Claire from Pact gave us a potted history of the inetrface between new media and TV…

Mint Digital showed us their Buried Alive web site and TV show. An archive type site that allows viral mechanisms to let old content bubble up and be rescued by the public. This is also tied to a TV show that then emerges from the archive. They also have Bloom Box a UGC concept. Bloom box is a reskinnable web app that allows you to create content….Great Stuff. http://www.bloombox.tv/

therefore lots and lots of content is community based but grounded in TV….

Frank has just launched a competition for delegates to come up with ideas as to how the museum might engage with audiences, via it’s archive of photos, film and television content, in the next few years. This should exploit all the emerging media that is around, web 2.0 and the like. Interesting brief. It would be great to get any ideas posted on here and then maybe go through them live tomorrow.

Steve has invited us to the networking event tonight? Whoo hoo! Free booze… Fiddian from Soda has just got up to talk. Soda rose from the ashes of the Middlesex Uni centre for electronic arts. They love play, learning and art through technology. Talked about SodaPlay 2.0 - based on an integrated community but from a learning point of view for teachers pupils and general users. Also sodaplaymobile… Soda aim to be self sufficient from IP within 3 years.

Andy Pickles - Jive Bunny himself…believes you can do things all yourself. But you can create some IP and keep selling it. Made points about needing talent and harnessing creativity for commercial gain, not just for creative purposes. He believes that education wil be their core revenue within 3 years.

Jem talked abouit the changes in BBC New Media - the 25% quota and the newer open processes for small and big partners. How UGC is also being encouraged. Backstage, innovation labs etc. Rarely comission end to end projects but they do comission both large and small - £10 million pot of cash.

Questioner pointed out that the process itself is expensive. Couldnt the BBC set up an ‘awards’ panel to give out money for new projects to reduce the cost. Defence is that the BBC has to have formal processes because of the scale ofthe BBC and for the sake of transparency. Producer sells direct to operator, billing aggregators, revenue shares, all platforms. Billing aggregators are key as they are cross pltform, can deliver content and avoid operators.
Jake from Orange talked about distribution and retail as being the way the mobile companies work rather than as comissioners. Portals, revenue share, wholesale price levels, and it is NOT TV i.e. they are not building channels. They operate quite differently - as aggregators/publishers maybe. The obvious stuff sells at the minute, sport, music, TV. Prodcuers need to consider unique IP, interactivity, community, cross platform.

Adam from Channel 4 said VOD is the big thing at 4 this year. UGC is also central to talent development, the .com site as a destination and a move towards ‘fewer but bigger’. Showed examples of using blogs, archive, feeds and UGC to do things such as creating their own news stories. the CH4 .com site has grown fast but has a reach of around 11%. Much more video is appearing on the site, more magazine content (50% of returning users consume magazine content). They are looking for high impact stuff (fewer but bigger). Looking for an interactive narrative and large cross platform formats.

Questioner asked…how they worked with international partners? Orange do but others dont largely…

It will be interesting to hear how the members of the enterpreneurs panel tackle the situation at the moment. We seem to be undergoing a second web boom but one that is possibly more rational (i.e. based on solid business plans)….It will be interesting to hear what they are looking for in proposals and ideas.

One hopes that  they are now much more sensible and wouldnt give oodles of money to an online underpants salesman…(which did happen in the dot com boom…)

As we are seeing (click here for nielen/netrating figures), social network sites continue their spectacular rise. Yet another aspect of community that is growing. Social Radio, shared and social video (Youtube etc.) and out and out social networking sites are all rocketing in size and reach. The nielsen figures show MySpace dominating as a service but when you look also at the retention figures the order lower down the list changes a little with Facebook scoring highly.

I like this because it confirms that standard behaviour is occuring online. We read so much about ‘new behaviours’ but the fact that smaller sites have great retention bodes well for up and coming and new ventures in this space and shows that a sustainable model based on satisfied cutomers is possible even if you dont attain MySpace scale - i.e. when you plan to launch something aim clearly at a market and serve that market well.   They will reward you with loyalty.

As we are seeing (click here for nielen/netrating figures), social network sites continue their spectacular rise. Yet another aspect of community that is growing. Social Radio, shared and social video (Youtube etc.) and out and out social networking sites are all rocketing in size and reach. The nielsen figures show MySpace dominating as a service but when you look also at the retention figures the order lower down the list changes a little with Facebook scoring highly.

I like this because it confirms that standard behaviour is occuring online. We read so much about ‘new behaviours’ but the fact that smaller sites have great retention bodes well for up and coming and new ventures in this space and shows that a sustainable model based on satisfied cutomers is possible even if you dont attain MySpace scale - i.e. when you plan to launch something aim clearly at a market and serve that market well. They will reward you with loyalty.

I see that the BBC’s rivals have criticised the BBC’s new strategy…here  Not suprising really as they now have 10 more years to get their strategy right before losing some or all of the license fee (which will happen next time). It si costing a fortune for companies to go properly digital into the new on-demand world. The BBC does have it easy in that respect but let’s not forget that their competitors have more reasons than fairness on their minds. The article quotes a director of News International as saying “Why should public money be used to create competition to a successful commercial venture such as MySpace?”… a bit cheeky maybe as news Int own MySpace.

The biggest issue for me is how much they plan to work with the independent sector. Why cant they divert most of the money towards commissioning  form small indies in order to promote competition and growth?

Looking at the blog of the BBC’s Paul Mason it seems that the BBC has announced that it’s future direction will be to offer media content in any format, at any time, at any place and in any way that the consumer wants it. By the time of the next license fee round the BBC will be a radically different organisation with broadcast becoming a small part of it’s raison d’etre.

According to the BBC they will enable personalise media consumption in order to make BBC output truly directed by the individual audiences. Further, Ashley Highfield went on to say that the BBC’s digital output would be based on “share”, “find” and “play”…

laudable…

The last 100 years has seen an ever increasing acceleration in forms of media technology. Communication is now possible in a multiplicity of forms using multiple technologies and in an ever increasingly smart context. One of the most interesting things for me is to speculate on what the nature of 21st century media will be.

We have seen the emergence of omnipresent, smart media technology and it seems that one major concern is about how we interface with the content. In hard UI terms new interfaces are appearing that include shared use, spatial, temporal and conceptual, tags, tangible, physical and hybrid UIs as base design concepts. New UI metaphors for bridging the physical and virtual world are being developed that use spatial and temporal mappings between real and virtual world, dynamic sets of devices, shared devices, public displays and dynamic adaptation among several dimensions: devices, users, services, not to mention tracking and modelling social behaviour and protocols, all of which are giving us Ubiquitous Interfaces.

This begs the question what effects will these new forms of interface have on the content? For example, how do gameplay mechanisms which are being used across media in order to attract and keep consumer relationships active affect content on TV?

How will advertising change? The imminent death of the 30 second TV ad slot is the birth of a whole new landscape. New forms of branded content have emerged but yet more is needed to fully exploit the emergent media landscape. Intelligence, profiling, smartness and new forms of relationship with consumers are driving new forms of advertising and may see the death of the big ad agency.

Mobile technology has created a whole new dimension to media technology and content. Full TV to mobile services have launched and consumers seem to like them BUT the content is having to change in form and also in the way it is delivered leading to a world where the most extreme personalisation is just around the corner on a mass scale.

Artists and the emergence of AI – art that ‘thinks’. Even artists locked in their Arts Council funded faux-ivory towers are being affected. If smartness and intelligence underpin other media technologies then why should artists be any different? For some years artists at the cutting edge have been exploring the cutting edge of computation and aesthetics but it is clear that with the new explosion of smartness, intelligence computational power and media channels available that this is an area that is set to explode in vitality and finally mass acceptance to maybe become the dominant aesthetic of the 21st century.

The emergence of behaviour and intelligence as interface design paradigms suggests that smart, always-on, on-demand, contextualized content will have to be created to suit the different needs of the consumer and examines the new opportunities for storytellers.

P2P, podcasting and other user generated content and distribution networks, in combination with ratings and reputation engines, could open the gates to truly democratic content…what do the public actually want, do they want what is fed them by media organisations? If media becomes truly democratised then we will find out.

These are just a few of the things that give us so much to think about over the next few years.