Monday, February 18, 2008

TV and Second Life

The main objective of the project I am working on with my group is to show the potential of virtual worlds like Second Life in enhancing the future the TV industry. I recently found one article from the New York Times, which, ithink, could be the fundamental framework of our project. I though it may be beneficial to share it with you guys.

Just in case you don’t have time to read it all, here are some excerpts:

if the wildest dreams of some very excited technology developers come true,
virtual reality might finally be the medium that unites the passive experience
of watching television with the interactive potential of the Web.

As broadcasters and media companies have entered virtual spaces, among the
earliest content they have provided residents has been, not surprisingly, television programming, which inhabitants can watch on two-dimensional movie and television screens that appear throughout the world. “It’s obvious, but it gets fun,” said Sibley Verbeck, the chief executive of the Electric Sheep Company, which creates programs and content for virtual worlds. “It starts being a more social experience.”

At minimum broadcasters want a presence in these virtual worlds because they
know that significant numbers of their viewers are already visiting them. “We
have to take our content to the community,” Mr. Smith of CBS said. “We have to
take it where the users are already.”

Additionally television programmers see the games and social activities within
their online communities as an opportunity for viewers — whether they are
designing and selling their own fashion lines on Virtual Laguna Beach or
building and wrecking cars on Virtual Pimp My Ride — to continue to engage with
their brands long after the shows themselves are over.


The proprietors of these worlds say this freedom has profoundly altered the way their users experience the medium of television. “Television has created a public opinion that we are mostly consumers and not very creative,” said Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Lab, whose company started Second Life in 2003. “But that’s simply an artifact of the technology of television. If people
are given the ability to co-create, to make something using the pieces and parts
of media, they will do it.”

2 comments:

West said...

Will this exist as its own form? Will it coincide with TV? What are going to be the rules of this new medium?

Jhih-Syuan Lin said...

Fandom cultivation is always important for TV networks in terms of its brand equity. Before TV go virtually, it has been a while that TV networks use TV Websites as a tool to transform general viewers to fans by using interactive features.

The term "Enhanced TV" is therefore defined as "the use of Internet features for enhancing the viewing experience of TV viewers" (Ha, 2002, p. 236). It helps to convert previously relatively detached TV viewers to enthusiastic viewers. These fans are viewed as better consumers for TV networks due to the value to advertisers.

Researchers have studied the TV Website feature usage as a predictor of viewer loyalty, subscriber loyalty, purchase intention, etc. Ha and Chan-Olmsted (2004) stated that these features are "indicative of nature and degree of the potential demand for interactive television" (p. 622).

Can I say the fast-growing virtual world phenomenon somehow has delayed the dream of interactive TV to come true? However, the virtual world definitely fulfills the development of cross-media use in the age of media convergence.

Hopefully our group project can add the value to TV networks which have or haven't enter virtual world. Here is an article Ryan found, TV in SL Update, which shows some successful example of TV in SL.

References:
Ha, L. (2002). Enhanced television strategy models: A study of television Web sites. Internet Research: Electronic Applications and Policy, 12(3), 235-247
Ha, L., & Chan-Olmsted, S. (2004). Cross-media use in electronic media: The role of cable television Web sites in cable television network branding and viewership. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 48(4), 620-645