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The TV of the Future
Mike’s post on Apps for Telly inspired me to write about something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: my ideal TV of the future.
It’s pretty clear that, with a few very specific exceptions, broadcast TV will become a thing of the past very soon. Other than ‘event telly’, things that need to be watched live, such as the World Cup, the Olympics and (shudder) X Factor, I either watch shows on DVD or record them on my PVR, the excellent EyeTV for Mac.
TV as we currently understand it is broken.
Photo by Kevin SteeleThere has been so little great content on free to air broadcast TV in the last few years that I’ve lost the habit of checking the TV schedule entirely. It’s very rare that I flick the telly on and watch the least bad thing on, because there is always something I’d rather watch waiting in my queue of DVDs or recordings.
I’m not in the least bit excited by Project Canvas, mainly because I think the problem with TV is not a technical one, but rather a content one. The content problem could be solved right now, with no technology innovation at all if the will to do so existed in content companies. My worry is that the focus will now be on a grandiose technical solution to an imagined problem.
Far too many content companies view the internet as some kind of threat rather than the most exciting possible platform for them. They no longer have to bother buying expensive licences from the government to get their content to the public, and don’t need to worry about watersheds or public service remits. They can let their content do the talking rather than entering idiotic scheduling wars.
If you were starting a content business now would you opt for the heavily regulated, expensive option of starting a TV station, or would you be looking to the internet?
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Why Twitter could do with a shhhhh button
After initially disliking the new retweet functionality on Twitter, I’ve grown to like it. It’s rediculously easy to retweet someone else now. It’s literally 2 clicks, only 1 if you dare remove the overly protective ‘Are you sure you want to retweet this?’ confirmation that some twitter clients are keen on.
But that also means that people you follow are retweeting far more.
Before, retweets looked fairly discreet, they just had RT at the beginning within the tweet itself. Now though, if you choose to use the new ‘baked in’ retweet, the tweeted tweeter gets their avatar in your stream. This seems nice because it gives prominence to people that give good tweet. Thereby helping people to discover more people to follow. But then, some people aren’t as judicious with the retweet button.
Scobleizer is one of those industry pundits that I’ve followed, unfollowed and followed again a couple of times now. It’s usually some kind of passive self-important tweet that gets me reaching for the unfollow.
And today, I came across this nice little feature on the main web client.
So, when you visit the profile in question, you see this.
There’s a couple of reasons this doesn’t totally appeal to me. Firstly, if I start blocking retweets from one person and I have nowhere to see them all in one place, it feels a bit messy. I personally need somewhere to get an overview of this kind of thing. It feels like my setting would be too spread out. But that’s fairly personal. Secondly, that little icon is the same as the button that’s actually used to retweet. It seems counter-intuitive that you would click the same button to stop retweets as you would to actually retweet them. Picky I know, but these little things are important to us.
What I’d really love is a way of not quite unfollowing someone but just taking a bit of break from them. I want to say ‘Shhh Scoble, that’s enough, it’s not you, it’s me, I’ve just had my fill of gushing and over-excited tech coverage for one day”. It would be like some kind of purgatory you could send people to. Like taking a break.
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Apps for Telly
Last week, the BBC Trust gingerly announced provisional approval of the BBC’s Project Canvas.
The aim of Project Canvas is to define a set of standards for set-top boxes that will allow integration of web and TV. Although, it isn’t clear exactly what the standards will consist of and what Project Canvas’ vision of IPTV really is.
Set-top box manufacturers such as Thomson, Humax and Cisco are involved and have committed to share intellectual property relating to Canvas with the rest of their industry. Content providers such as ITV, Channel 4 and 5 are enrolled within the organisational structure of Canvas itself, as are broadband providers such as BT, TalkTalk and Carphone Warehouse. Google has also voiced clear support during public consultation. One organisation we wont see supporting the project is BSkyB who claim the proposal is anti-competitive and not within the remit of the BBC.
Canvas won’t create, aggregate or sell content or act as an ISP. It’s merely acting to convene disparate industries and organisations to create a set of standards for Internet-enabled TV.
But who really wants Internet-enabled TV?
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It’s all about emotions, silly
Today, London saw its first snowfall of this winter season. As the white powder from the sky changed into sizable, more distinct flakes of snow, everyone in our office got excited and many (including me) moved to the windows for a few minutes to witness it. Now, on one level, it isn’t anything special, but on another much more wide-ranging level, there’s something about Nature’s magic that draws everyone to it – that makes people go ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’.
I guess most successful social media projects have that special something that draw people to it again and again in the same way. It’s about what they can make people feel. Twitter makes me feel like I’m part of a huge community of people, many of whom share different interests of mine. Facebook makes me feel connected to my friends and family. Songkick makes me feel like I’m part of this music community, some of whom live on music even more than I do, and Dopplr makes me feel like I’m fulfilling my desire of going to new places.
UK Snow has hundreds of people tweeting right now about how much snow they’re seeing in their part of the UK. It’s a fairly simple app that Ben Marsh created during February’s blizzard this year, and it’s probably a go-to site on days like this, when the snow makes everyone go ‘Ooh!’
Because on those days, a site like that makes us feel like we’re part of a snow community of sorts.
Sounds silly perhaps, but given the fact that as I type this, #UKSnow is a trending topic, perhaps not.
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The DIYist
If you want to understand ‘the social web’ and where it’s going, take a look at what the DIYists are up to.
For years, DIY was the bastion of the weekend jobbing dad. Men would buy tool belts, low-quality hand drills and set about putting up shelves, bleeding radiators or hanging pictures. And their bible was the Reader’s Digest Complete Do-it-yourself Manual. The appeal of DIY is really the time when you’re NOT doing DIY and you look at the thing you did and think “I did that, all by myself”. There’s immense pride in DIY. And the pride can be totally disproportionate to the effort you put in. You can bang a nail into your bathroom wall with a shoe and still feel pretty pleased with yourself when you look up at that C. M. Coolidge every time you perform your ablutions. -
Personal Platforms and the Future Of Communication
I found this simple and to-the-point presentation of what the future of digital will be like in 2010 by Rob Manson (@nambor). Essentially, we are moving towards more personalised platforms, and we are not just getting connected but staying connected with all the people in our network.
Up close and personal – Future of Digital 2010View more documents from Rob Manson.Pranav Mistry and Pattie Maes from MIT gave TED attendees this year a demo of the Sixth Sense, a wearable device with a projector that helps us interact with our environment, which is shown in one of the final slides of this presentation. I can’t help wondering where the next evolution of a product like Sixth Sense will take us – currently it allows us to interact with our environment, but maybe one day we can interact with our friends in a similar manner. This Nokia Augmented Reality video is one version of such a world:
What do you think? What will our personal platform be like in a few years’ time?
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It’s OK to fail
Years ago, when I was a teenager working as a summer camp counsellor, I was given a very valuable lesson in the expectation of success. (Full disclosure: I have yet to actually learn this lesson, but I’m trying. Lordy, am I trying.)
I was caring for a four-year-old whose mum had gone on an overnight trip, and as the day grew darker, my little charge became more and more anxious. I cuddled and soothed her, but nothing helped — she wanted her mum.
Her whimpers turned to full-on crying and I, agitated at the prospect of failing my job so completely, began to shush the poor kid. Obviously, this didn’t help, but I was dogged in my determination to ‘make it work’.
So I kept on. The harder she cried, the more I shushed, until the child astounded me by pausing mid-sob, staring me straight in the eye, and hollering at me with absolute righteousness,
“Don’t you know?! It’s OK to cry!!”
I was speechless. Of course it’s OK to cry — especially when you’re four. Who the hell was I to insist this kid buck up and ‘make it work’ when, clearly, it just wasn’t working? Read full post
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Branded food disasters
You’re working on a popular supermarket brand of processed meat. You’re in a brainstorm. It’s late, the client’s pushing hard for ideas. He’s got pizza and beers in. The ideas have been flowing freely but they’re starting to run dry. The brief is tight, you’ve got to come up with a way of “extending the customer’s relationship with the product”. You’ve gone through your entire inventory of stock ideas, you’ve talked about the innovation of Nike+, you’ve pushed the community angle, you’ve talked viral and you even pulled out the old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ concept. Still nothing is setting the room on fire. You take a bite out of the pizza and the idea hits you like a silver bullet to the brain. Deep SPAM™ Pizza. 
BOOYAH!! The wordplay is perfect, it hits the right demographic and the product is the main star. Then it hits you again, SPAM™ Rogan Josh. The client loves it and before you know it you’re commissioning photography and updating the web site.
Read full post -
Great writing does not depend on the tools
Yesterday’s Observer contained an astonishingly silly article from Tim Adams, entitled Will e-books spell the end of great writing? The short answer to that is “no”, but the confusion in Adams’s mind is such that I think his article needs to be taken apart piece by piece.
He starts with a quote from the great American novelist Don DeLillo, who says that he needs to use a typewriter to produce his prose. From this, Adams seems to deduce that without typewriters we cannot have great literature.
The absurdity is there on so many levels. First off, Cervantes didn’t have a typewriter, and DeLillo’s typewritten novels will work well enough on an e-reader. The medium used to create the text is of no relevance to the medium used to read the text, surely that’s obvious? DeLillo’s great contemporary, Philip Roth, writes standing up at a computer. Jeffrey Archer uses the same type of pen for every word he writes. You can’t tell me that if Roth swapped to the PaperMate, he’d start writing the kind of drivel Archer churns out, or that if DeLillo was somehow forcibly deprived of his typewriter that he’d stop writing.
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Enough of the R-word!
Today I awoke to find a veritable call to arms in my inbox:
Social Media Revolution is one of those hard-hitting, stat-stuffed summary videttes — albeit an exceptionally well-produced one — that I never quite know how to respond to.
As someone who spends a lot of time ‘doing social media’ I know I should be thrilled. I should feel excited and even a little bit proud that something I know and love is growing in popularity and being, in a sense, legitimised — evolving from a flicker in the zeitgeist to an actual thing to measure and monetise — but instead I just feel a little… let down. Read full post
Archive for December, 2009
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