Tell Me A Story... And It Better Be A Good One.

h/t to Slashdot for this...

Apparently, there're plans afoot to blend a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) with a weekly TV show on the Sci-Fi Network in the US. Most of the reaction in the blogosphere have pointed towards this being ill-advised. I agree, but perhaps for different reasons than "It's gonna suck."

The thinking behind the plan is fairly obvious: Create so-called appointment viewing, or getting fans to watch a show as it's being broadcast, rather than on a DVR such as TiVo or from a Bittorrent, so that viewers must watch the advertisements. The MMORPG has the added benefit of providing engagement and continuity so that the show remains top of mind for the viewer base, and they feel particularly involved in the story.

Dave Howe, CEO of the Sci-Fi Channel commented:

"A television show that is on once a week isn't enough. The fans today want the experience to go beyond that. For example, we can tell them that there will be an alien invasion at a certain place in the game, at a certain time, and to be there with all their friends and be ready. The outcome depends on them. And then that battle will be part of the universe in the show."

Here's why it won't work... Simply put, viewers make bad writers. Part of the great experience of watching TV is to be led through a narrative, being surprised, horrified, and even disappointed. We WANT to talk about it at the watercooler, we WANT to blog about what a great (or crap) choice the writers and producers of the show have made.

The best shows on TV are those that don't have to listen to their fanbase, and that keep them guessing. It's also the reason that every choose your own adventure interactive TV show has failed.

For the foreseeable future, narrative TV will remain a lean-back experience, and as such, will require writers and producers to continue to take risks and deliver that ultimately elusive experience: innovation.

Links:
Slashdot | Sci-Fi Channel Merging TV Show with MMO
The original blog posting

Time Warner Gets Into The IPTV Game

Conventional wisdom pits the cable companies (or MSOs - Multiple Service Operators - as they're known in the trade) against the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Sony as the next-generation delivery providers for entertainment content.

Time Warner broke that mold this week with the announcement of their own IPTV strategy: One that unites PC-bound content and HDTV's through a home networking device that democratizes the Web to TV link:

"Right now it's pretty hard to get Internet stuff on your TV," [CEO Glenn] Britt said at the Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York [on Friday].

"We're actually going to have equipment we make available to subscribers," he said. "It's actually going to be a new wireless cable modem that will allow you to network everything in your house."

What's significant about this is that there is renewed interest in converging the Web and TV. What's different about this is that the interest is not in driving lean-forward iTV, where the internet's presence in TV is used to deliver "Value-Added" content and shopping opportunities. Rather, this move is about getting the lean-back experience of Web video to the living room. Moreover, it's about competing with IPTV set-top boxes that have similar features but also allow movie and TV show purchases and rentals.

As mentioned on this blog last week, Forrester has predicted that Apple is going to throw itself full-force into this market, delivering products and services to support the home-entertainment convergence. I continue to disagree with this sentiment, and see Apple continuing to want to wrap up its products into opportunities to own the content-conduit-commerce services that live underneath the experience, rather than furthering the front end applications. This play by Time Warner looks to compete with THAT plan, and is further indication that the content distributors and aggregators see that VEBCAR (Value Exists Between Couch And Remote) is the focus of their model.

Link to Reuters Article

The Revolution Will Be Home-Brewed.

I have a modded XBOX hooked up to my TV.

In addition to playing XBOX games, it has a few custom applications courtesy of a few hundred amateur developers. These non-standard features include a dashboard that shows me current and forecast weather conditions. It's connected to my network, allowing me to play rips of my DVD collection (wirelessly) and Music CDs. I can search and view videos on YouTube and Comedy Central. I can download and play amateur freeware games. I can point it to a folder on my computer with all my pictures and run a slideshow (with music) on my TV. Apparently, although I haven't tried, I can even download video on demand through BitTorrent, timeshift with a DVR (TiVo) application and remotely control it using a Facebook application.

This nifty modified device comes to me courtesy of a chum who is familiar with the XBOX Homebrew community. Homebrew, a sort of Do-It-Yourself open source development kit for hackers, is predicated on the notion that the information should be free (as in speech, not beer), and that if I buy a device, I should be able to modify or change that device in any way I see fit. This point of view is not shared by the computing and media industries who feel that if they can't control the distribution conduit, they'll quickly lose control of the mass distribution system that they are the gatekeepers to. As a result, and thanks to the industry-friendly Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Homebrew style 'tampering' carries criminal penalties in the US (a version of the DMCA is soon to be proposed in Canada, according to University of Ottawa Law Professor Michael Geist).

So my 79$ XBOX hacked with so-called Homebrew software provides me with a perfect lean-back IPTV experience that is, in some ways, far superior to the experience I would get with a 400$ AppleTV, XBOX 360, or PS3. In fact, virtually all the IPTV features on these 'advanced consoles were, for the most part, inspired by the Homebrew version. Everything from the feature set to the User Experience Design are being copied from the Homebrew versions to the newer consoles by the big guns at Apple, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

Still, what's the big deal? If these other devices all have the same features, so what? Well again, it's a matter of access. For the most part, only 'signed' (read: paid-to-play) applications can run on the non-Homebrew machines, and each of these consoles makes it very difficult for all but the most savvy to stream videos from their computers, preferring that consumers rent or purchase their videos (again, read: paid-to-play). Homebrew (access and information want to be free like speech) are decidedly NOT paid-to-play and represent a loss of control by the major distribution channels.

Now comes word from Slashdot that the venerable Wii has been hacked (without hardware mods) to include a Homebrew 'channel.' From Slashdot:

"The Homebrew Channel is a tool that can be installed on any Wii (no hardware mods required) that lets you run unsigned homebrew software from an SD card, or upload executables via WiFi or a USBGecko. We've tried to make it friendly for users with a simple GUI, and powerful for developers with direct upload features and reloading..."

While the Wii isn't a multi-media experience per se, with its focus on interactive gaming, it is an IPTV play, and you'll find weather, news, a Web browser (that can play back YouTube) social networking, and a game store on most every console. The Wii Homebrew Channel will provide the fuel to feed that fire, and with the recent port of the VLC player, it might even see some media applications make their way onto the system.

At the end of it all, this channel will be just another niche hobbyist's playground, installed on a paltry minority of Wii consoles. If history is any guide however, this channel may provide Nintendo with the Next Big Thing for their product. I wonder if they'll pay to play.

Slashdot | Unofficial Homebrew Channel For the Wii

P2P - IPTV Killer App?

According to Slashdot, the guys over at Cornell have devised something REALLY interesting. It's a plug-in for a bit torrent client called Azureus that "Listens" to the torrents you're on and the responds to search queries, and is decentralized, read: immune from the traditional legal actions on companys like The Pirate Bay and Oink. From the project Website:

What is it?
Cubit is a system that provides fully decentralized approximate keyword search capabilities to Azureus as a standard plugin. Approximate search means that you can use Cubit to find a movie, song or artist even if you don't know which spelling variation is used in the title or in her name. It gives you what you mean instead of what you asked for exactly, and returns the best results in the network in only a few seconds.

How does it work?
Cubit creates alongside BitTorrent a lightweight peer-to-peer network designed from the ground up to enable rapid and accurate approximate searches. It performs the searches without relying on any centralized components, and therefore is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent aggregators. Additional technical details can be found in the approach section.

So what does this have to do with IPTV? Well, in order for truly interactive IPTV to take off, it's going to need a Killer App. eMail was the Killer App for internet adoption, Napster was the Killer App for broadband adoption, and YouTube, arguably, the Killer App for the online-video revolution.

IPTV has a few things going for it, but even more hurdles. On the plus side, it's a way around your cable company's bundled programming and anti-competitive practices, it's a lean-back entertainment delivery technology, and it's got the potential to deliver a LOT more than traditional cable experiences. On the down side, content on IPTV is limited to movie and TV show rental and sales, scrapes of online video experiences, and a fractured distribution community that can't figure out a licensing model with the major content producers, who don't want to risk relationships with Cable Co's. Moreover, there's no compelling reason for anyone to buy into IPTV; there's no Killer App.

What happens, though if you combine the power of Peer-to-peer, 'Napster' like experiences with lean back entertainment? Until now, you haven't been able to - mostly because the experience was so horrific and torrenting really required a PC/web browser. But if you look at this closely, you begin to realize that the right ingredients for a Killer App are brewing here.

Mix in some IPTV-geared service architectures, Long Tail filtering and niche content distribution potential and it seems like there's a recipe here for a lean-back killler app experience.

Link to Cubit project page

Netflix to Sell a Device for Instantly Watching Movies on TV Sets - New York Times

IPTV's slow march takes another step, and then yawns...

Given that the blog title tells the whole story, I'm not sure that this is really 'news.' The one bit of interest here? Long tail darling Netflix is fighting back against Apple & Amazon, to be sure. But... can they beat Blockbuster/Circuit City?

We're years away from meaningful IPTV applications... But that's because we're depending upon a LOT of legacy business infrastructure and the molasses of consumer adoption.

Netflix to Sell a Device for Instantly Watching Movies on TV Sets - New York Times

Ad firm Spot Runner lands $51 million in funding

B2B Long Tail company Spot Runner has secured a 'war chest' of $51M to fend off challenges from deep pocketed competitors Google and, yes, Microsoft.

It's an interesting model they've got. Democratize production and distribution of television advertising through pre-fab TV spots (Customized with a business's photos, logo and Voiceover) and localized (inexpensive) TV buys.

It begs the question asked by a colleague of mine some time ago: Are they building a business, or simply paving the runway for Microsoft and Google to land on. This gets more interesting when you consider IPTV in the mix, something outside the scope of their (visibly apparent) business plan.

Link to Yahoo/Reuters Article
Link to Vallywag snippet

Flashing The Flash: Adobe Opens Up

h/t to Slashdot on this one:

Adobe has opened up their proprietary Flash formats - SWF & FLV to the developer community, removed licensing restrictions for the playback, and is making the mobile player available for free. They are doing to Macromedia's flagship product (since having acquired it 3 short years ago) what they were able to successfully do with PDF.

The Open Screen Project is dedicated to driving consistent rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices.

Link
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