Vote for SXSW

I've never managed to attend the annual SXSW conference, despite my strong admiration for the role built by the organizers of the multi-faceted event each spring in Austin. More than any other festival (at least in North America), SXSW gives equal weight to film, music and interactive.

This year Janet Piersen who runs the Film program pinged me to suggest that I should consider proposing a panel, and was very helpful in steering me through the rather arduous process of doing so, articulated in this FAQ.

You see, SXSW is interactive to its bones. While I'm sure certain conference sessions are programmed by staff, there's a healthy dose of user-generated content among the roster of activities. And it starts 9 months prior to the show itself.

Once the submission and speakers have been established (all online), there's a public voting process, which is NOW -- through September 2nd. Public voting and comments comprise a 30% share of the weighted consideration, but obviously a well-crowd-sourced panel does get the attention of the organizers. 

I submitted the following two panels, one in film and one in interactive. Please review, vote and comment, should you be so inclined: 

• INTERACTIVE: Television in the Era of Social Engagement 

• FILM: Can Next-Gen Studios Reinvent Content Models?

• The Difference Between Connected TV, Social TV and Expanded TV – and Why You Should Care

The tech world is rife with trend-mongering, much of which winds up as wishful thinking or downright wrong. The future of television technology is no exception (Remember web TV, Intercast, and interactive set-top boxes?). Prognostication is a mug's game.

And, so it is with great caution that I approach the latest trio of trends -- Connected TV, Social TV and Expanded TV. Whether or not these jargony trends hurl us into the future, they reflect the challenge that every content creator (and distributor) faces today: 

Consumers expect more from all of their screens. 

Herein I break down these three big trends, along with their odds for future success (which I may live to regret).

Connected TV

What is it? Your TV connects to the Internet.

Why you should care: It bypasses traditional distribution middlemen. Today there are some 30 million connected TV households in the US, a number that is expected to more than triple to 137 million in three years.

How it works: Connections can be made through devices (Blu-Ray players, game consoles, Roku) or directly to Internet-enabled flat-screens. There you'll find a marketplace of TV apps, (aka over-the-top, or OTT) because they come into the home over the tops of cable and satellite payrolls.  

The players: The consumer electronics companies (Samsung, Sony, LG, etc.) make the sets, many of the boxes, and the platforms where consumers find the OTT apps.  (Apple, Yahoo and Google, also provide OTT services, compared here. Each manufacturer offers libraries of both paid and free apps for all kinds of stuff, including music, education, games, sports, reference, photos, social networking. 

For video, Netflix is the OTT poster child, of course. Other VOD vendors include Vudu, YouTube, CinemaNow, Amazon, and Hulu, compared here. Expect other aggregators to follow. If Sundance can centralize deals with networks, why not build a branded OTT channel? If SnagFilms (owner of IndieWire) presents documentaries over the web, why not via OTT?

The odds: Today's OTT market offers new choices at a low price. But if iInternet access providers (like the cable companies) start charging by usage, and content providers start withhold content or charge more to the aggregators like Netflix, the model quickly falls apart. Both trends have led to some to doubt OTT's long-term success.

But I am intrigued whenever there’s a chance for outsiders (think: indies & their aggregators) to disrupt the status quo, especially since they have been squeezed out of cable's "500-channel universe" and the shrinking DVD market. Vendors like Accedo or Flingo can help build TV apps. 

Social TV 

What is it? A way to connect viewers, content, and friends, powered by mobile platforms and social networks. Not a new idea, but very powerful in the age of Facebook, Twitter and iPads.  

Why you should care: Connecting media consumption to social networks produces a tsunami of  data, which in turn powers personalized advertising, commerce and relationships, which creates new business models. Bye-bye mass, hello niche.

How it works: Viewers “check-in” to a show they’re watching via a mobile app. They can send their ratings and comments to friends, share on social networks, and otherwise fool around with badges, points, leaderboards, messaging, and other game-like features. 

The players: Suddenly, this is a crowded field. Apps like GetGlue, Miso, Philo, and Tunerfish offer similar check-in and game-like features. IntoNow adds automatic content recognition (ACR), in which the audio signal of the show that is running triggers the app. Shazam does for that for music now, and will shortly add it for TV. Beyond TV turns your PC or Mac into a DVR. WatchPoints offers rewards for viewing. Zazum enables impulse purchases via its “SeeLoveBuy” app.

The odds: With so much VC-backed competition, it's clear that the category is hot, which may lead Facebook and Twitter to jump in. Earlier this year, Yahoo bought IntoNow just weeks after its launch . Over the long haul, hese apps must attract users, sponsors and deals with TV brands themselves, like this one with Project Runway. 

IntoNow’s Adam Cahan admits, “I don’t think anyone in this space has cracked what users are drawn to.” To hear more from Cahan and other leaders, check out this video  from the TV of Tomorrow show. 

Expanded TV

What is it?  Tablet and smartphone apps that give fans a deep dive into a specific show or network.

Why you should care: The audience is moving to mobile devices, especially hard-core fans.They will reward the shows that give them more content. 

How it works: Early mobile apps for networks and TV shows offered promotion, schedules, trivia, data, galleries, clips and the like. (My favorite: TCM) When networks began streaming full episodes on websites, and then tablets, the apps provided extra content alongside the streams. (Cable got into the act with its TV Everywhere initiative, which opened the cookie jar to subscribers.). Now individual series are offering bespoke apps for the true fan.The newest of these actually synch to the live broadcast.

The players: Basically everyone in the business, especially channels, shows (and movies) that have ardent fan bases. "Our brands are all racing to create a companion experience on mobile interactive devices,” said Marc Siry of NBC Universal at the Digital Content Monetization conference in June. 

Some good examples are apps for Fox’s Bones and ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, one of the first to use Nielsen's MediaSync technology. See also, the HBO-commissioned content for Game of Thrones, available via its HBO-Go app. 

The odds: Mobile devices and app stores are revolutionizing the content marketplace, forever changing our definition of TV "networks" and "shows." (and movies, too), and bringing new opportunities to satisfy the seemingly insatiable demands of audiences for more, more more. Expanded TV allows creators to broaden their pallets and expand their relationship with audiences over time. 

Just TV

These three trends are enabled by technologies (Wifi, audio fingerprinting, tablets) and new business models (OTT, apps, social). As each finds its user base and category leader, it's very likely that the functions will simple become subsumed into the mainstream -- it will be "just TV". 

A London start-up called Zeebox suggest such a future when the TV set will be linked to a second screen and automatically connect your viewing to the broader web. As co-founder Ernesto Schmitt told Paid Content:  "We think (consumers) want TV on steroids - the ability to watch TV socially, an ability to transact, to get information, to interact. It’s the enhancement of TV. 

A version of this post also appeared in Tribeca's FUTURE OF FILM BLOG, here. I am grateful for input from Dana Harris, editor of IndieWire.

To access links on this topic, check out my OTT collection on Delicious. 

• L.A. Transmedia Meet-up: A Wealth of Talent and their Projects in Development

I attended a meeting of the LA Transmedia Meet-up for the first time last night and I lucked out, because the program featured rapid-fire sharing by members of the group, 20 of us all told, and quite a variety was on display. The group, founded in late 2009 and coordinated by Scott Walker, Jay Bushman, Tara Brown, claims more than 200 members via the Meet-up site.

Some tidbits I gleaned in the meeting are worth sharing with the world:

• Brown kicked it off, describing some of her work helping record label 50/50 Konvict.
• Andrew Fogel described his work with the League of S.T.E.A.M., a steampunk-themed performance group which is in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign for the second season. 
• Mike Minadeo of MineField Productions described "The Los Journal of Commodore Claude D. Ledger," an ARG scavenger hunt that took place in San Diego's Gaslight District during ComiCon -- complete with lessons learned from this, his first such effort.
• Nedra Weinreich described two "transmedia for good" projects she's involved with: one focusing upon Indian health; the other using fiction and transmedia elements to teach health care literacy to teens, in conjunction with the UCLA School of Public Health and Health Net. 
• Rich Silverman, who worked on HEROES and other transmedia projects, described a new story world called Society Twins  he's launching with British author Michael Brant, who wrote the young adult series "Gone"  and publisher Egmont UK. Another project is Nexus Humanus 
• Attorney Bruce Lazarus who worked in Biz Affairs for Disney and other studios described a transmedia project he's helping to develop around author Troy Byer's self-help book Ex-Free.
• Robert Chapin described The Hunted, a web-series with social links that is being pitched as a movie via another Kickstarter campaign. 
• James Denning discussed Jamabi, his early-stage startup that embeds commerce and other functions into video via a posting and sharing site.
• Rick Baumgartner's early-stage venture is the 3D Music Company,which offers bands the chance to create 3D videos for their original performances. Built upon HTML5 standards, the company offers an innovation in business and revenue sharing with the artist.
• Kate McCallum has used her writing and mainstream TV background in a transition to transmedia, working on producing a "Bible" for a Chinese-backed multi-media rollout. She's also involved with 360-degree storytelling with a dome at Los Angeles Center Studios, and the Center for Conscious Creativity, which is hold a tribute to Tim Kring on Sept. 15th at the DGA as part of "Producing Change."
• Kirsten Olsen is a "anthropologist," eg. she consults with studios about behavior, likes and dislikes of the fans of various properties and story worlds. She described a new movie project with roots in China, a new challenge.
• Wally O., a recent winner in Script Frenzy, described her "death trilogy" web series.
• April Arrglington described her involvement with a multi-platform story from Spain (translation: The Super Coffeemaker), as well as the beginnings of her own sci-fi project.
• Kent Nichols (co-producer of the early YouTube hit "Ask A Ninja") just came off a long Honeymoon at many national parks, and is consulting with Blip.tv and teaching at USC. He described the recent re-booting of AAN, which btw has a total of 150 million views (!), and the push-pull relationship with fans.
• Alistair Jeffs has a day job in distribution, and works with passion on projects with Oil, the London-based creator of the award-winning Routes, the Channel 4-backed show and game about DNA. He is also working on a project code named WHI that involves driving a car from within a video (?) and a children's music project called Nelson and the Hollow Trees. 
• Aaron Vanek is a passionate member of the Live Action Role Playing (LARP) community which has fueled his belief that the experiences from role-playing can be educational. He's developing Seekers Unlimited as a LARP for Education start-up. 

• Stephanie Argy & Alec Boehm described their journey from filmmaking to transmedia in a three-act structure, starting with their short newsreel Gandhi at the Bat,  then to a feature The Red Machine, which has just come off the festival circuit, and finally to their current project, a Civil War spy transmedia adventure, A Person Known to Me.
• Travis Carter and Brad Lusher of One 3 Productions outlined "Fury" and "City of Refuge," two transmedia franchises they are developing.
• Phil Gable, a producer with ITV and BBC experience, has a company called Witch Factory Productions that is developing "Adore", a transmedia world developed using the Starlight Runner methodology, and a slate of ten projects they hope to launch using the licensing model.
• Marcello Picone, with a background in television and interactive, is working on a project called "101 Ways to Die." He discussed the aha moment for him, which was ten years ago in the AFI Enhanced Television Workshop, when he was part of the team that incubated an interactive version of KCET's "American Family" 
• JayBushman is a transmedia writer/designer with Fourth Wall, which has a lot of secret projects underway (he couldn't discuss). He did ask for coding help for a former project of his that he wants to bring back: a Twitter version of a short story by Melville (I think). He also gave a shout-out to "The Floating City", http://www.floatingcity.com/ an online game around the new Thomas Dolby album. 

I was also happy to discuss my recent deep-dive into the transmedia and ARG community, which started with the posts I wrote for Tribeca, and the presentation I gave at Digital Hollywood. It all began way back in the 90s when we incubated so many multi-screen projects at the AFI Enhanced TV Workshop and the Digital Content Lab. So many folks mentioned that they had been up to AFI over the course of their careers. Made me proud!

BTW> Please correct any wrong names or project data or links. This is all from my notes, and our friends at Google. 

• TV of Tomorrow: Video from "Creative Visions" Panels Posted

ITVT has posted videos from the two "Creative Visions" sessions from The TV of Tomorrow Show 2011 (May 17th-18th in San Francisco), which I moderated (thanks to Tracy Swedlow, thanks Tracy)

The presenters for Day One's "Creative Visions" session were:

• Paula Byrne, Managing Director at Pushbutton (which has just been acquired byAmazon), who focused on user experience (UX) design, addressing such topics as why UX is now so important; what is right and what is wrong with current UX design; how technology is impacting UX design today; and how it will impact it in the future.
• Dustin Callif, Executive Producer of Digital at Tool of North America, who drew on his work on "Touching Stories," an application that contains four interactive live-action short films designed specifically for the iPad, in order to illustrate how touch and physical movement can be used to drive an interactive narrative.
• Michael Payne, Director of Experience Design at Intel, who focused on the user experience of connected TV, and attempted to define the roles that content integration, social presence, new forms of interaction and multiple screens need to play in that experience going forward.

Presenters for Day Two's "Creative Visions" session were:

• Itamar Gilad, Product Manager for Interactive Video at YouTube, who provided statistics and use cases illustrating how YouTube's Annotations technology, which the company launched without much fanfare back in 2008, has ignited an explosion of interactive video creativity--much of it from non-professional users--in such areas as gaming, tutorials, promotion and cross-promotion, choose-your-own-adventure narratives, advertising and more.
• Olivier Lacour, VP of Design at NDS, who drew on learnings from focus groups on EPG's and from NDS's deployment of its Snowflake user interface with Portuguese operator, Zon Multimedia, in order to elaborate a vision for the future of TV guides and UI's.
• Nathan Shedroff, Chair of the MBA in Design Strategy Program at the California College of the Arts, and Chris Noessel, Director of Interaction Design at Cooper, who presented findings on gestural interfaces--including the seven gestural meanings adopted by Hollywood and the "narrative stance that isn't"--from their ongoing work on the lessons that interface designers can learn from science fiction.

• VidCon 2011: YouTube Faithful Scream and Dream of Hitting it Big

(A slightly different version of this post appeared on IndieWIRE).

With 2,400 young and noisy YouTube fanatics, the sell-out crowd could have been mistaken for a rave. However, VidCon 2011 was something even more radical: It's a next-gen vaudeville show that wants to become a showcase for the future of entertainment.  

Headquartered at Los Angeles' Hyatt Regency Century City, the three-day, second-annual VidCon was a showcase for the fastest growing segment of the entertainment business: Online video and most specifically YouTube, which was -- lest we forget -- founded a mere six years ago (and owned by Google since 2006). 

By now, YouTube is so ubiquitous it's easy to take for granted. The site's videos garner 3 billion views per day. More than 48 hours of video are uploaded onto YouTube every minute, a rate that has doubled in just one year.   

And from all of that emerges VidCon, which features the elite stars of the YT universe from among the site's 20,000 partners. According to YT exec Tom Pickett, hundreds of YouTubers make six-figure incomes from their share of ad revenue that comes to channels that attract millions of subscribers and viewers, and thousands more earn at least $1,000 per month, a figure which has tripled in the last year. 

VidCon was founded by siblings Hank and John Green, who have one of those star channels in the @Vlogbrothers. As emcees, they welcomed one home-grown YT star after another in 15-minute stints, including Dane Boedigheimer (the Amazing Orange), Phil DeFranco, iJustine, Mystery Guitar Man,  Shane Dawson  and Michael Buckley.

Naturally, each brought their own cameras on stage so they could post videos of the event, like this one from Toby Turner (Tobuscus), who is known for his faux trailers. 

At one point, when the stage was filled with YT celebs dancing to the rock stylings of TeraBrite, the audience's shriek became a deafeningly high pitch rarely hard outside Justin Bieber concerts. By my reckoning, the average age of VidCon attendees was mid-20s, with a decided tilt towards the teen cohort.

That frenzy is more than than fandom: Most audience members are YT creators who aspire to the same kind of fame and fortune. Top draws at VidCon included sessions like "Secret Tactics to Grow Subscribers and Views," "Building a Great Rig," "Merchandising Your Brand," and my personal favorite: "Balancing School and YouTube." 

YouTubers may be young, but they have a sense of their own history. VidCon presented a reunion of the actors from Lonely Girl 15, the fake videoblog that helped put YouTube on the map in 2006, especially after it was outed as fiction, not IRL/In Real Life. Many YTers, including DeFranco and the Greens, said they date their YT awakening to LG15, which was also one of the first web properties to utilize UGC in the form of viewer-contributed videos.

VidCon is not an official YT event, but the company was a major sponsor and a ubiquitous presence. Just as Apple once used MacWorld to introduce products and make announcements, YT took the stage to rally the troops and to define its message, including the launch of a new partner hub that centralizes resources and links.  

YT execs also promoted the site's new interface, dubbed Cosmic Panda, which began its rollout in early July. The effort is a long-overdue revamping of YouTube's cluttered look and feel, especially compared to sleek sites like Hulu. 

But as successful YouTube producer Bob Jennings suggests, Panda's focus on channelization reflects YouTube's hunger for slicker content and the advertisers that they hope will follow. YT's billions of daily views don't translate to a similar appetite from top-tier advertisers. Vevo, the music site spinoff that YT launched with Universal Music, was one way that YT addressed this problem. Not surprisingly, with music videos consistently making YouTube's top-viewed list, Vevo is a hit.

YouTube already bestows privileged placement and exceptional promotion on its biggest UGC stars; it's not much of a stretch to imagine a premium YT that will place them alongside the heavyweights of professional content, which YouTube has been wooing for years with mixed results.

However, that narrative was not part of VidCon, not even during the "industry day" that preceded the main show. 

Vidcon's message is one of hope, with presentations like the one from Canadian YTer Corey Vidal, who shared his own triumph over homelessness: Every person who opens a YouTube account has a shot at starring in his own rags-to-riches meme -- this generation's version of "A Star is Born." 

Which is why next year, VidCon will move to Anaheim Stadium, which has enough room for 12,000 stars. 

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The official Vidcon channel posted some of the conference live, as well as interviews with many of the speakers here. Read backwards on the #Vidcon Twitter search for a flavor of the event.