Venkatarangan TNC

Digital Hollywood - Day Zero

DH Fall 2007 just started. The first session "Media, Entertainment and Social Change" talked about how Digital Film Making Tools helped the campaigners behind the "Darfur Now" movie to produce it. "Ted Braun" said how they are using the Community tools to spread the message through viral marketing (embed the original videos produced during the movie). Participant.net company's "Adrian Sexton" says their goal is to be make entertainment meets social action meets social media. For them using the community/social networking technology tools means not only making profit but action social awareness. Most of the Social causes sites and places are not engaging and compelling, they are largely inert communities and no entertainment proposition. People want to be in active communities and have entertainment as well. Good Philanthropy should also give good entertainment and they call "Social Action Network". There tenets are to "Connect, Collaborate, Engage, Activate" basically take part!.

I was pleased to know that the technology we feel is only for the urban elites are helping greatly in effecting a social change.

Few other points - YouTube has a new initiative "Broadcast your cause" where they give free cameras to community journalism, Al Gore has launched Current.com (2.0) Digg Like System for social causes sites, Kiva.com is about loans that change lives (based on Micro finance) and Clinton plugged it in Oprah on Sep 4, 2007 and they got more money they can give, MSN Messenger works with the IM donations model, Development of original multimedia content based upon community engagement in a subject area.

"We Make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give" - Winston Churchill

Mobile TV & Video: Content & Commerce: A movie clip was demoed by Motorola using Mobiclip player from Actimagine corp. Transpera demoed their solutions to connect multiple devices, multiple gateways, etc and also social community sharing features. MediaFlo (Nalco) shows their TV Experience in Mobile and channel surfing as fast as in tv and not battery draining, uses Qualcomm's nationwide 700Mhz spectrum. Actimagine says they expect the Nokia, Motorola & Windows Mobile Smartphone will be 400Million+ by next year. Choicestream talked about their personalized recommendation software. Verisign talked about their DNS Services, SSL, Mobile Messages (60% of world wide messages are routed through them) and they have more TELCO integration than anyone else. Fun Little movies demoed their family/kids/international friendly comedy in Sprint Mobile channel.

How do you make people watch the content they have already paid for, say by $100 per month for their cable connection
Internet has taught us that Media houses will have significant share, but the hockey stick long tail approach/inflexion point is user generated content
Discussions on whether content programming (like what they cable networks do) is important or not. Or is only the content producers (professional or user) important
In the question hour I talked about how in India people wait for 5-10 minutes to download a paid content; it is about empowering people who don't have access to content (connecting the unconnected)
There was another question - In TV advertisements happen because it was free; why will we watch advertisements while we pay for Mobile. It was answered as the same scenario that happened 10 years back - why see advertisements while we pay for ISP for internet, why we watch advertisements in TV while we pay for cable.