I spent yesterday at NATPE’s LATV Festival enjoying some interesting discussions and presentations from the Digital Day.  This report is a synopsis of one of those sessions.  This session focused on how audiences and content are interacting like never before.

Moderator: Wayne Karfalt - Editor, Cynopsis: Digital

Panelists:
Eyal Hertzog Founder and Chief Creative Officer for Metacafe
Melanie Hall - COO Quarterlife
Kevin Chou - CEO Watercooler
Justin Cooper - Chief Innovation officer for Passenger

Crowdsourcing has it origins in things like WikiPedia where people can collaborate and develop content together.  How can crowdsourcing sourcing techniques be applied to entertainment?

Melanie discussed the social networking site for creative people and online show.  She says they have many opportunities for crowdsourcing at Quarterlife.  They use the audience to discuss characters and story lines.  The principles of the show were used to build out a social network so that the show and the site can play off each other.  They launched the show on Myspace, Youtube, Bebo and other sites which then referred people to the site resulting in a fast growing online community.

Eyal described how Metacafe now serves up over 300 million videos each month to over 35 million people.  He says the internet is introducing a new low cost of failure which means many more experiments and allowed many more people to participate in the creative process.  They have recently allowed people to edit the metadata about the videos. The members can edit the tags, titles, descriptions etc connected with the videos.

Kevin introduced Watercooler, a company that makes widgets for social networking sites.  Watercooler’s mission is to bring fans together online.  People have allows gone online to discuss entertainment.  They started online forums to discuss TV shows.  They launched in 2007, growing to 25 million registered users in 12 months.

Kevin says that their users are using the site to find out what others are thinking about when they watch a show. The communities can be very different.  Lost, for example has a community of 600,000 with very different involvement, while the online community for Jericho is 10,000, but very passionate about the show.

Justin described Passenger, a company that provides a crowdsourcing application for large corporations and media companies.  Major networks like ABC and Fox use the application for collaborate with their most passionate users.  These super fans can drive storylines and changes in shows using Passenger.  These audiences are built from either web sign ups or email lists that the clients have built up over the years.  Filtering tools are really important to allow people find the content they want and for the clients to sift through all the information provided by the users.  Justin says that Lost has been an active user of crowdsourcing to steer the show and for what content should be submitted for Emmys consideration.

The panel discussed the future of pilots.  Eyal says that the whole model for pilots is changing.  It used to be that because of distribution constraints there was a filter, then publish model for testing new content. The change of the distribution method has changed the model. We are moving from filter, then publish model to a publish, then filter model.

Eyal says that about 50% of videos are found via search for the first video you watch.  The second video is more likely to be the exploration of the related video.

In another example of crowdsourcing, Wayne described how Digg is building a recommendation engine based up your Diggs.  This will makes for more active recommendations based upon the collective input from the crowd.

A question from the audience - how to use input from the community when it conflicts with the creative direction of the show?  Melanie says that in any successful relationship there is compromise.  Justin describes how the creative commons process where other can build upon existing content and generate fresh content.