Don’t know what a flame war is? Not voting for you.

It’s so obvious when you talk to, or watch the actions of someone who’s taking web comments too seriously. Typically these people don’t post very much, keep posting but ignore their fans and therefore never grow their audience, or worse, they get defensive in the face of all the criticism and just keep feeding the “haters.” I’ve seen all three scenarios play out in one way or another over different platforms, and in every case the ones who prevail are well-adjusted people who can take the heat and still keep doing what they’re doing, grow an audience and a swell of public support, and see their work be crafted into something even better. I love it, for instance, when iJustine makes fun of her hates all over her comments section, allowing horrible comments to sit at the top of her videos so everyone can see her ALL-CAPS SARCASTIC RESPONSES.

Not to say that it’s easy to keep your distance from the hate. It gets even harder when all that vitriol spills from one social platform to another, catching more people along the way who either really believe in the contrary point of view or are just in it for the lulz, and creating a real trend of people, who really believe in what they’re saying and are very vocal about it, but do not in any way represent the opinions of the majority of people on a particular issue. After all, the vast majority of people who watch a video or read an article or a blog post do not leave a comment at all.

Lately I’ve realized, as social media increasingly plays an important role in capturing the news cycle, this idea applies to people in public office. Some people get it: Mayor Corey Booker of Newark talked to Jon Stewart about his active and productive Twitter handle the other day, and how he deals with the usual hate. But damn is it frustrating when others in similar offices prefer to use the position of the vocal minority to justify what, to a statistical majority, just doesn’t make sense.

I don’t mean to blanket-label a vocal minority or say one side “isn’t doing enough.” I’m just remarking broadly how public policy is now being crafted on the groundswell of a social- and traditional-media message that is, by definition, easily manipulated by anyone with enough Twitter/Facebook followers, or anyone who news organizations deem worthy to listen to. You could argue that this is how Obama was elected by a younger, more-techno-savvy group of voters, while the older white men who voted for Romney could never take control of the media narrative unless Obama made a misstep like the first debate. I think you can apply this logic to the level of party platforms too. Thomas Feidman’s NYT column today talks about a GOP base who “denies global warming after Hurricane Sandy and refuses to ban assault weapons after Sandy Hook — a base that would rather see every American’s taxes rise rather than increase taxes on millionaires.” And I’m left wondering…who are these people? Surely they exist, but surely the over 50% of Americans who voted for Barry O disagree.

The solution here is NOT to have Obama-supporters take to the internet and demand anything – that’s just going to force opponents to become more defensive, hold their ground more passionately, and create more gridlock (a.k.a…it’ll start a flame war). The solution is for all of us to learn to read your comments section and understand that even when the haters comment, they still watched your video. And they’ll probably even come back and watch more.

Interactive games are making football the most-watched sport

While ratings for every network get lower and lower, Sunday football ratings continue to be the anomaly, gaining viewership and fans faster than Bieber. People are throwing around lot of reasons why: the game is better, it’s become America’s past time ( I wholeheartedly disagree), ESPN and other 24-hour sports networks make the stakes higher. But none of these address the fact that ratings are continuously falling for the 162-game baseball season (where fewer steroids and more Moneyball led this year to arguably the best game of baseball ever played) and the 82-game NBA season (despite the players being rockstars and reality-show fodder). Meanwhile, MLS (34 games in one season) and NASCAR (36 races in the Sprint cup) attendance and TV ratings have also never been higher.

Without any consideration for the quality of game play in any of these sports, one thing is clear: sports with shorter seasons with fewer games are doing better on television. That’s because if there’s one thing we know still works on TV, it’s huge events that take over public consciousness and drive tune-in, from the season finale of LOST to this year’s premiere of Two And A Half Men, to that age-old ratings juggernaut: the Super Bowl (in fact, those events are doing better than ever thanks to the echo chamber of social media). The NFL season is perfectly scheduled to take advantage of that event status, while also adding a dash of routine. Every Fall Sunday is football day, no doubt, and we only get 16 of those so we better take advantage while we can. The major networks play up the drama, reminding us that every single game has playoff implications, and if we miss one moment we could be lost in a sea of meaningless plays. Monday at work, if you’ve missed the highlights from yesterday, good luck with the small talk.

What makes NFL stand out from the pack of short-season sports and get even larger ratings than the others is the millions of people around the country who are currently playing a game while they’re doing it. Fantasy football, now easier to play than ever thanks to numerous websites that do all the math and the drafting and trading for you, gives audiences an excuse to be invested in every moment of every game, because every extra yard a player runs or throws and every extra tackle could be the difference between winning and losing your office/family/friend/enemy pool. We’ve game-ified the experience of watching football, creating a structure around the flow of information about NFL that lasts throughout the week and culminates with games on Sunday. And the preferred way to get that information in real-time? Watch it happen on TV.

The interactive experience gives audiences a personal investment in what’s happening in the NFL every week; it’s not just Ravens vs. Jets, it’s me vs. my boss. That means audiences have an even more intense personal relationship with what’s happening on screen, adding to the event status that the NFL has already carefully cultivated. For all the talk of how interactive experiences are eroding TV viewership, fantasy football is the shining example of how interactivity can be additive to the TV experience, both in terms of audience size and emotional impact. One tackle could mean the difference between winning or losing for the at-home player; that’s a big deal.

No longer can the NFL fan be satisfied watching one game at a time, or even a Red Zone channel that cuts between key moments. When a fantasy football player has different players from different teams playing in different games simultaneously, the only thing that will work is a multi-screen setup so as not to miss a single second of any game. At the hub of all of this is the tablet or laptop, perched within arms reach and constantly refreshing the player’s game for the week in real time. It’s like we’re all playing a day-long game of Call of Duty, with our fantasy football provider of choice as the controller. There’s even a cult of masculinity around the creation of the perfect watching experience; I’ve already planned my man-cave for that inevitable time when there is a lady living with me.

The next question of course is how we can use this model and bring it to narrative TV programs. Imagine a hypothetical project where users become invested enough in an extra-filmic game that they had to watch every episode the moment it aired, and where small pieces of narrative information were carefully released by the show’s writers so as to affect the game in perfectly calculated ways. That’s true power, and true entertainment.

Bob Galvin in his prime

I was upset to hear of the passing of Robert Galvin, the longtime CEO of Motorola and a man I was lucky enough to spend a day with in 2006 (a story for another post). But even in death, he’s inspiring some ideas: I didn’t realize Motorola Mobility, yes that half of the company, doesn’t just make phones. They also make the box my cable company gives me and millions of others to connect to our televisions.

In all the analyses I read about the proposed Google acquisition of MM, most focused on patents (they were on a patent purchasing spree after all). But with this week’s announcement of the new YouTube channels, along with a revamped GoogleTV, no doubt Google is also after an efficient way to get GoogleTV into all of our homes.

It’d be a welcome addition. I’m a recent adopter of VOD, and while I’m impressed with the amount of content available (I never have to DVR almost anything!), my fingers are doing a ton of work to get there – it takes about 10 clicks to get to an episode I want, and that includes a step asking if I want to watch in SD or HD (what is this, 2010?). It sounds like a dream: a new Google interface, with a specially designed remote and hey, maybe even some integration with Android phones and tablets a la my Apple TV and iPad. And of course, I’d love an easy way to watch some of the new YT channel content on my widescreen.

When it comes to engagement, or a show’s ability to command attention from viewers, “Ted” (3.4 million viewers) trumps “Idol” (average viewership of 50 million across two shows each week). According to Nielsen IAG, the most “engaging” show on TV is ABC’s “Lost,” followed by “The Middle,” also on the Disney network. Tied for third this season, as of April 19, are ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters”; NBC’s “Chuck”; ABC’s “Desperate Housewives”; NBC’s “Heroes”; and CBS’s “Rules of Engagement” and “The Amazing Race.” Rounding out the list are Fox’s “24,” ABC’s “Ted,” NBC’s “Parenthood,” and CBS’s “Survivor” and “The Big Bang Theory.”

What do these shows all have in common?

1. Only TWO are unscripted (The Amazing Race, Survivor)
2. At least three have rabid, if small fan followings (Lost, Chuck, Heroes, 24). I’d argue you could add B&S, Desperate Housewives, and Parenthood to this list, if the fans are given a chance to show it (as Chuck fans did when their show was about to be canceled)
3. Only TWO are ending their first season (Parenthood, Rules of Engagement)

I want to see someone analyze the narrative elements of each of these shows, to see if there’s any overlap. For instance, Survivor and The Amazing Race are fairly similar in that they involve ordinary people in extraordinary situations, with interpersonal relationships stressed as a narrative device to keep the show engaging (think Survivor strategies and the way the producers paint a hero and a villain, and think of the dramatic pairings in Amazing Race). 24, Lost, Chuck, and Heroes all have a big online fanbase (Lost and Heroes in particular, of course), and their narratives have often been described as video-game-like (well, not Chuck, but there’s an argument there, especially in more recent seasons when he’s a legit spy). I think that narrative structure encourages engagement, as it asks the audience questions and then lets them sink in for months, even years before giving what might be considered an answer.

Of course my immediate follow up question is how engagement changes on each of these shows when watched online. While we’re at it, what are the most engaging original web shows or videos?

As a side note, I for one am depressed impressed The Office isn’t on there, with its Dunder Mifflin Infinity, huge fan following, and constant line-referencing in pop culture.

We'll do it, live.

I still find it impressive how much the internet has changed the focus of our communication to real-time, current, relevant information, shrinking the news cycle and creating massive events around happenings that once might have only been a blip on our collective radar. Even if these new real-time events only last a few hours, they draw more people, in terms of viewership or attendance, than just about anything else. I’m talking about current news events, but also live cultural events, like live sports, concerts, or variety shows – say what you want about NBC, but Sunday Night Football is still the highest rated show on broadcast TV, every year (yes, even bigger than Idol), to say nothing of the Olympics. And, no shock, ratings for live broadcasts of awards shows like the Emmys and Oscars have gone up in recent years, as the networks have stopped time-shifting and started showing them at 5p Pacific time.

More impressive still is that the web, the birthplace of relevance in the 21st Century, has been so slow to catch on to this in a big way, with original programming. Time and again we’ve seen live events draw huge crowds online – from the NCAA Tournament on cbs.com every year, to CNN’s live streams of big speeches and events, to YouTube’s U2 live stream from the Rose Bowl, and most recently YouTube’s massive success (outside the US) in streaming IPL cricket matches. There are so few live offerings though, likely due to networks’ hesitance to make digital deals based on the widely accepted but completely unsupported notion that anything simulcast on the web will cannibalize regular TV audiences. After the IPL success, YouTube is doubling its efforts to find live programming, but who knows how long those deals will take.

I have a solution: let’s make some original live content, only on the web. There are a few shows trying this already, with varying success, like the Streamys, but we’ve yet to see a recurring show based around live broadcasts on the web. Even Diggnation, a show completely based on relevant links from Digg, isn’t live.

Stop begging for respect in the digital space and start making cool stuff.

At last year’s Streamy Awards, everything felt new and exciting, if a bit self-serving. The first annual awards were a chance for a burgeoning group of starry-eyed creators to gather in meatspace for the first time and acknowledge that yeah, we’re all doing this, and yeah, we’re onto something here. During the show, the in-jokes were plentiful and awards were rightly doled out to the independent pioneers of the space, shows that gave us aesthetic guidance and the beginnings of business models, and to the few members of mainstream Hollywood who we called our own. We patted each other on the back, packed into an after party, and the mainstream industry started to take notice. Year One: Mission Accomplished.

This year, I walked away from the awards feeling frustrated, and a little annoyed. In their sophomore year, the awards featured high production value content from major studios, shows that had better viewership than a lot of cable TV programs, and a whole lot more legit celebrities. Let’s be honest: from business models to aesthetics, web TV is beginning to tentatively find its stride. Many of this years’ Streamy nominees are making a decent living creating and maintaining interesting scripted and non-scripted content on the web. Big media companies and big brands are investing in this space more and more every day. We are beyond the self-deprecation and the simple short narratives, and we need to identify and reward the individuals who are making actual progress toward the new, sustainable business models and progressive aesthetics that interactive platforms allow. That’s what I thought the Streamys were supposed to do.

It’s frustrating that IAWTV Chairman Michael Wayne clearly agrees with me, given his remarks last night, but the votes and the general tone of the show didn’t reflect it. I think the IAWTV and the Streamys need to take a good look at their goals and focus themselves and their membership on achieving them. The fact the show exists is a huge, important step; we celebrated that in year one. But an awards show is supposed to recognize achievement in artistic endeavors in order to force content creators to take risks in their work and push the medium to new aesthetic heights and practical/business models. Right now, the Streamy Awards is still caught up in its mere existence, and that’s a reflection of all web TV in general. That was amazing last year. We need to get over it.

Rather than honor achievement, this years’ Streamys added an endless stream (pun!) of categories to make sure every YouTuber, vlogger, category, sub-category, genre, and sub-genre had a chance to be featured (Kevin Pollak: “in Hollywood, guest starring on a web series is the new jury duty.” So why do we give an award for it??). They gave top honors to non-narrative series Between Two Ferns. People continued to poke fun at themselves with jokes about not having money, not being able to find “real” work and thus turning to the web, and the small audiences they’re expecting. That sounds really disingenuous when it’s coming from Mark Gantt, whose much-honored series The Bannen Way was financed by Sony and featured recognizable faces. I don’t feel bad that you had to work hard and struggle to sell your show to a big media company. It takes hard work to sell a regular TV show too.

If the Streamy Awards is going to be the Oscars of Web TV, it needs to recognize true talent, true artistry, and true innovation in the web space. In conversations last night, I compared it to the Academy Awards: there may have been 10 nominees for Best Picture this year, but each of them had audiences and critics talking about them as inspirational artistic endeavors. There were amazing movies that were not nominated for an Academy Award this year – that doesn’t mean The Hangover wasn’t fantastic, but it should be honored at a different awards show (the Golden Globes perhaps). As much as I love Between Two Ferns, did it expertly weave a storyline around a brand in the way Easy to Assemble did? Did it refine the web romantic comedy the way Wainy Days might have? No. And I watch every episode of Auto Tune the News, but does it directly call into question the traditional media system in a way unique to the web, like The Tomorrow Show does?

With the onslaught of criticism this year’s show is receiving, even from within the community, I’m confident next year’s show will be better focused, better run, and more reflective of where the web TV space wants to be rather than where it is. I think IAWTV members (I am not one, yet) are waking up this morning and realizing “that was kind of my fault.” Maybe. Good news is, that means we can fix it.

If I tap here, we get to see a video of the bush burning and play the slapping game

With the hype dying down, TechCrunch recently published a great article detailing what could be an actual potential use for an iPad (a device that otherwise just seems like a great tablet computer without an operating system). It’s true – a device like this could be a new frontier for interactive storytelling, if only because there is finally an interface that will make it as easy to read/watch/experience an interactive multimedia story as it is to page through the morning paper or a good novel.

It’s often clunky and downright annoying to use a mouse to navigate through a longer interactive creative work, be it a story, script, graphic novel, or just a DVD. It takes about 45 minutes for a user to get all the way through my thesis, a fact I was not proud of when I tried to explain to my parents how easy it would be for them to read and understand it. This gets even worse when any of the media involved in the interactive story should be viewed with a 10-foot experience, on a television or other larger screen; how often do you want to throw your remote at the TV when it doesn’t scroll to the correct button?

That’s where a huge, responsive touchscreen, seamlessly integrated with a television, could come in handy. Imagine being able to combine the 10-foot experience with a more intimate storytelling experience. Viewer/users could watch a television show on TV and have an iPad automatically present context-relevant links, in real time. Want to dig deeper into a side character’s momentary appearance on camera? Wait until the commercial, then tap a link on your iPad and watch a short video, read a graphic novel or a short story, or play a casual game on the web that gives you even more narrative. The interface allows for an easy way to add an entire dimension to a visual narrative, a level of depth that previously only existed when users moved from TV to computer, or watched/experienced the entire narrative on a computer screen.

It’d be foolish not to touch on how beneficial this could be advertisers, with context-relevant links able to be presented to viewer/users as they watch a product integrated into a TV or web show. Interactive narratives using a well-designed interface could take a step out of the process from ad watching to product purchasing.

There’s more good news: the perfect software already exists to make this happen, and easily: it’s called Sophie. Sophie finishes a natural progression for its creator, Bob Stein, who was one of the first people to look at a video playing on the same page as text (at the MIT Architecture Machine Lab, the same people who brought us black text on white backgrounds on computers…that’s not a joke), and see the potential for a new form of communication. His first crack at the seamless integration of video with text became the Criterion Collection, which at its genesis essentially served as a model for DVDs and Blu-Rays today. Early Criterion titles included on their LaserDiscs scholarly essays with specific references to the films, and being able to play those clips as the reader went through the argument was a massive innovation in the early ’90s.

That was a mere drop in the hat compared to what Sophie intends to do. Stein now runs the Institute for the Future of the Book (among other things), and their Sophie project aims to make it relatively easy to create what are most easily described as interactive books; works that utilize multiple media and interactivity alongside text in order to get their point across.

My hope is that someone is already hard at work on a Sophie Reader for the iPad (you can get started making one now, Sophie is open source). I want to see the day when I can read a story on my iPad, then tap a link to start a context-relevant video playing on my TV; while I’m watching that, I can chat with other fans in the online community, then seamlessly go back to reference the text when something amazing happens on the TV. And after the TV episode is over, it can point me to more online videos and texts that can further immerse me in the narrative.

And as TechCrunch points out, that experience is something to pay for.

After this is settled, I'm going to Disneyland

Information is power. The democratized web has given the public access to more information than ever before, and they’ve taken advantage of it, showing big media companies and politicians that the public can still have control over their systems, much to the big guys’ dismay. With that in mind, net neutrality is a no-brainer – why would we ever want to stifle innovation, kill creativity, and generally screw over the little guys who’ve defined the web? Why would we want to consolidate throttling power in the hands of ISPs, when we’ve seen what happens when we give control of our communication pipes to AT&T?

But, much to my dismay, there are actually a lot of (non-evil, non-monetary) benefits to a non-neutral web, especially to people who want to see robust interactive and video content served over these pipes (despite what Tubefilter might write). The hardware and software of the web runs into frustrating limitations when there’s a limited amount of bandwidth to be distributed equally to everyone. “Everyone” includes web video producers, who rightly need more bandwidth, and bloggers, who rightly need less. Mark Cuban put it well yesterday:

…in a net neutrality environment no bits get priority over any other bits. All bits are equal…When that happens, bits collide. When bits collide they slow down. Sometimes they dont reach their destination and need to be retransmitted. Often they dont make it at all. When video bits dont arrive to their destination in a timely manner, internet video consumers get an experience that is worse than what traditional tv distribution options.

We can’t have our cake and eat it too. We can’t argue that we want to web to be neutral to allow for innovation and cultural progress, but then desperately need more than our equally distributed share of the web in order for our art form to progress. But do we really have to surrender our rights for the good of artistic innovation? We did that once, and boy has that one come back to haunt us…

I’m just wondering if there isn’t a third path here, an alternative that makes it so we don’t allow huge corporations to unfairly and disproportionately benefit from a non-neutral web, but still allows us to take fuller advantage of limited technology. Should we make a third-party, unaffiliated entity that oversees connection throttling, the UN of the web? Or could someone design a program for the infrastructure of the network that will monitor broadband usage and adjust limits accordingly? Is that even possible?

It's good to be the king

With this week’s announcement of NBC falling under the same corporate umbrella as NBCU’s cable empire (Bravo, Syfy, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, the list goes on…), broadcast television is dead. Where there has always been a dotted line between the profits of the NBCU cable empire and the losses of NBC Entertainment, there’s now also a dotted line between their content production divisions. How long will it be until Universal Cable Productions folds into Universal Media Studios? I’ll set the O/U at a year. Then, the only thing differentiating NBC from its cable counterparts will be its news division (which, by the way, is already branded as MSNBC…the name of the cable channel. Try going to http://www.nbcnews.com).

And yet, the broadcast model of ad-supported media is as strong as ever and is poised to become even stronger as it becomes fragmented and attached to content. It’s not news that advertisers have generally become more content-focused as they’ve invested in digital content, whether it’s Nestea’s investment in CTRL or Microsoft’s sponsorship of The Guild. It’s almost a throwback to the birth of TV: the Colgate Comedy Hour, Texaco Star Theatre.

The difference now is content comes with a distribution outlet attached to it (you know, the medium is the message and all that). Digital content is increasingly becoming aesthetically tied to the medium in which it’s being presented. Not every web show is meant to live on YouTube or Hulu; some are better viewed on iTunes or through Xbox Live, or even in their own complex interactive environments. On top of that, it’s become clear that for a show to be attractive to sponsors, producers are being held responsible for protecting the way brands are presented by ensuring the brand message isn’t diluted or otherwise changed by anything around it. In other words, if your show is sponsored by Kodak, you can’t put it on YouTube for fear their algorithm serves a Fuji ad right next to it. The solution? Create your own site to distribute your content, a site you can design to be Kodak-branded. This is still the broadcast model for media, it’s just fragmented. Today, creating a web show can be likened to starting your very own network. Which means you can sell your very own ad inventory.

On top of that, you’re free on the web to do something TV producers would only die for: you can take your existing content or create new content related to your main show/network and sell it to other people at the same time! Premium content centers like YouTube, Hulu, and blip.tv have huge user bases to tap into and distribution deals with platforms you might not have made agreements with. Think of these guys as the CBS/ABC/NBC/Fox of the digital world – places that don’t produce content themselves necessarily, but sell advertising around acquired content. They’ll increase the reach of your content and can drive traffic back to your main site for your advertisers. So you can sell or just post for free smaller pieces of your content to these major content centers, almost as marketing for your own network. If it’s a hit, the big guys make money, you as a producer make money, and your sponsoring brand makes money as traffic is driven back to your site.

So the broadcast model might be dead on television, but it’s essentially just gaining an extra dimension online with the ability for content creators to create and own their distribution channels. We’ll see the standard licensing model applied to the big guys, as it was to the four major broadcast networks. But the smaller networks focused on single shows will be able to take advantage of their control of their distribution and make another revenue stream out of it.