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Convergence Culture Consortium (C3@MIT)

Happy New Year - FoE3 videos availableDecember 31 2008

I just wanted to take a quick break from the Christmas/New Year's festivities to let you know the videos from November's third annual Futures of Entertainment conference have been put up online.

We took a little more time getting the videos up this year as we plan to push them out across a broader range of video-sharing platforms than we have before. For the moment, they are available from MIT's TechTV site. You can watch, comment on, and embed the videos from this site. In the coming weeks we will put them up on a range of other sites across the Internet.

Happy New Year everyone, from all of us here at C3; 2008 was a stimulating year, and we're looking forward to an equally provoking 2009.

Product Placement: A Necessary Evil?December 6 2008

I love my DVR for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it allows me to watch more TV and fewer commercials. Using my DVR to fast-forward through commercials turns a 30-minute sitcom into a 22-minute sitcom. Those extra 8 minutes mean I can watch four sitcoms in the time it used to take to watch three. And all without having to sit through a single ad.

I scanned through all the commercials during the November 6 episode of NBC's My Name is Earl, but I still had to watch an advertisement. An entire story line in the episode centers on Joy's (Jaime Pressly) desire for a necklace designed by Jane Seymour and sold at Kay Jewelers. Joy sees the necklace in a television commercial and embarks on a ridiculous quest--involving rockets-- to raise the money necessary to purchase it. Zany antics ensue, and Joy is eventually rewarded when her husband presents her with an "Open Hearts" necklace at the end of the episode.

C3 bloggers have frequently weighed in on product placement, and with good reason. The proliferation of alternate distribution models in recent years has shifted thinking about the ways television content can be effectively monetized. TV is still an advertiser-supported medium, but calculating the value of an ad spot has become increasingly complicated with changes in viewing patterns brought on by DVR, VOD, and streaming video sites like hulu. AC Nielsen provides measurements of audiences who playback DVR recordings (on the same day the program originally aired with "Live + SD" ratings and within seven days of air with "Live + 7" ratings), but since commercials can be skipped with DVRs, "Live +" ratings aren't a reliable gauge of ad watching. Advertisers may not be able to tell how many time-shifting viewers actually see commercials, but they can still be confident people are watching the shows themselves. As a result, audiences are now subjected to traditional commercial spots and ads embedded in TV content.

This new emphasis on product placement is not really new at all. Before current ad models evolved, television programs were rife with product placement and visible sponsor support. As early as 1950, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show incorporated conversations about instant milk into dialogue.

There is a difference, however, between Gracie Allen extolling the virtues of Carnation and Jaime Pressly coveting a necklace from Kay Jewelers. Viewers of Burns and Allen didn't have to sit through--or scan through--a barrage of 30-second spots for other stuff during the course of an episode like Earl's viewers do.

My Name is Earl has one of the highest proportions of time-shifting viewers among network TV shows, so product placement seems like a good strategy for attracting advertisers. Unfortunately, the Kay Jewelers story line just wasn't funny. Product placement works best when products are integrated into an already intriguing plot. For example, characters on Gossip Girl use Verizon cell phones to spread rumors, form alliances, and conspire against enemies. While cell phones are essential in moving Gossip Girl's plot forward, the show is not about the phones themselves.

If My Name is Earl wants to continue with such overt product placements, they should take a lesson from their fellow NBC sitcom 30 Rock. 30 Rock has managed to make product placement funny by mocking its necessity.

Revoking Spreadable Media: Soulja Boy take-down noticesDecember 5 2008

Last week, just in time for the holiday season, CMS colleague Kevin Driscoll received a Youtube DMCA take-down notice for Crank Dat Roflcon (video viewable here on Fred Benenson's blog). Crank Dat Roflcon was part of the Internet Conference held at MIT last year in conjunction with Harvard Free Culture and the Berkman Center, as well as the follow-up to our own CMS Soulja Boy project, Crank Dat MIT with free software guru Richard Stallman.

Those of you who follow the C3 blog may remember last year when we picked up the Soulja Boy phenomenon as an exemplar of the power of spreadable media in a networked cultural economy. I've previously discussed his social media strategy and some of the social and cultural implications of the phenomenon through an analysis of the official music video.

Given that Soulja Boy's success has been built on people remaking both his song and dance and posting, sharing, and discussing the videos, it is both disappoint (though sadly unsurprising), that one of them would fall victim to the DMCA takedown-bots.
In the spirit of Soulja Boy, Kevin and a couple of the Roflcon crew, put togeth

"The Canon" Goes 2.0December 3 2008

I've always had a love/hate relationship with the Criterion Collection, the same goes for the lesser known blog, The Auteurs, which has now grown into a full fledged site and recently developed a partnership with Criterion and with Celluloid Dreams. This post is probably a bit excessive on both extremes. On one hand, I can't help but drool every time I visit the Criterion site, on the other, I usually can't afford their DVDs, and mostly I'm disturbed by the notion that someone out there is defining "the canon". It's unfair, I know someone has to do it in order to restore and make available all those wonderful films, but this process of inclusion/exclusion is still problematic. So, while it extends the life (and in some cases resuscitates) many films, it also ghettoizes them into this fabricated Olympus of the cinema.

Having said all this, I am very happy to announce that Criterion has discovered Web 2.0, and is cautiously entering this domain. You can now rent Criterion movies on their site for $5 that count towards the DVD should you decide to purchase it, but more importantly, through their partnership with The Auteurs they provide a monthly selection of free movies streams under the Festival section. This month we can enjoy the "cruel stories of youth", including Sweetie and Lord of th

Futures of Entertainment roundupsNovember 28 2008

This year's futures of entertainment conference was a great success. We enjoyed two solid days of discussion, with clever panelists and a really engaged audience.

If you missed the event, we'll be posting podcasts of the sessions shortly. In the meantime, you can check out the C3 team's live-blogging of the event here.

Amber Case, who participated in a great panel on Social Media has a write up of the event here and here.

There are photos of the event here (courtesy of Geoffrey Long), here (courtesy of Amber Case). We have a large batch of photos we'll be uploading over the next week as well.

There was much tweeting throughout the event and afterwards, which you can check out here if you're interested. At one point we surpassed Twilight in the Twitterverse, which was a little bit of a thrill.

We'll be back next