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Come join us! #socialTV meetup on Wednesday hosted by @ConstellationTV http://t.co/OUnqLfCw

prophecyboy — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 06:08:39 -0500

Come join us! #socialTV meetup on Wednesday hosted by @ConstellationTV http://t.co/OUnqLfCw

Inside FB on Orbitz 50 Faves: “really good at giving users the incentive to keep on playing...

prophecyboy — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:19:40 -0400

Inside FB on Orbitz 50 Faves: “really good at giving users the incentive to keep on playing and inviting more friends” http://t.co/l8tMPgG

Check out @adamjsimon’s blog post on the future of film: http://t.co/SJdhHtk

brendn — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 08:28:26 -0400

Check out @adamjsimon’s blog post on the future of film: http://t.co/SJdhHtk

The Future of Film

prophecyboy — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:00:05 -0400

A friend of mine was recently asked to be on a panel about the future of film for The Academy (yes, that one), and asked what I thought about where the industry was going in the next decade. Below are some of the thoughts which came spilling out once I got typing, in no particular order:

We’ll blur the lines between series of movies and series of television episodes pretty quickly. There will be a time when there is no meaningful distinction between the two.

The audience experience is going to become a lot more core to the creative process of filmmaking. We can’t assume that our audience is just watching a movie in a theater or on their TV anymore, and some of the most interesting work is going to come from incorporating the basics of user experience design into creating movies. This is already happening with 3D - we know that a viewer is having a different experience in a 3D theater versus their non-3D television set. And episodes from Mad Men’s next season will be 5 minutes longer on iTunes. But I fully expect different versions of a film to be “designed” for theatrical release, home viewing, mobile viewing, co-viewing, etc. It will be optimized for casual viewers, and will give true fans even more ways to give you their money.

On a much more extreme note, some people have been recently writing about client-side dynamic video assembly. Think of it like this: the news feed I see on Facebook doesn’t “exist” anywhere until I go to it. I log in and say “give me my news feed”, and it’s assembled (and refreshed) on the fly. Once I click away, that exact view of it ceases to exist. It’s dynamic, like all software is.

One day, video could be assembled the same way, based on an awareness of who the viewer is, where I’m watching, other viewer’s reactions to what they watched, etc. The way that Flipboard makes a dynamic “magazine” of content for me - one day we could have video experiences like that. The tools for this are being built today - tools that generate something that looks more like software for dynamically cutting video, rather than just the cut video itself. This is a side effect of every screen becoming a computer - they’ll all have the ability to run software.

I’ve been on a tear about “all media is becoming software” recently. It’s a thing I think a lot about.

The theatrical experience will get much more upscale and event focused. Theaters, too, will focus on the audience experience, getting fancier and more of them offering food and alcohol. And there will be more one-off special events, where you pay a premium to see something exclusive or hard to find. We’re close to a $100/person opening night for films, complete with after party and VIP section.

And theatrical windows will shrink. Most money is made in the first week anyway, so why not concentrate the audience into that time. Release a movie in theaters for a week, on a $25 ticket. The week after, rent it at home for $35. Then drop he price by $5/week until it hits zero, at which point it goes to Netflix. Something like that. There’s just so much media competing for attention, that if you don’t see it quickly, you probably won’t see it at all.

In the short-term, production budgets will shrink as the industry adapts to new business models, and then expand again as a new set of standard practices emerges. This will take a long time and cost a lot of people their jobs when they don’t adapt quickly enough. We’ve seen all this before, there are good notes to cheat from.
And if I’m right about all media becoming software, one day we won’t even have that, we’ll just have a “media” industry that produces “content,” for lack of a better word. But we’ll need a better word.

-Adam

Socialbomb at OSCon

mikedory — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:47:00 -0400

We in Socialbomb Engineering had the pleasure of going to O’Reilly’s OSCon (Open Source Convention) again this year, and as expected, it was a great collection of open-source concepts, experts, and goodies. We even heard it was the biggest OSCon yet, with over 3500 people registered!

Socialbombers Adam Parrish and myself, along with Socialbomb album Brendan Berg, gave a talk called Tornado: Scalable, Non-blocking Web Servers for Fun and Profit, in which we outlined the things that make Tornado such a fantastic framework and how folks could make use of it for their own development. The crowd was wonderful, and we got a great conversation going around the advantages and problems to using it in production.

We made a quick link-shortener program (live!) to demo Tornado’s power and simplicity, and if you’re curious, you can snag the code here. Thoughts, edits, and questions are welcome!

Adam also did a second session called Teaching Creative Writing with Python, in which he outlined the things he’s learned from the creative-writing-with-Python course he teaches at NYU ITP. Not only did the room seem to love it, it even got picked up in ReadWriteWeb!

If you were there, we’d love to hear your thoughts on these talks or any others you saw, so drop us a line!

-Mike

RT @adamjsimon: In advance of tonight’s meetup: The Second Screen is the Social Screen...

brendn — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 12:32:26 -0400

RT @adamjsimon: In advance of tonight’s meetup: The Second Screen is the Social Screen http://t.co/dABwNw8

Don’t forget to check out the August #socialTV meetup tonight with our guest @attractv....

brendn — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 17:07:37 -0400

Don’t forget to check out the August #socialTV meetup tonight with our guest @attractv. http://t.co/P2gmtzq

The Second Screen is the Social Screen

prophecyboy — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:12:00 -0400

At Socialbomb, we’ve worked on several different types of social TV apps, from sharing rich media related to time-shifted content in True Blood Live Feed, to co-viewing of live television in Skins Captionbomb. Unsurprisingly, all of our applications have been highly social - not just including a like button and a tweet button, but actually built from the ground up to integrate users’ friends and other viewers into the experience.

The 20th century involved, in some ways, a cultural shift toward getting accustomed to sitting in front of a screen. Whether it was a movie screen, our television or our computer, we spent a century learning how to sit in front of a glowing rectangle instead of a fire. And those rectangles became increasingly personal and interactive. The pull of time was toward lean-forward.

So far, the 21st century seems like it will be about learning to interact with multiple screens simultaneously, all of them personalized, all of them aware of each other. Today we’re starting with two screens, most commonly a smartphone and a television. You can imagine that, decades from now, when nearly every surface is a screen, this multi-screen literacy we’re developing will be a vital skill.

So how do we increase personalization? One way is with sensors, as we’ve seen each generation of smartphone become more and more aware of its context in the world. But that’s about it, not us. The way that we increase personalization for the user, right now, is social.

Our primitive lizard brains aren’t so equipped for modern technology. Subconsciously, we’ve developed a deep relationship between our friends and family, whom we use our smartphones to communicate with, and the phones themselves. Logically, that relationship extends to other things we do on our phones, and, combined with a cultural drive to bond over media, makes our second screens the ideal place to gather our friends and discuss the latest episode of Mad Men. We were doing this via text messages, emails, and tweets years before we had specialized apps for it, and we’ll continue to use those channels as long as they remain satisfying, often to the exclusion of any kind of official app.

There’s a lot of experimentation going on in the second screen space. No one’s nailed the experience so well that they’ve become a clear thought leader, let alone a market leader. It’s a question of what users want, what content owners can provide, and what technology makes possible. But the answer is most certainly social. It will look less like a DVD bonus disc with a like button, and more like a new software platform for social media, in the most “media” centric meaning of the term, providing deep integration of viewers into the content experience.

If you’re in NYC, come by our offices to talk about social media on the second screen at tonight’s SocialTV Meetup!

-Adam

RT @aparrish: hey check it out, there’s a readwriteweb post about my oscon talk on poetry and...

brendn — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 05:22:47 -0400

RT @aparrish: hey check it out, there’s a readwriteweb post about my oscon talk on poetry and programming: http://t.co/ddQb0nY

At #OSCON today? Check out the #Tornado panel hosted by bombers @mike_dory @aparrish and @socialbomb...

brendn — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:37:33 -0400

At #OSCON today? Check out the #Tornado panel hosted by bombers @mike_dory @aparrish and @socialbomb alum @brendn http://t.co/EwHDVuS

RT @adamjsimon: Just 1 week until the next #socialTV meetup. Come talk TV + social + mobile with...

brendn — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:20:57 -0400

RT @adamjsimon: Just 1 week until the next #socialTV meetup. Come talk TV + social + mobile with @socialbomb & @attractv!
http://t.co/ld …

RT @adamjsimon: Less than 2 weeks until the next #SocialTV meetup at SBHQ, with @attractv!...

brendn — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:10:11 -0400

RT @adamjsimon: Less than 2 weeks until the next #SocialTV meetup at SBHQ, with @attractv! http://t.co/ldfgEka

Socialbomb + BBDO + HBO win a CLIO for True Blood Live Feed!! http://t.co/CjyAP7f

brendn — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 12:31:39 -0400

Socialbomb + BBDO + HBO win a CLIO for True Blood Live Feed!! http://t.co/CjyAP7f

RT @adamjsimon: Live streaming the NYC Social TV Meetup here in 1/2 hour: http://t.co/4rfhOl1

brendn — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 04:42:27 -0400

RT @adamjsimon: Live streaming the NYC Social TV Meetup here in 1/2 hour: http://t.co/4rfhOl1

RT @adamjsimon: The NYC Social TV meetup is tomorrow! Come talk mobile + social + TV with...

brendn — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 06:20:29 -0400

RT @adamjsimon: The NYC Social TV meetup is tomorrow! Come talk mobile + social + TV with @Social_Guide & @socialbomb http://t.co/HZDVAWH

Just 1 week until the next Social TV meetup at SBHQ, starring Sean from @Social_Guide! Come talk TV!...

brendn — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:35:53 -0400

Just 1 week until the next Social TV meetup at SBHQ, starring Sean from @Social_Guide! Come talk TV! http://t.co/cCMjDDd

RT @johnchavens: #socialTV event continues. Some intriguing models esp from Adam @socialbomb. #pnid...

brendn — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 12:56:35 -0400

RT @johnchavens: #socialTV event continues. Some intriguing models esp from Adam @socialbomb. #pnid http://t.co/tBEfrYI

the bomb joins @social_guide @getglue @gomiso @playPHILO @tunerfish @facebook and others at...

brendn — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 11:56:56 -0400

the bomb joins @social_guide @getglue @gomiso @playPHILO @tunerfish @facebook and others at #TVGoesSocial

Just updated the SocialTV group with dates for the rest of the summer: http://t.co/OZV1Rvq

brendn — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:24:35 -0400

Just updated the SocialTV group with dates for the rest of the summer: http://t.co/OZV1Rvq

The next #SocialTV meetup is a week from today at @GetGlue’s swank new offices!...

brendn — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 14:26:40 -0400

The next #SocialTV meetup is a week from today at @GetGlue’s swank new offices! http://t.co/KABdIJy