1. News

2. Live TV (channel surfing)

3. Movies

4. Games

5. Songs

6. TV Series

It's all about relative investment of time, with one exception: songs require less commitment than movies and games, but music taste is extremely personal and specific for many people, and therefore harder to influence.

Channel surfing is a very interesting one. The jury is still out, since real-time, live TV social recommendations is still largely uncharted territory. I am going out on a limb by pinning it up at #2.

By "social discovery" I mean one's own social graph, as well as the wisdom of the crowd (to lesser degree).

Hat tip to my super-smart colleague Bruce Hertzfeld for forcing me to think harder about this list.

What does your list look like?

Story-telling is old. My guess is that it dates back to our first efforts at domesticating fire. The camp fire afforded us "leisure time" after nightfall for the first time ever. Imagine all of us pre-verbal, proto-humans huddled around a fire, faces awash in the red glow, staring at each other, for hours...

The context was ripe for language. And for story telling.

We learned, were cultured, and were entertained by stories in that ancestral environment. We made sense of the world through story-telling. It was all inherently social, passed from one person to another. The social fabric of "the tribe" was the content medium; social was the only content channel in town.

Fast forward 50,000 years or so to present day. Our stories are now impeccably-produced, high-definition TV shows, movies, music, beamed around the planet at the speed of light, blanketing 6+ billion people in the blink of an eye. With the swipe of a finger, I can instantly access one of 10 million stories available, anytime, anywhere. No fire required.

And no tribe required, either.

I believe we lose something when social is not part of the content experience:

• We are left to our own devices to make sense and find meaning in the story.
• We are muted in our ability to express our emotional response to it. 
• We miss the opportunity to bond and deepen relationships around shared interest in the story. 
• And we have no one we really trust to guide us through the endless maze of 10 million choices.

TV, movies, and concerts are more fun and enriching when experienced with others. And we give more weight to recommendations from friends than from strangers or algorithms. Hard to argue with these statements.

TV used to be naturally social. A few decades ago it was the "modern camp fire". Families congregated around it every night. And while the act of story-telling was no longer social, the experience of it certainly was social.

That has changed; the experience of content is becoming less naturally social. As more and more single-user content devices flood the market (iPhones, iPads, Kindles, etc), social experiences around content are either absent or dependent on technology solutions.

Imagine: mom, dad, Dick, and Jane, all huddled around the living room coffee table, faces awash in blue techno-light, staring at their individual tablet screens, completely unaware of each other, absorbed in non-intersecting realities.

Extreme, for sure. But I'm fairly certain that we're becoming more isolated via our new devices, and our need for integrated social technology and virtual social graphs will only increase as a result.

http://itvt.com/blog/next-technology-should-be-%E2%80%98people-everywhere%E2%...

There are of course a ton of privacy issues to work through. But those aside, I think it's the right direction. The more "identity aware" entertainment technology is, the more compelling user and social experiences can be created.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

First, see this post by Will Richmond about how live sport events continue to attract the largest online video audiences.

The virtual world is indeed resembling the real world in this important manner:

Where large communities of people gather to co-experience live sports, speeches, concerts, breaking news ("point events") is also where people virtually gather in TV and video land.

People crave community, especially as virtual experiences become more fragmented and isolated due to the explosive growth of content supply and choice.

The more viewing options there are, the less likely you and your friends will watch the same thing.

Human community fragments as the content-landscape fragments.

But sports and other live events bring us back together. Big events in the real world, like The World Cup, are now the scarcity. In a big way. As such, their value increases in a big way.

I was all set to sit down and write up a little analysis of the newly announced Hulu Plus subscription service. But then I read Will Richmond's write up, and I really don't have much to add beyond his great insights and opinions. We agree mostly on this one.

Below is Will's piece. I'm sure I'll sneak in a few thoughts of my own over the next week or so...

Dear All TV Programmers / Marketers (and heck, all content marketers in general):

Twitter #hashtags are your most effective marketing devices. Start using them wisely and liberally.

Drill them into your viewers' heads. Make them memorize the hashtag for each of your shows.

Never miss an opportunity to get your hashtags in front of your viewers' eyeballs, wherever they are: on TV, online, on mobile, even on the street.

Seriously.

Every tweet about your content that does not include a hashtag is a wasted opportunity, a lost soul, a dead-end.

Your fans want to know how to talk about your shows, but they are frustrated that they don't know how.  Guessing a hashtag is horrible user experience.  Don't put the burden on your fans to figure it out.  Tell them proactively. Help them help you.

Display your shows' hashtag on screen at the start of every show. Make it as pervasive as your network logo; it is a far more effective branding tool.

Seriously, Twitter hashtags are now your best marketing tool. Never shy away from promoting them!

The "safe harbor" provision basically says that a content host (such as YouTube) can't be held liable for copyright or redistribution infringements committed by its users, as long as the host had no prior knowledge of the infringement and quickly responds to take-down notices submitted by the content owners.

Many folks are applauding this ruling as a great victory for the DMCA and for "Innovation". Yes, it's certainly a victory for the DMCA, but I'm not so sure it's a victory for "Innovation".

Based on several emails between YouTube founders surfaced in the Viacom / YouTube lawsuit, it seems that YouTube probably got away with some questionable tactics with regard to premium (copyrighted) content on the site.

If true, it is not at all surprising.

There is tremendous pressure on start-ups to show inflection points (steep up-and-to-the-right growth curve) quickly. And it's usually high-demand, low-availability content (or spammy viral tricks) that drive that type of rapid growth.

In this context, what the DMCA protects is not Innovation but rather a greater freedom to leverage crowd-sourced content aggregation. That is, on UGC sites like YouTube, as long as the site owner does not proactively monitor what gets uploaded, and quickly takes down content upon request from verified content owners, it's not liable for the copyright infringements of his users.

The DMCA is therefore very appealing to entrepreneurs who are looking for ways to amass compelling and differentiated content from its user-base, with minimal risk of liability.

But this is a business tactic, not innovation.

Let's face it: Facebook is getting less personal, less intimate.

Mark Zuckerberg has recently stated that Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and transparent. That's awesome... But open and transparent generally create environments where people are less personal and less intimate.

Open and transparent is what Twitter does naturally, not Facebook. The bulk of Facebook users joined when the promise was still very much about connecting them to people they know in the real world: friends, family, colleagues, old high school friends, etc.... in a private and secure manner. An environment well-suited for personal and intimate social exchanges.

Twitter is natively public; all content published by its users is public by default. This is well understood by everyone who joins. In fact, the goal for most active Twitter users is to get as many random people to follow them as possible. An environment well-suited for open and transparent social exchanges.

This may explain why Facebook has made so many changes over the last year and a half, in response to Twitter.

The world needs both a Facebook and a Twitter. It doesn't need two Twitters.

The wonder of the Internet is the enormous, enormous amount of content it makes available to all of us. It's one of those mind-benders, like: "if you added up the length of all the digital audio and video accessible via the Internet, it would amount to 15 billion years worth of linear playback... Or the age of the universe." I have no idea if that's true or not, or even if it's within several orders of magnitude (no one does)... but it's a HUGE number.

The last decade has been all about bringing that content online and accessible, with ever-improving user experiences. Currently, many of us are focused on spiraling all this content out to all the various consuming devices available: PC's, phones, tablets, TV's, embedded devices, clothing (soon? :-) ) etc...  and enabling us to easily pass "the best" content on to our friends and followers, to any of their preferred devices. It's a VERY exciting time for those of us involved in this work.  Hooray for that!

But there is a very large elephant in the room: the supply / demand balance is now totally out of whack. There is exponentially more supply than demand. And the gap is ever-widening.  It's not that people are demanding less content (they're demanding more and more - especially as the number of consuming devices proliferate), it's that we have a fixed and relatively short time to consume it (24 hours is the most we get in a day).

This is an inherent problem with linear content: it requires time to ingest. 

This "natural law" problem causes massive fragmentation in the content distribution business, and poses a big threat to content programmers. For instance, TV networks place big, big "bets" on a tiny, tiny, TINY fraction of available video content. That's a tough model to sustain, given all the above.

For most of us, TV is an escape, an opportunity to wind-down, to relax.  No more decisions; just entertain me. 

I'm not sure that Google TV, which starts with Search as the primary content discovery mechanism, embraces this mindset.

Discovering content in TV-land is a very different mindset than discoverying content in Web-land.

On the Web, people generally seek specific information or content.

On TV, people generally want to be entertained.  Yes, they may have something specific in mind (and search is great for that), but just as often they don't.

Honestly, the last thing I want after spending all day in front of a computer is to collapse on my couch, only to see a blinking cursor in an empty search box staring back at me on the TV screen. 

"No thank you, Google; just entertain me."