This past Saturday night I watched the future of “television” .. at least in the form that I personally believe to be the direction that the format is headed. It all started with a twitter post, and ended up with me staying up late at night watching a live stream of Wilco playing at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago.
After a day full of the usual weekend responsiblities, I was kicking back ready to watch a baseball game and reading through current tweets. The following message from someone with the handle ATTBlueroom (I’m sure it is someone who serves in a Community Manager role) caught my attention, “Broken Social Scene and Wilco are up next on tonight’s Lolla webcast.” I am a huge fan of the band Wilco, so I got very excited to log on and check it out.
What I experienced made me realize that the famed “convergence” of television and internet that has been spoken about since the early dotcom days is upon us. The stream was flawless on my dsl connection and all I wish was that I had a better sound system on the computer so that the full music quality could have been experienced.
The added feature of communicating with others via Twitter while simultaneously watching the show only added to the excitement. Actually attending the event in person would be the only better shared experience.
Some observations:
- Apple TV and other web connected television appliances are going to explode on the scene shortly as the next big consumer appliance
- Using Twitter as a way to announce programming is a must for any broadcast channel
- ATTBlueroom actually needs to do a better job of monitoring the conversation to interact with viewers. I had two people directly state that they were having trouble with the feed and it would have been a perfect opportunity for some direct company involvement (Contact me if you want to talk about my ideas!)
- I suspect that the issues were due to only having the option of Windows Media Player as the format for the stream, and possibly it would serve to have a variety of options based upon the users preferences.
- Television plus Twitter (or another communication platform – gaming consoles allow for actual conversation) for live events is going to be an integrated part of the viewing experience. It will be important to allow the viewer to directly compartmentalize the communication being received however. Non-relevant tweets during the broadcast would detract in some cases, which leads to more sorting of conversations into silos along with a search (track) functionality.
This is making me reevaluate the silo interface of TweetDeck, which just needs to become more stable at this point. - Sporting Events, Concerts, Award Shows, Political Debates … any event that is being broadcast where interaction with others in real time adds to the experience will benefit from this convergence.
- It’s still unclear how the entire monetization strategy will work in these live events. They could have interjected lower third promotional messages or sponsorship logos without harming the quality, but I believe that branding messages will need to be more subtle to be acceptable.
Wilco demonstrated why I believe they are the best band in the land right now. The AT&T Blue Room broadcast was very well done in terms of production, while needing some assistance in the community interaction area.
I was extremely glad to have been part of the event, and wanted a big encore from the band as they left the stage. I know we’ll see more of them and more of these types of events down the road though.
