Akamai Eyes New Second-Screen Technology: Report
The future blending of TV and computing is getting more interesting all the time.

According to a report from KurzweilAI.net, researchers at Akamai are busy working on a new technology that will automatically know what you're watching on TV and then stream secondary content to your smartphone or tablet.

Akamai is considered a Web optimization company. Its online servers handle as much as 30 percent of all Web traffic — including some of the most popular destinations on the Web.

The company says the idea is simple. It wants to create a standard for today's TV/Internet technology that lets users get scores and other facts on a small screen while watching a sporting event on the big screen or, for instance, police statistics and news reports while they're watching a crime show.

At the moment, second screen information is handled by separate apps for each TV broadcaster. Akamai's new system would negate the need for multiple apps.

Ratings company Nielsen says 40 percent of Americans are also using their smartphones/tablets/computers at the same time they're watching TV. Akamai thinks that it will be able to create a way to keep everything flowing faster and even more seamlessly than today's current methods.

Experts believe that the market for second-screen content could increase more than tenfold in the next three to four years.