Thousand-Channel Lifestyles

I’m old enough to remember television sets with knob channel-changers; when there was only a knob-full of channels to be found.  Who can even count the channels now?  A similar explosion of opportunity is about to revolutionize your mobile existence.  Are you ready for a thousand-channel lifestyle?

A simple demonstration of this phenomenon leaps forward from the recent Winter Olympics in Turin.   Turin is laid out on a classic European city grid with a number of open public squares sprinkled across the urban landscape.  In terms of ‘programming’ an analog city, this is a perfect design: a set of discrete ‘channels’ where the 2006 Turin organizers were able to ‘broadcast’ distinct crowd-pleasing offerings in a variety of locations.  It works well but there’s a profound scaling problem (like the knob channel-changer): what happens when you’ve got enormously more events than town squares, and the events are transforming faster than a printed program can keep up-to-date?

Welcome to the digital city!  Looking ahead to Vancouver in 2010, we don’t have that pattern of public squares and there will be too much happening to be contained by squares in any case. The only audience-friendly solution is to connect the predicable body of traditional “broadcast” programming with a very ‘long tail’ of wagging ‘narrowcast’ events using dynamic mobile social scheduling software.  

Let’s use the launch of MobileMuse.ca’s latest application – Mobile VIFF – as an example.  The Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) is a venerable pioneer of urban film festivals in North America.  The traditional audience experience is contained within a catalog-ticket-foyer-theatre universe, limited by changing schedules, unpredictable line-ups, and an inability to amplify ‘buzz’. Mobile VIFF is expanding this universe with podcasts, mobile video trailers, phone-based voting, social networking, ticket-purchase-on-the-go, etc.  The idea it to extend the VIFF experience into the office, car, restaurant, line-up, supermarket, etc.  The knob-world VIFF already has a number of theatres involved, but imagine a digital-world VIFF where there’s a theatre in every hand, and hundreds of happenings coordinated and spontaneous throughout an entire city. 

MobileMuse.ca intends to expand this mobile festival capacity into this city’s great Jazz Festival, Children’s Festival, etc, etc, and finally to the biggest festival of all – the 2010 Olympics.  By then we’re hoping to offer that thousand-channel festival experience – a form of ‘mobile social radar’ enabled by the universal remote control in your hand.  And, given that life itself is carnival, the transition to a continuous thousand-channel mobile lifestyle will be a simple one.

If only there were the equivalent of a mobile PVR, so we could record real-world events and have them happen whenever convenient!