Multi Screen Content

Now that we know that the battle of the screens isnt a battle anymore, how is life for people who create content is changing?

Creating multi-screen content has been a discussion for quite some time. We all realise that it is much more than just the screen formats or the quality/ resolution of the picture that differentiates the content on these 3 screens. But what we have very little of is the understanding of how audio visual content consumption differs on these 3 screens.

We can have a point of view on what type of content is better suited for mobiles consumption versus big TV screens. The obvious conclusions, my fear is, might be simlistic and around duration of the content. Bite or snack sized consumption versus feature length viewing, etc. But what happens when the first “direct to mobile” movie is released? The phenomenon obviously is a response to not just video consumption on mobile, but a certain type of consumption on mobile. There would also be obvious points of on big screen versus small screen versus very very small screen viewing. The bigger the screen, the better the detail and impact of visual effects.

Would there be any other differences apart from that? Or are we in a position to answer the question of “What type of stories are better told on one screen versus the other”?  Answers that would help us create content specifically for consumption on a certain type of screen?

Does somene has access to online video data, mobile video consumption data, and set-top box data for us to be able to do some analyses? Or any interesting insights to share? Please leave your comments.

Geo-tagged content

The term “collaborative productions” is perhaps en-route to take over the hype of user-generated content. Not to suggest that the pure user generated content would completely lose its appeal, but I think the productions of the modern day TV world are set to take that element of a viewer or user’s ability to generate content to the next level. Reality TV such as Pop Idol and Big Brother are examples of such collaborative content anyway. But here is a completely retro twist to this!

For their upcoming album “Brotherhood”, Chemical Brothers have asked fans to submit short video clips of 2 to 20 seconds, or photographs that celebrate “insanity that goes on at the stoke of midnitght”. They would use this content to create a montage video with footage from around the world, except, this footage would be “geo-tagged”. The footage is to be submitted to Google Earth via the chemical brothers’ website, and all the submitted clips would be shown on Google Earth and Youtube channels on September the 1st. Can you get more collaborative, high-tech, and global than that in production in this day and age?

Not entirely a collaborative production, but here is another piece of content that BBC recently produced called Britain from Above. The producers used all sorts of technology to show a different view to “Britain”. There is perhaps all of us living in the UK in this programme somewhere! Go spot yourself!

Areas of Development in TV

Within the business of television, there are areas that have been tremendously affected by the advancement in technology. If we break down the business in certain areas, we can study the impact and nature of the technological advancement in each of those. This will also make it easier to guage the impact of those advacements on our business. Areas that can be significantly categorised, for this purpose, include:

• Production
• Delivery
• Reception

In addition to the above, there is an artisan or creative side of the TV business that stands to be affected by the technological advancement in each of the above areas. That is the area of “creation of content”. Over the years, though, this area has developed more “creatively” than it has “technologically”.  It will, however, be interesting to see how the new developments like YouTube are affecting the creation of content.

I will classify all my posts in the above sections for the ease of organising thoughts, and of course to make the blog easier to access and read.