What Cinema can learn from TV?

Adopt the internet

A few blog posts ago I was talking about Cinema and the audience using their phones in the cinema to share the experience and hinted at some other things Cinema can learn from TV.

Me and Hugh were arguing in FYG, Television has gotten the cluetrain like the film industry hasn’t yet. (it has a long way to go, to be at one with the internet but alas…). Live TV is the new fashion and teamed up with Twitter its giving TV a way to do explicit feedback like never before. I’ve attended so many talks where twitter integration is taken as the norm, actually what was weird was hearing our European public broadcasters talking about using Facebook instead of Twitter hashtags.

So generally…

Live TV + Twitter = Good experience

I wonder if Cinema and the film industry can learn something from this?

Cinema + Twitter = ? experience

I already expressed an dislike of people using there phones in the cinema due to the light but if you could tweet without ruing the darkness of a cinema, now that would be interesting… Of course the ability for people to be able to take pictures of the screen is a massive problem but tweeting about scenes could maybe increase the engagement (specially tweeting alongside premieres). Maybe theres a way to replay a hashtag in real-time along with a film?

This could work if films adopted something like status.net along film releases rather than using twitter per-say. Being in control of the microblogging means spoilers can be moderated and that replay feature can work. However your never really going stop people using Twitter oppose to using your own backchannel system? If it did work, imagine what you could do with the DVD, Bluray, digital download releases. Replay the best/insightful comments, add the directors comments, tweets from the actors, staff, etc… Who knows?

Maybe the whole aping TV is a distraction and there is something which it can do which is more interesting and more native to films? I had thought about using sensors within the cinema, perceptive media style? But its strikes me Hollywood is never going to allow customisation of films. Just like TV doesn’t want to see the same. Maybe sending the stats to the Internet and visualising them could be somewhat interesting? But hardly ground breaking… Sure a few people are thinking about this and will make a killing…

Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io