Digital Future / Digital Media / Media & Culture — No comments
28
Oct 09

Internet Video vs the DVR and Cable

Mark Cuban, in a recent post on his blog about Internet Video vs DVR, gets it half right. His point is to reiterate the power of the DVR as a driver to keep consumers interested in traditionally delivered video. But I ask, why?

He says, “Forget the Internet!” But I think he’s missing the point and confusing “internet” as meaning “watching videos on your computer.” Don’t think of the Internet as a collection of web sites. Instead, think of the internet as nothing more than a delivery pipe that doesn’t care about the receiving mechanism, then the question becomes what are the advantages of delivering content via IP technology over the current status quo of cable delivery?

We are already seeing the internet radically change related industries. Think how different gaming is now that there’s XBOX Live. For many people they couldn’t imagine playing games at home by themselves anymore. Why not create XBOX Live-like experiences but for watching TV?

So, I agree with Mark that the Big Media companies still don’t get it. And I agree that Big Media should embrace DVR and Sling-like technologies wholeheartedly. But I think there’s a lot more to it. Programming needs to advance, and the internet provides a better, open platform for doing so.

As I said before in my post about multi-linear storytelling, we need to find ways to allow programmers to create more compelling content. Big Media shouldn’t forget about the internet, they should just stop worrying so much about “web sites” and focus more on how to take advantage of internet technology for real-time delivery of advanced programming tools. Whether it’s social connections and simultaneous viewing, or multi-linear story options, the nature of content delivery changes drastically when you move from a traditional cable simulcast delivery model, to a true multicast delivery model that allows each person watching a program to have a customized viewing experience.

Digital Media / Media & Culture — No comments
30
Sep 09

Three Screens – Moving Content Consumption Across Platforms

I can’t speak for everyone, but I know how much my television viewing habits have changed over the last few years. Between the DVR, Hulu, and my Apple TV, my routine has changed drastically from just five years ago.

For one thing, I watch more. It seems fairly simple, but with better access to view the shows I want, when I want, I watch more. True, I pretty much only watch recorded programs, and pretty much always fast forward through the commercials, but I most certainly watch a lot more than I used to.

So, the most recent research from Nielsen’s Three Screen report shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone – video viewing is up. According to their research, overall viewing is up by 1.5% over the same quarter last year, including, as you’d expect, an increase in internet video viewing.

More interesting is the data on simultaneous TV viewing and internet usage, which is at 56.9%. Quite a large number, but certainly not a surprise to me. I can think of a zillion times I’ve been in the middle of watching a show and felt the immediate need to look up an actor on IMDB, or Wikipedia.

These patterns are just glimpses into the future as media consumption continues to change. These changes will result in increased consumption, not decreased, but with better control and more choice. Hopefully quality won’t suffer in the meantime. But it’s time that programmers got smarter about how to bring the three screens together during programming. It’s time we moved beyond SMS voting campaigns…

General — No comments
24
Sep 09

Starting a New Chapter: On Leaving MTV Networks

Starting new chapters in life is always bittersweet, filled with excitement for the future and yet sadness for the people left behind.

When I started at MTV Networks, I was given a a difficult task; I was tasked with creating a social strategy from scratch that could connect our sites together, change our relationship with our audience by giving more control over how our media is shared and consumed, and build a platform that could increase engagement and power new experiences and programming. From those goals, FLUX was born – an innovative social networking and distribution platform. I’m proud to be able to leave MTVN with the ability to say that we accomplished all of our goals – we built and integrated a global platform that is now serving millions of unique visitors and page views, including over 12M registered users, over 7,000 publisher sites from across the web, and over 50 of Viacom’s major sites, including powering all of the social interactions on sites big and small – from MTV.com, VH1.com, ComedyCentral.com to Jokes.com, JackAssWorld.com and ColbertNation.com, not to mention many others. Our vision for a social content distribution network has become a reality as users organically navigate their way through our sites, discover new content and communities, and engage more deeply than ever. And all of this we somehow accomplished in under two years. The road was definitely filled with pot holes along the way, and though FLUX hasn’t yet been able to achieve everything we set out to, I will always be proud of the accomplishments we made and the team I’m leaving behind.

What we realized when we started to build FLUX were two major facts: people weren’t really consuming content in Facebook (at least not premium content – certainly there are a lot of UGC photos consumed in-site), and people wanted to have deeper experiences directly aligned with their passions and other people who shared those passions. Our view was not of a centralized web world where major central hubs control the experiences, but of a fragmented and distributed world where you can bring your identity with you and share it across your communities and passion points, with the extra work required with something like OpenID, and without being forced to have all of your experiences in someone else’s walled garden, like Facebook. Of course, this all pre-dates Facebook Connect.

Much has changed in two years. This idea of fragmentation has taken a strong foothold, and the social networked walled gardens continue to crumble, just as the portal walled gardens crumbled before them. But the basic needs of any content creator haven’t changed – how do you get your content discovered by the most people, build a brand, and monetize? I’m sure I’ll continue working on these issues for many years to come.

I want to thank everyone who helped and supported us along the way, and most especially thank my team who showed more passion, dedication, and talent than I could have ever asked for. Without their hard work we could never have accomplished anything. I want to especially single out Jin Kang and Brian Wong – you have continually been an inspiration to me and I’m certain that in your hands Flux will be well taken care of.

And stay tuned… I’ll let everyone know soon what’s to come in my next chapter.

Digital Future — No comments
08
Sep 09

Nonlinear and Multilinear Films and Stories in the Future

Everything we do in digital media is ultimately about either telling a story or walking someone through an experience. When we build digital products, our goal is to create an environment that connects with our users and engages them… The best digital products typically have the right balance between environment, story, and function.

Film has largely remain the same in both form and function for many years. The tools have evolved, and as such have given filmmakers new ways to edit or shoot their stories. But ultimately the stories are always presented in a simulcast, linear form. What happens to storytelling in a truly nonlinear medium?

The term “nonlinear” in writing already has a specific meaning, referring to telling stories out of chronological order – a term I remember well from my film school days. So instead we’ll use the term “multilinear” which has often been used to describe works like the old choose your own adventure books we read as children.

One thing that excites me most is thinking about what the great storytellers will do once they embrace truly multilinear forms of storytelling. We’re starting to see the germs of this in video games, as plot and character become more important elements. But this is still a lean-forward experience.

The landscape of how we consume stories is changing. Video game consoles are just one perfect example of this change – individually addressable boxes connected to not only the internet but potentially peer-to-peer, allowing each viewer of the same program to have a different experience, or to influence someone else’s experience while watching, or even to influence everyone else’s experience. The future cable boxes will have similar capability as they move from the traditional switched cable headends to more interactive and on-demand based systems over time.

It’s time that we, as storytellers, start exploring how the medium itself can influence radically new forms of stories.

Digital Future — No comments
02
Sep 09

Embedded and Emerging – Local Cloud Computing

I’ve long said that computers become a lot more interesting when they’re no longer computers. Computers as we know them are just far too complicated, having been designed to do anything and everything that can be imagined. Unfortunately, the average computer user doesn’t need a device that allows for an infinite number of uses – most users probably have requirements to only use a handful of applications at most, and most of these are what you’d expect: email, web, word processing, image processing, etc. Obviously, this isn’t a new idea. Thin computing, dumb terminals, cloud computing – there is a long history of ideas designed to lighten the computational load on the local host and offload it to another location, thus also allowing for the local host to become far more simple.

So what will the future look like when filled with embedded systems? I’m a big proponent of the “personal wide area network” and “local cloud” computing. I believe in the future you won’t need one device that does everything. Convergence will continue for some time, as people become more entrenched with smartphones, but I believe that in the future there will once again be a divergence and specialization of devices. Of course software platforms are the key, but there’s no reason why simple, specialized hardware with embedded software can’t replace complicated hardware+software combination… I’m reminded of Life Alert – that pendant that the elderly can wear to signal for trouble. Or Nike+. Both simple pieces of hardware that connect to other devices to perform more complicated tasks for specialized purposes.

So what happens when we stop thinking of smartphones just as phones, or PDAs, or gaming devices, but we start thinking about the smartphone as the hub of the personal wide area network? Imagine a range of simple, embedded devices with wireless capabilities that you can choose to accessorize on any ocassion. Perhaps the watch you love. Or glasses with HUDs.

In the future, your trusty iPhone might just act as the “local cloud” for your own PWAN, with each device connecting for specialized functions and UI moving from software to hardware interfaces…

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