PR Squared: Ode to CES: Adding Social Media to the Media Convergeance Story

Prepping for my imminent departure to Las Vegas to catch the tail-end of the Consumer Electronics Show, I was bedazzled by all the toys & promises that have already been widely covered.

A vision of the future came to me in a flash. Yesterday I was reading about Comcast’s wideband strategy, enabling hi-speed downloads of thousands of HD movies to our PCs and computers, and within moments also came across news of a “Google tv” making its way through the development cycle.

This all happened within a day of watching videos on Metacafe … a video-uploading site which has cleanly embedded contextual advertisements within each video, and of course features all the latest & greatest modes for sharing the content.

Clearly we’re headed towards a world in which all content becomes widely available across numerous different media channels and devices. Online. Offline. Web. TV. Mobile device. Storage not a problem. Transmission not a problem. Monetization streamlined. (Not to gratuitously tout a client, but it sounds a lot like Rob Glaser’s “jukebox in the sky” vision.)

Before you say, “duh!” – since that’s an age-old convergeance story – the vision that came to me added the all-important Social Media element to that Media Convergeance tale.

There may come a day when we can give our personal Thumb’s Up or Thumb’s Down to all content, regardless of how it’s displayed to us. Today we can rate a YouTube video. Tomorrow we’ll use our remote control to rate the latest episode of Law & Order, and that rating will become part of that episode’s aggregate score throughout its umpteen re-runs.

There may come a day when we see a cool program or even a commercial on the tv, and be able to email it directly from our tv to our friends’ in-box or even remotely download it to their DVR. (I presume our friends’ prior permission to do so would be a built-in safeguard against “DVR spam!”)

There may come a day when we can press a button on our tv remote to append a verbal comment to a program or commercial; this comment could become either an audio file or be displayed via speech-to-text, depending on how it was later accessed.

Remember Mystery Science Theater 3000 (in which you’d watch a B-movie alongside a wisecracking chorus?) There may come a day when all tv shows and movies can be accompanied by a running commentary track – not by the director, but by your friends, or by some rising wise-acre emerged from the blogosphere.

We’ve all been enthralled by the vision – as espoused in the famous Qwest commercial (circa 2000) – of a world in which we can access “every movie ever made, in any language, any time, day or night.”

Imagine how much more fun that world would be with the ability to share, score, re-purpose and react to that content together.

As “visions of the future” go, that one’s pretty fun.

(Note that you can download the Qwest commercial by clicking on the screencap above.)