Now one of the biggest mainstream entertainment companies of the world (Endemol) has encapsulated social media in its new television format ZOOM, we can finally say social media has arrived big time. In this television format five ‘subjects’ are followed in their daily routines, 24/7, with the possibility of the audience to constantly peak into their lives, much like Big Brother, the breakthrough television format of …Endemol. Endemol ensures that it deviates from the Big Brother formula, for one thing: there is no voting involved. Instead ‘the’ social media are constantly monitored and the ‘buzz’ about the different contestants is harvested and aggregated into a so-called SCI: Social Communication Index. As soon as one of the contestants’ SCI-score drops below a certain threshold he or she is eliminated (from the show that is).

What makes Nancy Botwin, in a strange kind of way, a sympathetic character, as she is a weed-dealing mom that has no control over her two kids who experiment with drugs and sex at an age that Pokémon cards are still cool. She sleeps around, has criminal friends, sets her own house ablaze, smoothers her grandma, and has no problem setting up a bakery (season 1) or a maternity clothes store (season 4) as a ‘front’ for white washing drugs money. Is it that sometimes she breaks down and we witness her struggle to keep coming up for air since her loving husband was struck dead by a heart attack? Is it that she has moral limits too: no drugs for kids (!), and when drugs dealing leads to frontier running she betrays her Mexican boss, who she is romantically involved with…It is not that all is without consequences, people end up in jail, get beaten up, are tortured and even die. But life in the suburbs is undisturbed, as the opening credits of each episode make all to clear.

This post is an exercise in futurology. Anyone who has been in the CELL lab (especially the old lab) notices the large TV screen. Indeed the development of HD TV is one of the focus areas of the Cross media lectorate, see for example Harry’s convergence and the future is now posts.  Some of my colleagues at Novay  in particular Christian Hesselman, are also deeply involved in next generation TV through the iNEM4U project. And of course Harry and I have in long gone days both been involved in the Giga Port Next generation TV project, which came up with a model for TV that is not all that different from what I will propose here.

Two months ago I started my graduate research for CrossmediaLab on business models. My main focus will be the STOF-method as it was developed in the Freeband program. In March 2008 a book was published concerning the STOF method: “Mobile Service Innovation and Business Models”, which is more or less my reference source for the coming months.

Last year, february to july 2008, I did an internship at public broadcasting TV-station BNN, which focuses it’s programming on young people, typically aged between 15 and 30 years old . The department I did my internship for is called 101TV, which is a digital television channel (accessible via a decoder / settop box), that also offers it’s content on-demand online via www.101.tv. Typical for 101TV is the concept of ‘bit-sized television’ which means that every program the channel broadcasts doesn’t take longer than 5 minutes, like the channel is already zapping for you. 101TV makes these 5-minute max items in-house, and that’s what I did during my internship (producing, directing, shooting and editing video-items). The items subjects vary greatly, as long as it’s interesting television for the target audience, which is slightly younger than that of BNN. After my internship I continued working for 101TV on a freelance basis.