In short – it did and it didn’t, but was quite a lot of fun, even if the film was truly awful.

The main point around collaborative watching that has popped up a bunch of times in the last few weeks, as I’ve been doing a load of collaborative video stuff recently for entirely random and disparate reasons, is that doing it live is what it’s about. You can add annotations to a video stream and have them pop up as you watch, as Vimeo now do, but not only do you have the interactive element when watching live, but you also have a sense of being part of An Event, which adds to the enjoyment. I’ve been talking to people at the BCS about streaming their talks through UStream.tv, giving us a message board for the watchers to interact with the live room, and it’s that ability to talk to the live event that people grab hold of as one of the most important pieces.

Last night’s movie of choice was M Night Shyamalan’s execrable ‘The Happening’. It may not have been the best choice for a first run, as rather than being amusingly bad it’s just depressing in its awfulness. Horrendous script, awful plot, no resolution and lots of shots trying to film the wind. The occasional shocking or impressive scene could not save it and at the end I was properly disappointed in a film for the first time in years – it sat heavily and immovably in the zone of the truly bad, not even touching on the boundaries of terribleness that might have made it amusing to watch.

According to the Bad Movie Club website, the crowd was about 2000 strong and there were about 40,000 tweets sent tagged with #badmovieclub. I watched the stream and commented through TweetChat, a site that works to compartmentlise twitter by detecting hashtags in the main public stream and dividing out the tweets into seperate ‘rooms’, almost IRC style, also enabling easy adding to the ‘room’ by automatically adding the hashtag to the end of your tweets. The comments flowed thick and fast and it became almost impossible to keep up with them, and for most of the film my attention was not focused on the screen, although with The Happening that was a bit of a blessing.

It was fun – people made amusing comments and pulled interesting things out of the movie as things went along. The concept of non-local participation in events is something I’m very interested in, but a completely distributed event like this, as there was not a lot of mention of groups watching together in the same room – the demographic for this kind of experiment is often the lone keyboard tapper, like my good self – is something I’ve not considered much before. Having played with things like Phreadz and Seesmic in the past, one of the main points that pops up is whether text or video is the appropriate medium for various different uses, and in this case live video interaction would win out, if it was possible for us to keep track of 2000 talking heads yammering over each other at the same time. We seemed to be pretty much in sync during the watching of the film, but the time taken for each person to get their comments out into the stream meant that there was a shifting window of commenting as the film continued – not too much of an issue, but definitely chipping away at the immersiveness of the interaction in the same way that a friend sitting next to you on the sofa commenting on something that happened in the last scene might.

The full volume of commenting also made it difficult to keep up. It was as if we were sat in a large room with everyone shouting their comments out at the same time, with overlaps in context, repetitions of sentiment with varying different levels of effectiveness and the occasional gem lost amongst the baying of the crowd. Exactly as you would expect from the varied crowd.

So, as an idea does it have legs? I think so. People use Twitter in different ways and my stream of related tweets has caused at least one former follower to block me on the site, having flooded his normally more sedate stream with seeming non-sequitur’s  that got in the way of his normal online interaction (a problem that was much more noticeable in the days when the text messaging service was still operating – having your phone flooded by me exuberantly trying to deconstruct a DragonForce gig is not to everyone’s taste…), and I think this brings up the main problem with the Bad Movie Club idea – is Twitter actually the right medium for it? Annoyingly there are, as ever, points for and against.

Firstly, in its plain and default state Twitter is not compartmentalised, and while there are applications to help users make sense of the potentially overwhelming stream of data that the site processes, this raw stream is what many users, myself included, use. The addition of a pile of data from an event that you are not involved with, leading to contextual failures and seeming random tweets, is something that annoys people a lot of the time on the site, and once you hit a critical mass of people that you follow engaging in the same event you end up with the service almost being crippled as your stream becomes overcome with information that you cannot process effectively without a ‘real-life’ context. Outside of last night’s rather extreme demonstration of this we have recent events such as the Obama inauguration (although almost everyone on Twitter seemed to be looking at that), the Apple Expo keynote and almost every web and tech related conference in the last year.

The fact that we had to use third party tools to join in effectively, which leads to security issues due to Twitter’s current lack of a secure API and the ‘give me your username and password’ that the 3rd parties have to do in order to integrate with the site, demonstrates further that at the moment it may not be the medium for this kind of interaction – although the general openness of Twitter that allows the creation of these tools to push forward uses of the platform that the creators hadn’t thought of is, in my opinion, one of the most powerful things about the current rash of ‘web2.0′ sites that are appearing. @glinner, despite being the instigator of the event, ended up having problems, both from not tagging his posts, leading to him being missed out of a lot of the conversation, but also from hitting a little known about spam stopping ‘tweet cap’ which led to him being locked out of Twitter before the end of the film.

As I mentioned earlier there was an IRC feel to things (and a bunch of people were even using twIRC to join in) and that led me to thinking about whether IRC itself would be a more appropriate medium for this kind of conversation. It’s a tried and tested platform, already with a pile of tools to allow people to access it, and it also is designed for compartmentalised realtime chat. However, that very compartmentalisation removes one of the big pluses that I saw last night – the drawing in of people who had no idea what was going on. Due to my spraying of tweets across the screens of my various followers, a number of people poked their heads in to look at what was going on. The reaction varied from me being blocked to people saying that they’d join in next time, but it drew in other participants as an effortless by-product to the standard interaction, in a way that the compartmentalised IRC channel never could.

So, overall I think it was interesting (as well as fun), but as @glinner is now realising it didn’t work as well as he was hoping. Tweaks need to be made to make it work ‘better’, but at the same time this seems to me to be the best way of finding out how things work – have an idea, run with it and see what happens.

Links:

• Bad Film Club – the website.
• Graham Linehan on Twitter
• Bad Movie Club on Twitter
• All the posts tagged with #badfilmclub
• My part of the conversation

Now, this is no Frankie Boyle or Bob Log III gig, but a day of talking about random stuff unconference style, all focused around ’social-media’, however you want to define that rather wide term. I helped chair a session about The Future of Books last time and there was a pub afterwards, so there’s something for everyone…

Amplified 09 will take place in the slightly left-field venue of Tiger Tiger on Lower Regent Street on April 24th. The wiki for session proposals and discussions is over here, and you can sign up for free tickets at Eventbrite.

I skived off work yesterday (well, booked the day off well in advance and made sure that my work had cover, but that sounds less rebellious and I’ve always wanted to be a rebel) and wandered down to the ICA for the first of this years Amplified events – a morning of talking about the future of online video. I attended @freecloud’s session at Amp08 and heard many interesting things, so was rather pleased that I got the chance to sit and talk to a bunch of interested and interesting people.

The format of three conversations with no fixed agenda worked well, even if I only managed to move once, and a lot of ground was covered, with ideas being dragged from one table to another and shared between groups. I ended up talking to Alan Patrick (@freecloud), Steve Lamb (@actionlamb), Annie Mole (@anniemole), Janet Parkinson (@janetparkinson), Ric Galbraith (@richgalbraith), Tony Hall (@tonyhall), Penny Jackson and Andy Coughlan (@andycoughlan) and jumped through quite a large number of topics.

There are a pile of tweets about it, enough that we started trending higher than Obama’s inauguration (although, as it was the day after and before the US woke up that was not as big an achievement as it may sound, although it’s still rather impressive) and a lot of information was bandied around. There are a load of other attempts to crystallise some of that discussed and I’ll try and do some linking in this post when I find things:

• My tweets
• @whatleydude for Spinvox
• @freecloud at Broadstuff

Anyways, as I seem to be bad at passing on event information, the next big Amplified event will be a conference half day (more information when the organisers get it organised) on February 24th at Tiger Tiger.

I made some notes and here are some of them in an attemptedly cogent and organised fashion. Well, more of a braindump with some bold text. You have been warned.

There’s no EPG for online content

There’s a whole load of video content out on the web and people are turning to it more and more, but as the amount of content explodes it is becoming more and more difficult to find the stuff you want, both in terms of quality and topic. How are we going to make it possible to find the things you want in the future?

Search engines are a start, but due to the nature of video you have to rely on other people’s descriptions of the content. Due to the nature of language this leads to inconsistent description schemes that make it difficult to find relevant content. Even in situations where you specify identification schemes people will always find ways of interpreting descriptions in different ways – this leads to folksonomies (thanks to @freecloud for teaching my new word for the day) rather than strict taxonomies and this makes finding content difficult.

Recommendation engines are another avenue. I worked on collaborative filtering and recommendation engines in the past and while they often worked fairly well (and are getting better) they require critical masses of information to get to a reliable level and can start returning strange results if you start being too ‘exact’ with your use of the information. However, there are sites out there using the idea (I think http://www.mightyv.com does, but I’ve forgotten my password) and it could lead to personalised TV channels in a way we don’t quite have yet.

Personal recommendation is the third piece we talked about and the one that is simplest to implement on a base level – if people can link to it then they’ll tell their friends, cf youtube and the joy of the viral video. We talked a bunch more about personal recommendations but it’s all mixed in with the stuff below…

One other point that we discussed was what we meant by quality. I break it up into two pieces:

• Quality – how good the content is. ie how well written, performed, produced, edited, etc.
• Fidelity – how good the technological side of things is: resolution of video, quality of lighting, recording of sound, etc.

With the dropping of barrier to entry to the creation of video the fidelity of amateur production is rising rapidly, but when looking for content you are generally looking for good quality content, but the fidelity level is something that varies depending on use. Someone looking for a video to put on their iPod is after something different to current.com, who are looking to put video on the television and internet as news.

Collaborative Watching

This lined up quite nicely with some of the stuff I’d been talking to people about at BookCamp this weekend – how do we consume content in an interactive fashion, rather than isolated and alone. With online video this is a slightly less esoteric topic, as we have the history of offline video to draw on – video that has traditionally been consumed in cinemas or lounges full of people. A number of points came up:

In what situations is collaborative content consumption socially acceptable? Talking in the cinema is frowned upon and different people react differently to being interrupted while watching. The general conclusion was that there is a stark difference (in general) between fictional and factual content, with the latter being a lot more accepted as something that can be commented on in real time. Story is often based on the immersion of the consumer into the world (bringing to mind, although not in the same context, a comment from @sleepydog’s opening remarks to the session – ‘The author owns the story, the audience own the world’) and realtime commentary or collaboration during that can often break the spell and pull people out of the story, so not a good idea.

One thing that was noted was the increase of twitter as a commentary method for television – major televised events such as the recent inauguration of President Obama seem to be popular as expected, but you also get TV programs like Top Gear popping up in online conversations. I think of twitter as a back channel to the world and in collaborative watching it does allow people to come together in a non-locational manner to comment in real time on content. However, these comments are based on scheduled programming rather than the video on demand approach that the internet enables.

Now that we can’t guarantee, thanks to iPlayer, 4OD, DVDs, downloads, etc, that we will be watching things at the same time we need new ways of sharing our experiences to make the watching process collaborative still. Outside of the oldskool ‘water cooler chat’, updated to blog posts, forums, IM/Twitter and the like, we talked about ways of leaving your comments on the content in a time sensitive manner, using Vimeo’s time based tagging system as an example – this again tied in with the concept of the ’socialised book’ that we talked about at bookcamp, using timecode here rather than page number. Being able to leave comments on video, tied to the piece of video that you are commenting on is a powerful thing, allowing timeshifted watchers to tell each other their views in real time, even if it is not truly interactive.

I went to the cinema after the session and found that the Curzon Soho’s wireless extends throughout the building, including covering the screens themselves. I twittered as such from the 5th row, wondering aloud whether we could have a silent collaborative viewing of a film, communicationg through networked text alone. This does, of course, ignore the annoyance of the tapping of keys and the light of screens, but until we get ocular implants…

New models of content distribution

It was proposed that traditional television programming is dieing. However, we decided that it had hope as long as it continued to embrace new models of distribution. There were a few that came up:

The ‘Sanctuary’ model – the sci-fi channel program Sanctuary was originally distributed as free to download and share 15 minute webisodes. They also allowed you to pay a small amount of money which would give you access to high fidelity recordings as well as ‘extras’. Part of the extras package were video resources for remixing – the original green screen footage as well as backgrounds, outtakes and other bits and pieces. Users were encouraged to play with all the footage and redistribute as they saw fit.

Due to the ease of sharing and not having to pay if you didn’t want to, the payment scheme acting like a tip-jar/buskers case – throw in some cash if you liked what you saw. It also gave the feature of reducing the effort required to obtain the ‘extras’ in addition to the ‘honourableness’ of donating some money to someone doing work that you liked. The freedom of redistribution and remixing gives interested parties the ability to do the advertising of the content for the producer willingly – everybody gets something out of it.

However, Sanctuary was successful enough that it got picked up for traditional broadcast and the webisode model disappeared. Ho hum.

Joss Whedon – He put up Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog up free for a weekend and then moved on to selling it through iTunes. Later it was moved to traditional DVD distribution as well as free viewing through Hulu. The cult following of Whedon helped push the initial viewings and downloadings, but the time limited nature meant that many people who missed it bought it online in order to make it easier to obtain and also to kick some cash back to Whedon. Many downloaded it for free through filesharing, but this just meant that more people saw it and advertised it. The balance is fine here, as it is with the Sanctuary model, but with the dropping costs of budget production, as well as the increase in fidelity at lower cost, there is still a potential for this kind of production to be funded. I’ve still not seen it…

South Park Studios – Matt and Trey have now managed to get every episode of South Park online to watch for free. In addition to this they have made the content available in clip form for embedding and remixing. This has led to a boom in homemade South Park content and the expected rise in awareness of the (already saturated on the internet…) brand on the internet. The ability to take clips and embed them has lots of potential, discussed below. The problem that South Park has had is that this was not planned from the beginning, leading to continued issues with rights and the absense of the service in the UK, as rights issues are still not resolved:

There were a bunch of points that came out of this end of the discussion, but the one that stuck in my mind the most (leading to me repeating it when I forgot if I’d spoken to the people around me about it already…sorry) was that if you put content out in such a manner that people can do ’stuff’ with it, they’ll do ’stuff’ you haven’t even thought of. This is a Good Thing, as it makes your content more useful and more people will want to use it. Again, this is a point that came up with bookcamp, driven home as we stood around with a pile of different devices that could consume e-texts, each running a different program displaying the content in a different way, and that didn’t even include the less traditional book-like devices that we discussed.

Everyone has different content consuming habits – no two people who I spoke to at FOOV watched video in quite the same way. Whether it was timeshifting/VOD versus traditional scheduled programming, or watching on the go, being wedded to high fidelity content or not caring, everyone had different criteria for their consumption needs. The more open the data provided the more of them can use it.

Monetisation

A lot of the topics we talked on touched on making money out of video. Ad-support and DRM locking are not the be all and end all of making money out of online content, although they are the two traditional ones. Outside of Sanctuary ‘honour’ systems with perks there must be other ways of doing it.

One other thing that came up about money was the different habits of paying that people have got into with different media. Physical storage still has the psychological lead when it comes for commanding high prices, with non-tangible data still not quite fitting in to many people’s minds as something that can possibly command as high a price. In many cases it doesn’t justify the prices, with the transport, storage and sale of media taking up a lot of the potential profit.

The prices that people will pay also vary a lot depending on the context. £6 for a piece of home computer software doesn’t seem all that much, but take the same software and charge that for the iPhone version then all of a sudden it seems pricier. The prices of online rentals/video downloads may be palatable for traditional televisions, but the same prices do not translate to smaller portable screens.

Fin.

If you’ve got this far, well done.