Comments on: As Millions of Videos Come to TV, How Will We Choose?

By: ssinha

ssinha — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 19:33:29 +0000

Hi Robert, would appreciate link to MIT’s Social TV program. Thanks
Sandeep

By: brian2

brian2 — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:41:03 +0000

My frustration with “There’s nothing on” is that, as a DVR sub, I already pay for thousands of movies a month, and a hard drive to record them. Yet it’s still difficult to easily find and record them.

Why? B/c the grid guide is not built for time-shifted viewing.

I built a little site at http://movies2record.com as a baby step toward fixing this issue. It’s the first site dedicated to this (admittedly narrow) slice of the problem.

The operators, of course, don’t have open remote schedule APIs, but if they did, a ton of innovation would happen around Social TV viewing that would improve the TV experience for all of us–even if we didn’t want to be actively Twittering. And btw, “remote add to VOD list” is even further away, sadly.

By: Chris Albrecht

Chris Albrecht — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:47:27 +0000

I too want to hear more of this flocking. I smell a conference call! Thanks for the comment Robert.

Interesting to note about HBO. I spoke with them a couple years back and asked them about movies vs. original programming. At that time, they said more people signed up for the service because of the movies — not the shows. Just an interesting nugget about what people are looking for there.

By: Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:27:09 +0000

@Robert – Wow, that MIT discussion sounds fantastic. I’d love to hear more about that conversation!

I think the long tail, while a theoretically valid concept, was one of the most overhyped foundational premises in venture backed business plans in the content space over the last few years. You had companies like Akimbo making terrible decisions and launching businesses that had no hope of succeeding. The truth of the matter is the big-time audiences continue to “flock” to the best content. There’s a reason tens of millions subscribe to HBO, and why Hulu has been the story of online video over the past 12 months.

By: Robert Bole

Robert Bole — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:43:05 +0000

I just spent a half a day at the Communications Future Program at MIT talking Social TV. I know that there are a lot of groups looking at the same thing, but starting with the interesting experiment Facebook TV to some of the projects coming out of the Media Lab there is a lot of energy going into “flocking” in choosing content, as well as the algorithms that help tame the multiple choices.

I am looking forward to how they manage the work and what are the products that come from their research. However, the unintended consequences – both good and bad – are the most interesting. Will social tv make our choices homogeneous? Will the flocking lead to content producers to lead us to even more vanilla choices or do we believe the long tail will happen? I sometimes worry about the assumption of the long tail because of the cost and time that goes into making a creative program is so much greater than recording a song or even writing a book.

Good times all around though..the plethora of choice will lead to more innovation and around it goes…

By: texasyellowdog

texasyellowdog — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:31:51 +0000

Interestingly, pirate content on the web is dead simple to find. There are announcement services for new content with pointers to reviews and search engines to find older content. These are cooperative efforts without corporate fence building roadblocks. It’s pretty much on-demand with all the world’s content available. It’s going to be tough breaking that habit.