simondelliott

CCTV posters, look at them through media eyes.

This poster reads “A bomb won’t go off here because weeks before a shopper reported somone studying the CCTV camerars”.

This poster has been made by a professional media company, and has been placed in public places throughtout Britian. The chosen image is deliberatly amature and familiar so that you the viewer will engage with it. Quite simply it feels like you are in the image, doing an every day thing. The CCTV camera and the lamp post have an equal placement in the photo. Both objects are shown as depicted as benevolent helpers to our society. This poster is designed to invoke an emotional reaction. You look at the picture, not noticing the physical environment. Then as you read the text you realise that our society is at risk, and you feel fear, then as the cerebral message is delivered you realise that its safe because of CCTV … phew!

This poster reads “Secure beneth watchfull eyes”. Again this poster is very clever. The image shows an eye with the london transport logo in it floating above a typical london city scape. The design is in the style of art deco and suggests some kind of modern shiney metroland. The floating right eyes hover over us like friendly flying saucers.

Whether you believe CCTV is a natural progression for the bureaucratic need to protect our society from groups that have marginal interests or a state sponsored invasion of privacy is not important. What is clear is that state funded organizations are spending considerable money trying to show you that CCTV is being deployed to make you safe.

TV is Dead Long live the Stream!

Have any of you tried to use the internet in the UK around 20:00 in the evening?
Did you notice that the under 20 demographic dont discuss TV shows any more?
What do you think people are using the iPhone 3G’s to do ?

If you work for an ISP you may have access to the bandwidth usage metrics, and if you have seen them (as I have) you will notice that people are seriously into the iPlayer. The basic consumer TV behavior of settling into a TV programme is still there but the method of programme selection and distribution is totally different.

If you work for a telco and you dont manage to get your existing TV audience into the new streaming delivery then you will loose it to your competitors. As someone who has spent the last 15 years working in TV I dearly want this to not be true, but the tide has changed?

Olympic media consumption

The BBC iPlayer is currently serving 5,000,000 streams per day to just UK residents and the uptake is increasing 3 times faster expected.  

The Olympic marketing fact file for 2008 shows that the 2004 Athens Olympics had a “cumulative viewing” (analogous to number of streams) of 34.4 billion.

A rough estimate; less that than 1% of total 2008 Olympic media consumption was online.

It would not be outlandish to suggest that a significant proportion media consumption during the 2012 Olympics will be online. If its 10% or even 20% then there will need to be massive changes in the media delivery platforms.

This is a good opportunity for high tech companies and network vendors,

intermercial – Interactive Comercial

An Inetermercial is an interactive comercial

Essentially during a piece of video passive comercial, the audience is prompted to interact. Here is a great example of an infomercial for holland cassino.

This was made using the Mistral interactive TV authoring tool. Which without a shadow of doubt one of the best pieces of software in the world ever.

Humans need a passive group experience

I have been thinking about the Clay Shirky lecture  on the cognitive surplus, and how its the end of TV as we know it. Funnily enough, my 4 year old son did the same thing with looking for the mouse.

The thing that I cannot reconcile with Clay’s line of thought is that people like a passive experience, if you look at behavioural data,  my guess is that they people to be fed and that the TV helps them remove the need to think, sure the kids like to play the interactive games (they also constantly change channels) but as they get older they chill out and slow down.

In terms of technology clearly the internet will replace TV, but I guess there is a hole in the market for a passive group experience.

Any Ideas?