Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog

"Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first."
- From Dr. Horrible's Master Plan

Yes it's true - Joss Whedon has published a completely silly, but very entertaining mini-series. Conceived and produced during the writer's strike last year, The video blog is more TV than Internet, but one can see where it draws its inspiration from in the first few seconds. For Joss Whedon, WWW stands for "Well Worth Watching" (just trying to make my level of cheeziness consistent with his).

It's not genius, but it is fun. Moreover, it's a great example of traditional, old media TV style entertainment working its way into the new media in a very unpretentious way.

Update: Variety explains the 'nefarious plot' of Whedon et al this way:

"The 'Web miniseries,' as Whedon dubs it, made a big splash in its debut over three days last week as a free streaming option on the Web or paid download via Apple's iTunes. But now comes the really tricky part: Turning 'Dr. Horrible' from a one-trick supervillain into a profitable franchise (think DVD release, soundtrack, merchandise, live events and, of course, a sequel or two) wholly owned by its creators.

Whedon's gambit is the most high-profile example of a movement under way among Hollywood scribes to harness the marketing and distribution power of the Internet for their own creative (and moneymaking) ends, sidestepping the major studios and networks in the process."

You can read the full article here, or visit Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog for more info (sadly, however, you'll have to buy the miniseries if you watched it on the first go-round).

Jennifer Aniston's Sweater: Part Deux

Filed under the "Too important not to blog but kind of meh news" department comes word that TiVo has hooked up their TV service to Amazon's eCommerce services. In what appears to be a move towards t-commerce, real-time merchandising is now a reality. Let's start with some history:

Jennifer Aniston's Sweater refers to a concept whereby a viewer, enjoying some random episode of the hit show Friends (I said it was history), takes a hankerin' for the sweater Jennifer Aniston is sporting. Deciding that they must have said sweater, they click a button on their remote, highlight Jennifer's Sweater on the TV, click "Buy" on their remote, and 'poof,' it shows up at their house within 48 hours.

This concept got a lot of play in the late 90's as Web-based TV startups DEN (Digital Entertainment Network) and Pseudo.Com sought to use technologies such as the (at the time) ubiquitous to "stream" postage stamp-sized video through people's web browsers. The sites ran up huge cost deficits (bandwidth actually overshadowed production costs, if that can be believed), and both shuttered even before the dot-com bubble burst, despite sponsorship deals from Starbucks and other mainstream 'engagement-focused' brands. Before they shut down, and desperate for monetization models, DEN and Pseudo were also trying to find other ways to offset production and (more urgently) distribution costs and tried adding eCommerce to their offerings. It didn't work.

Seeing the Internet as a tremendous threat to their share of leisure time, the entertainment industry was beginning to panic about finding ways to extend value into these new, interactive networks. ABC bought the InfoSeek and GoTo.com portals, rebranding the new mix as go.com. NBC picked up Snap.com in 1998 to launch them into the online world, and had already forged the MSNBC partnership to bridge their news offerings across Web and TV.

When it came to iTV (Interactive TV), the idea was simple: Split this new way of consuming TV into two categories. There was iTV, or single screen interactive Television, and there was eTV, or enhanced "Two-screen" Television, where viewers would watch shows on their normal Plain Old TV, and enjoy synced content on a laptop or other computer in the same room. Only CBS, under the stoic and visionary leadership of Sumner Redstone and Les Moonves stayed out of the fray while ABC, NBC and FOX all sought to use fragile 3rd party technologies such as Wink.

The short of it is that all the networks ultimately tried to find mechanisms to create eCommerce revenue opportunities. Partly fueled by its eCommerce experimentation, NBC bought ValueVision and rebranded it ShopNBC, hoping to buy into a streamlined eCommerce/operationally endowed organization it could integrate against. CBS did some of their own testing, but to give you an indication if its lack of success, this is what was what the New York Times said in July of 1999:

CBS sold thousands of copies of its ''Joan of Arc'' video on cbs.com after broadcasting the mini-series last month, said Dana McClintock, a spokesman. On a broader level, the network's stakes in Internet companies like Sportsline and Hollywood Online ''will provide an array of opportunities'' in E-commerce, Mr. McClintock said.

''Right now, those opportunities are few and far between,'' he added, ''but in the future there will be a lot of them.''

ABC tried to do the same thing in 2002 with Shop The Soaps (an effort in which I was intimately involved). HSN and ABC struck a deal that saw Daytime soap writers adding products to their narratives (mostly jewelry and some apparel). When the commercial break hit, ABC produced a 15 second sting designed to drive traffic to an eCommerce site linked from ABC.com. The promise was that viewers could 'become part of the story' by purchasing whatever it was that was revealed on the show.

One would think that this particular audience would be primed for this offer, but the site didn't do enough revenue to even cover the cost of the 15 seconds of airtime we displaced with the promotional message.

With all of this said, people do buy stuff from TV. HSN and QVC combined represent about $7Billion US in sales, with about 15% of that generated from their Website. By contrast, according to eMarketer, eCommerce as a whole, excluding travel, generated around $130Billion during 2007 in the US alone.

So if TV viewers are buying stuff, why hasn't this worked in the past? To start, HSN, QVC and ShopNBC viewers are watching with the intention of at least considering a purchase. Most viewers watching a TV show for entertainment aren't really in that mindspace. Even interactive TV experiences such as what Wink offered in the early part of the decade were largely ignored by most folks, which is one of the primary reasons it hasn't been incorporated into the richer experiences of iTV today.

See if this sounds familiar(TiVo Press Release):

"Product Purchase adds a whole new dimension to the TV viewing experience," said Evan Young, Director of Broadband Services for TiVo Inc. "By teaming with Amazon.com, TiVo enables viewers to purchase products related to their favorite TV shows or that they've seen in TV ads without leaving their couch. For example, if a guest on the Daily Show or Oprah has a new book, CD, or DVD out, you can purchase it on Amazon.com using your TiVo remote without missing a second of TV, whether the viewer is watching live or recorded. The viewer with an impulse can buy right away and no longer needs to remember to do so the next time they are at their PC. Television advertisers and consumer products companies are no longer limited to the traditional linear shopping channels that require live viewing for product merchandising and fulfillment -- if their product is seen or advertised on any TV show or network, and sold by Amazon.com it can be merchandised to viewers through TiVo."

"Starting today, TiVo will launch the new service to consumers by merchandising products related to several high profile shows, including but not limited to The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Colbert Report, and Burn Notice."

What's not mentioned there is what ArsTechnica points out:

[TiVo] devices are, after all, in only about 4 million households.

While the technology has changed slightly - the ease of real-time payment is a big one, as is the innovation TiVo provides by 'pausing' a show while the transaction is completed, the mental model that consumers have regarding their leisure time and entertainment consumption hasn't. I will be anxious to see how this pans out; However, the short of it is that I don't believe in the transactionalized entertainment model. All my experience suggests that people watch TV to be entertained. That said, I believe that people will someday shop through their televisions, as they will through all internet enabled devices, but shopping by narrative hasn't worked on the Web, nor has it worked on TV. I don't think it will for the foreseeable future.

Read
ArsTechnica Analysis
New York Times Analysis

Oh, But The Home Of The Future Is Sooooo 1939

The future home will probably be equipped with a number of control centers, from any one of which the homemaker can give her commands to appliances at work in the kitchen and laundry. Electric ranges already are equipped with automatic controls for temperature and cooking time, but there is no practical reason why these operations together with the other appliances cannot be controlled remotely from any room the house."

- Popular Mechanics "The Electrice Home of the Future," Aug, 1939

The folks at the Industry Standard have offered up a new predictive look at the home of future, this time projecting ahead to 2013. The "Home Of The Future" is a common thought experiment that allows futurists, engineers, artists and business people to trace a path to the present by looking backwards from the future (hey, that sounds familiar), and the Industry Standard offers an interesting guide.

t's 2013, and you've just come home from work. As you pull into the driveway, you reach into your pocket and swipe the screen of your smartphone with your thumb. Your garage door opens and the lights in your house turn on. The TV queues up the shows you missed while you were working late. Your favorite songs are following you from the living room to the kitchen. Then you stop. The phone blinks and warbles at you. The fridge says you forgot the milk.

Welcome home.

In the following pages, you'll be treated to a glimpse of the toys and technologies that will grace your home in the not-so-distant future. If you are like most people, you probably have already sampled some of them, but others -- such as automated home control and personal applications of cloud computing -- haven't made it into people's homes ... yet.

Check out the full article here

Writing Style for Print vs. Web

Link to Jakob Nielsen's blog at useit.com

Summary:
Linear vs. non-linear. Author-driven vs. reader-driven. Storytelling vs. ruthless pursuit of actionable content. Anecdotal examples vs. comprehensive data. Sentences vs. fragments.

Great explanation of the inherent differences in writing for the Web versus writing for print or TV. He identifies, in part, the way we write for lean-forward experiences (the Web) and lean-back experiences (TV).

Writing Style for Print vs. Web (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

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

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

Death of the sitcom frees up 2,000 Wikipedias worth of cognitive capacity - Boing Boing

Nothing too crazy here, but I really like the sentiment:

"Cognitive surplus" [is] the idea that automation gave us an enormous amount of free time to think and cogitate, and that sitcoms and other light entertainment from the past century were a way of absorbing that surplus"

Link: Death of the sitcom frees up 2,000 Wikipedias worth of cognitive capacity - Boing Boing