During the Cross Media Storytelling conference I had the chance to learn more about LAMP, (Laboratory of Advanced Media Production), aimed to upgrade media professionals to cutting-edge production modes, which means of course cross media.As far as I know nothing like that is actually happening in Europe, except maybe the (internal) training at BBC 360°, the Immovator meetings in the Netherlands, which are not exactly training, and perhaps something within the Media program (the brilliant Sagas courses have been denied funding this year, let’s hope in the next one). I understand something in that direction is going to happen at the MEC centre in Mechelen, will post about it later on.Probably for this to happen in Europe we will need cross media to reach some sort of “official” status, which it still has not. Let’s wait and see..

Here I am in Amsterdam, enjoining a couple of free days after attending the conference EuroITV 2007. This is not strictly a cross media event, but it features plenty of connections with cross media and it has been a good source of inspiration (and update, to see what is actually happening out there).

Compared to previous editions of the same conference, this year’s focus was not on EPG’s and problems of compatibility between platform as before but was instead all about sociability and about integrating interactive television in a broader scheme of media interaction.

Presentations about extended homes, ambient entertainment, swarm intelligence, mobile TV and a one-day seminar on social interactive television seem to indicate that the “push the red button” era is definitely over.

Another main feature of the conference was “Social Interactive Television”, a hybrid form incorporating the structure of interactive television with features from Web 2.0, notably the community aspect and the possibility to share - the present moment, opinions, content.
To make isolate and remote TV viewing a collective experience, once again.

A very interesting seminar dedicated to it (social interactive television) featured the following project presentations:

Living@Room (it is such a rare pleasure for me to see some (indie) italian presentations!) borrows the tools of a live chat such as a web cam to share the viewing experience;

CollaboraTV, wary of the role of the choir in ancient Greece’s theatre, shows the silhouette of an audience at the bottom of the screen and post-synchronizes comments and reactions to the show in order to create the illusion of simultaneity even when conversations happen at very different times;

ConnectTV seems inspired by the graphics of MSN messenger and allows you to share content from your computer to other TV viewers and have “Genrebuddies” to stay tuned on your choices and to send you suggestions (interesting how the speaker had to admit that in one month of street and web advertising for the project, that is very much in development, they manage to get only 4 subscribers, who also where a single group of friends);

Find-a-Friend, “another way of meeting people in your neighbourhood”, connects people through their zone code during live broadcasting;

MyHome from the University of Salzburg, examining the D-box2 by german Premiere, highlighted the extremely interesting point that “the user is the innovator” showing that, as we see in videogames and all sorts of open software, users tend to improve even the set top box according to their tastes AND technical capabilities.

(I found amazing the number of features added or costumized by the users: not only the interface, but also the possibility of sending audio video data stream over to the network, a simple game console, video and mp3 player, image gallery/slide show, notifier of incoming calls or emails, weather reports or stock market tickers.)

Finally Celia Quico from TVCabo, Portugal, spoke of participatory culture, and presented a truly cross media project called Total Explorer that spans from TV to the web and into the real world in something similar to locative games to show kids the hidden treasures of Portugal (real cool!).

Some buzzwords of this EuroITV conference seem to be:

asynchronous communication (that is, software allowing the audience to be in synch with each other, adjusting broadcast timing to their conversation);

user generated content : the most quoted models are YouTube and Google video and Flickr (sons of YouTube are the japanese GoromiTV and the dutch Tribler);

metadata/text matching basically the semantic web and XML applied to iTV for various goals, like recommendation systems, buddies systems, and costumization;

P2P-TV and sharing (content and experience) basically “altruistic” (thus sociable) systems transported to iTV

It is really amazing to see how the themes of Web 2.0 are protagonists of a conference entitled after iTV; television viewing, mobile TV viewing and ambient entertainment experience are of course different but they are talked about implicitly like they were at the same level or belonging to the same field; when I went to EuroiTV 2004 in Brighton such an approach would have been unthinkable. Things are really changing fast.
Cross media may not be the most popular of terms in this set (I still have to find out WHY—?) but the concept of cross media (or media convergence or participatory media) was deeply present in most of the presentations. How long before scholars and the market come to a common agreement with regards to its name?