I had written about how social media really enables what Marshall McLuhan envisaged as ‘global village’, last year. As a continuation, there’s something interesting happening here.
Imagine you are in a cinema theater with a lot of your friends. If you’re my type, you would ‘Sssshhhhhh’ the person next to you if they spoke while you are watching the film, but that’s just me.
Even I do something interesting these days, at least when watching a cricket match. A new word has been coined for this act – Twicketing. It is nothing but being active on twitter, while watching a cricket match. So, what we end up doing is that we attend to two things – watching the match and sharing our thoughts + reading others’ thoughts about the match, on twitter. But, thankfully, it is not as intrusive as talking while watching something. Like most-things-internet, this is a selective activity. I could be sitting with 10 more friends in my living room and could be actively discussing what I’m watching with 100 other friends on Twitter, without bothering the others in the room!
In a way, Twitter expands the size of your living room and the size is limited only by the number of people active on your Twitter timeline.
This goes against all kinds of conventions. We were supposed to concentrate on the thing running in the name of broadcast, but we are happily chatting with our friends, virtually, about the thing being broadcast. We believe this gives us more happiness and helps us enjoy whatever we’re watching even better. And to some extent, at least in case of cricket – I don’t know about a film – it seems to be working quite well!
What does this mean for broadcasters?
For broadcasters who own rights to a live event (such as sports, opening/closing ceremonies, award ceremonies etc.), this is a goldmine. They are now able to significantly expand their audience in massive multiples and also get an opportunity to drive or take part in the conversation that ensues during the airing of the event.
For broadcasters who plan to air canned programs (like television serials, for instance), there is a wonderful opportunity to engage with audiences acorss 2 screens/modes – one, the program itself and two, through conversations that could perhaps be seeded by the program owner/broadcaster. Think of it like a YouTube screen with a live chat window below it.
In a way, this could also be utilized by speakers. But, by expanding your audience through a screen full of twitter users, next to the live audience, you perhaps are adding a lot of unpredictability to your own content. I suppose relatively anonymous people on twitter could be a lot more vocal and active compared to live audience. You also would need a method to handle the madness and steer your speech based on some parameters, but by involving the conversations happening virtually.
This ambient virtual presence seems counter-intuitive to conventional wisdom, but if you go by how we have consumed recent events like the Academy Award ceremony and the ongoing Cricket World Cup…or even episodes of Lost or Dexter sometime ago, this is perhaps the new norm. Broadcasters have a couple of choices – they could completely ignore the conversations happening live; or, they could adapt two different things – their outreach and their content, appropriately, to incorporate the conversations and let it enhance audiences’ consumption of your content.
Adapting outreach would be an outwardly exercise removed from the content. It is giving a voice and character to the narrator from the broadcaster’s/content owner’s side and let it engage with viewers during the airing of the program. Adapting the content itself is a deeper level of change – it would also mean you need to make inherent changes to your content, like how James Cameron envisaged Avatar as a 3D format film (Sorry Ebert!) from scratch…and not like how ‘Clash of the Titans’ used 3D as an after-thought and ended up adding only a sorry 3rd dimension. The former is a easier, intermediate step, but the latter could be ground-breaking, if handled intelligently.
Title inspiration…with apologies to Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez.
Pic courtesy, Jimmy’s Classic Drive-in via Flickr.