Notes from C21 Social Media Forum

Posted by Roo - 22/06/09 at 08:06:18 pm

C21’s Social Media Forum said that the event would provide

a creative workshop that defines and develops how the producers channels and rights owners can work with social media platforms to develop business and extend creativity. And generate new revenue streams today!

Despite not being desperately bothered about generating new revenue streams,  I was sufficiently interested by the rest of the description to book a place. Of course, I wasn’t really expecting it to deliver on its promise of being a ‘creative workshop’, and it didn’t. The event was more of a traditional conference, with speakers and time-for-questions. Overall, it was quite useful though, especially the morning sessions. Here are selected notes from some of the more interesting slots:

Opening keynote: Building brands with social media, Ann Longley (Digital strategy director, Mediaedge:cia)

  • how do we use social media, and what it means.
  • “You’d have to be living under a rock not to notice Twitter these days”
  • “What’s happening in Iran shows the power of social media beyond entertainment|
  • “press coverage of Twitter signals the ‘mainstreaming’ of social media”
  • What is social media anyway? Quote from MEC Guide to Social Media – “all online activities, tools, platforms and practices that allow users to collaborate, create, …”
  • “Traditional broadcasting model is breaking down”
  • social media is dominated by UGC: creating, sharing and remixing content
  • campaigning – e.g. NUS vs HSCB, M&S bra size cost, 13k on FB. There’s no such thing as local news any more.
  • organising protests has never been easier
  • finding out what people are saying about your brands online: “Many brands have fans online, even without actively cultivating it. It happens naturally.”
  • “smart brands cultivate their fanbase”
  • “smart fans influence brands” (or at least, influence brands which listen)
  • (while brands can avert crises by listening (Sony Bravia defusing negative story around Paint advert by monitoring online before it turned into a problem)
  • “…and invite their customers to help them”
  • What makes a good social media strategy? At the heart of any campaign you need a good product or service. Examples: Obama – being everywhere, T-mobile – UGC, Skins – energising their fanbase, Sony Ericsson – pocketTV, Dell – going from Dell hell to Idea Storm
  • content, communities and conversations = conversion (to £ or eyeballs)
  • social entertainment: social media enriching experiences. creative industries engaging audiences across channels
  • some examples of Alternative Reality Games (“it’s kind of a geeky thing, seen as quite left-field and not compelling for a mainstream audience…”, but interesting anyway) – cited McDonalds’ The Lost Ring, Superstruct, Penguin’s We Tell Stories
    A Swarm of Angels….
  • earned media: word of mouth from friends and trusted people
  • Whuffie: in a post scarcity economy, reputation and social capital rule.

How to work with Joost to extend your entertainment brand, Henrik Werdelin (Chief creative officer, Joost)

  • people are increasingly consuming an audience online, but how do people find the stuff to watch?
  • social discovery is underdeveloped. The whole internet seems to be centered around Google and SEO
  • the web is bad at helping people find stuff they didn’t know they wanted to watch
  • new content discovery methods are algorithmic (amazon, joost, iplayer)
    and equivalent to zapping / channel-hopping (i.e stumbleupon)
  • “you should watch this show about pandas” vs “28 of your friends really love this show…” – Joost uses FB connect to help with this sort of social discovery
  • ‘ behaviour generated content’ AKA ‘social triggers’: generating user content without having to do anything. e.g. FB activity feeds from status changes. Going from single to married used to be just a metadata change is now an item of activity in a feed. And an important one.
  • personalisation: subscriptions & data visualisation
  • realtime-web: co-watching. what are your friends doing right now?
  • 2% creators, 8% particpators, 90% lurkers/passive viewers. How do you move the 90 into the 8 and 2?
  • Paradox of Choice
  • Joost design based on ‘freedom from choice’, i.e. preventing people feeling overwhelmed.

Using online narrative and social media to drive commercial value, Andrew Piller (Fremantle Media)

  • new media strategy: recycle, extend and create
  • era of self-expression & the rise of the prosumer
  • audience is broader than you think (not just 16-24 year olds) and niche communities are valuable
  • rules for content: personalised, participatory and narrative (if there’s no story, how will the audience engage?)
  • ingredients: linear narrative (lean back mode), non linear (lean forward / real-time), interactivity, community
  • “all of our experiences are underpinned by community”
  • Freak (goes live July 20th.) is a Freemantle co-production with MySpace currently in production (story from Broadcast Now) is the first UK online drama from MySpace. “We’d never let the audience decide the story but how they get there, the everyday decisions, can be affected and influenced by the audience”.
  • Lead character is a girl gamer. Brand partners include P&G (Tampax) and Red Bull. Brand opportunities for music, fashion, games, …
  • producer from Coronation St, director from Hollyoaks, creative prod from serial drama, AP is very young, we have a community manager.
  • Brands want new ways to talk to their customer
  • Brands (think they) want community “but don’t know how to create it”
  • Q: where did the idea come from? A: In house creative team for d
  • Q: how do you work with other social networks? A: YouTube platform where you can view the content too, but the experience is bespoke to MySpace. In the dream world you’d hyper-syndicate and use it to drive back to MySpace.
  • Q: do you need MySpace? A: Brands are nervous about the space, so it’s easier if you have a distributor on-board. Industry needs a gamechanger to prove the model. Kate Modern & Lonely Girl were good examples, but the scale and production values were not there.
  • Q: how does the international model work? A: Not geo-blocked. We’ve cleared the rights internationally, but we’re not going to promote internationally. We think we can take the format to US market or European territories later.
  • Q: who owns the content and format? A: Intellectual Property is owned by Freemantle, but the UK series is co-owned by MySpace.
  • Q: is a TV series on the agenda? A: It’s not the on the agenda, but it’s talked about.

How Xbox used the social media space at E3, Maurice Wheeler (co-founder and planning director, Digital Outlook)

  • Microsoft asked us if we’d go out there and create a social media explosion around Xbox at E3. With 3 weeks notice. Gave us a view of what they’re presenting and announcing at E3.
  • we wanted to get the interesting info to social media power users / mavens / connectors
  • aggregation: wanted to focus people on our conversations. Listening to what people are saying. Consolidating to a stream of content which comes out of the social media cloud. “Sucking out the interesting and exciting content”. Feedback loop
  • providing content to a social media savvy audience in a way that they’re happy with an comfortable with
  • flew 5 influential gamer bloggers and 5 social media power users (including Charlie, to E3).
  • primary platforms: twitter, youtube, audioboo, kyte, flickr
  • secondary platforms: qik, 12 seconds, facebook, seesmic, bambuser, blip.tv, moblog, wordpress.com and many more
  • Q: how much of that would have happened without you? A: we can tell from the hashtag we used that we affected it [I'd agree. Just. Compare xboxe3 vs e3]
  • tips: create a #tag, have a distribution channel established, pick the right people, understand local technology constraints (e.g. make sure you’ve got wifi coverage), have a plan B, C and D

Inside the brain of Adam Curtis

Posted by Roo - 19/06/09 at 05:06:19 pm

I don’t often talk about work projects, but I cant hold my tongue about this one. I’ve been rather excited about it for a while, and it went live today.

Adam Curtis blog

Adam Curtis is the documentary filmmaker behind ‘The Power of Nightmares‘, ‘The Century of the Self‘ and more. Recently, he’s done some pieces for Screenwipe about the rise and fall of the television journalist and another about ‘oh dearism’ in the news for Newswipe.

Well, he’s going to start blogging about his work and ideas on the BBC. In fact, the Adam Curtis blog launched today at bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis. Hurrah.

Adam writes: “This is a website expressing my personal views – through a selection of opinionated observations and arguments. I’ll be including stories I like, ideas I find fascinating, work in progress and a selection of material from the BBC archives.”

All rather exciting. Of course, the rights issues with some of the clips, and especially the music, make it hard to publish them all for an internet-wide audience and sadly some of the content has to be restricted to the UK for right reasons, but the plan is for as much as possible to be globally available as the blog goes forward.

Some related links:

While I’m pimping BBC blogs, other recent-ish blog launches you might have missed:

3D TV

Posted by Roo - 17/06/09 at 11:06:58 pm


[image: skooal on Flickr]

I went to a BAFTA event tonight, cunningly titled ’3D: the next dimension in TV and Games?’. It served up a panel of Andrew Oliver (CTO and founder, Blitz Games Studios), Colin Smith (Technical Analyst, ITV), Brian Lenz (product design and innovation, Sky), chaired by Guy Clapperton (freelance journalist who has been writing about 3D TV for the Guardian).

The event began with a chance to learn about the three major approaches to full-colour 3D display today, and a chance to try out a couple of them. They are:

  1. Active LCD shutter glasses darken one eye, then the other, in sync with the alternating image being shown on a standard display. This halves the effective frame rate by sharing the display across both eyes, and being an active system requires power to operate the shutters and also to be in sync with the display. Expensive glasses, but off-the-shelf (though high-end) screens or projectors. [more on wikipedia]
  2. Passive polarised glasses work much like the old red and green glasses, but using polarised filters rather than red/green means you get a full colour experience. It means cheap, passive glasses but complicated and expensive screens and projectors. If you’ve seen a colour 3D movie, this was probably the way it was delivered. [more on wikipedia]
  3. Autostereoscopic display is a stupid name for a screen which displays 3D without needing glasses by use of a lenticular or ‘parallax barrier’ layer in front of a specialised (usually LCD) display, presenting a different image based on viewing position. No glasses, but a very limited viewing angle. [more on wikipedia]

Of the three systems, all have benefits and drawbacks. There were no autostereo (i.e. glasses-free) products on display in the room, but the one I tried a couple of years ago was far lower quality than the two passive and active glasses systems I tried tonight. Both worked beautifully well, and in my quick test it was difficult to distinguish between them in terms of quality. Perhaps I need to see a more recent example of an autostereo display. (Any suggestions?)

For the other two, it’s really a tradeoff between cheap glasses and an expensive screen on the one hand, and a cheap(er) screen with expensive glasses on the other. Scale matters too; fitting out a cinema for an audience of hundreds is obviously a very different problem to kitting out your personal games computer, with equipping a living room TV (for broadcast or games) for a family of 4 falling somewhere in between. Does anyone out there have enough experience with the two technologies to have a preference for home use? I would have lived to see the same source being shown on both systems to compare them properly.

Technology: tick. What about the content? Starting with games, it’s simple enough for existing 3D games to be rendered in ‘real’ 3D rather than being flattened to a flat screen. It’s rendering problem, and since the graphics card in your computer already knows where the various objects are in three dimensions, spitting out the required output for any of the available 3D display systems is already possible.

To prove the point, Nvidia had provided an Nvidia ’3D Vision’ equipped PC running Burnout Paradise in stereo 3D, and I must say it worked beautifully.

While rendering 3D games in 3D may be a more or less solved problem technologically, Andrew from Blitz pointed out that it’s also a design issue. Existing games have not been designed for 3D display, and while it works for some, Blitz wanted to start with a simple game designed for 3D and explore from there. They have a commercial release coming in the next couple of months; a console game which is a platformer with the 3D limited to just a few planes. It’s an intentionally simple first stab at a form in which they know they have a lot to learn. Andrew’s point was that games designers, like cinematographers, now have a new toybox of tricks, techniques and conventions to start playing with to get the best results out of 3D displays.

In television and film, stereo 3D content is equally easy in the case of computer generated (and hence a great many 3D movies so far have been CG), so perhaps it’s unsurprising that ITV’s biggest exploration of 3D TV so far seems to be building on Headcases, a satirical computer animation created in 3D, which obviously translates to stereo 3D telly very nicely (as I can confirm, having enjoyed a few minutes of it tonight).

Sky, meanwhile, have been using their existing infrastructure and experimenting with shooting everything from boxing to ballet, Gladiators and Keane in 3D.

The idea of taking existing 2D content and adding 3D perspective to it was mooted. Colin from ITV and Brian from Sky were both eloquent on the subject, saying that the filming and editing techniques used in creating good 3D content are not the same as in creating good 2D content. Eye strain is caused by making it difficult for the eye to resolve what you’re seeing, and cutting between shots forces people to re-focus, so 3D content will probably involve fewer cuts. The phrase that (I think Brian) used was “linger longer”. Taking what works well in 2D and simply 3D-ising it was repeatedly compared to Hollywood’s fad in the 20s of ‘colorization‘, something everyone seemed keen to avoid.

Brian (Sky) seemed tantlisingly close to wanting to announce something. He talked about getting past the experimentation phase and into the production phase: “we know exactly how to get there, it’s just a question of timing and conversations with TV manufacturers. You’ll see things happening in the next couple of years, for sure”. And later, “We’re not at the point right now of announcing a launch, but if the possibility of being part of another revolution in the way people watch TV is there, we want to be part of that, and we will be there, sooner rather than later.”

Other random points of interest…

  • Someone from the audience pointed out that the idea of a fixed ‘ocular distance’ of 2.5 inches (to match your eyes) between the camera lenses, is a myth. He pointed out that in fact, 2.5 inches is one of a myriad of distances that you’ll need to create depth, depending on what you’re filming. The panel agreed, saying that anything from a few millimeters to thousands of miles could be used, depending on the scale and distance of the thing you’re filming.
  • Where do you put subtitles? Andrew (Blitz) – found that ‘Hollywood 3D’ (‘things jumping out at you’ from the screen) can be too much, and they like to limit it so things very rarely seem to come out from the screen, especially because subtitles, heads-up displays etc, work well at the 0 distance, ‘on the glass’.
  • Colin (ITV) – “this is a significant evolution”. He adds that in the film industry they say it’s the biggest evolution since colour. A bigger jump than SD (Standard Definition) to HD.
  • The DTG (Digitial Television Group) is leading the first consultation into 3D TV, is the consortium of consumer electronics manufacturers and broadcasters that will probably be responsible for bringing the industry together around common standards for 3D TV.
  • There are some great terms in this 3D TV business: ‘inter-ocular distance’, ‘decreasing binocular disparity’ and ‘multi-view auto-stereo’ were just three that I wrote down.

Great event. Fascinating stuff. Glad I went.

Update: Alan Patrick was there too and took much better notes than I did.

Update 2 – disabling comments on this post for now. Too much 3D TV spam.

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