Rivers Run Red Bringing TV To Second Life
Hot on the heels of Destroy Television comes an announcement from virtual world branding and PR agency Rivers Run Red, which plans to launch a broadband television and content network in the virtual world of Second Life in November. Virtuallife.tv “will enable news, documentary and entertainment content to be distributed and shared across the entire virtual world,” according to a press release. It sounds an ambitious project, due to launch in early November on a 24-hour-a-day broadcast schedule carrying music, film, audio and text. More than 100 active channels are planned by the end of 2007, and the network, a Rivers property, plans to produce around 1,000 hours of original programming a year. There will even be content produced by the Second Life community, though quite what form that will take wasn’t clear from the release.
According to the release, “VirtualLife.tv will also serve as a channel for the community to promote their own services, events and products. With future plans to allow the free distribution of community created film (machinima), music and video.”
Already, almost a dozen “major content companies” have agreed to let Virtuallife.tv “repurpose or broadcast their content.” according to Rivers. (No idea who these are at the moment, though I’m checking.)
The service will be free, though pay-per-view programming is planned for the future. How do you tune in? “A television package will be freely distributed. Streaming will also be available to all landowners.” One question is whether Rivers has found a way to solve the worst problem about video streamed into Second Life: each person watches a different stream of the same content, making it nearly impossible to watch the same program with the same start and end time.
Does Second Life need television? You could argue that it doesn’t, but the increasing convergence of media platforms — seen in TiVo, Xbox Live, PlayStation Portables playing films on UMD, television shows on YouTube, etc., etc. — point to the fact that any platform with aspirations to mimic, replicate or add to the functions of the World Wide Web is going to eventually include content networks like the one Rivers is proposing. Could it be that Second Life is just ahead of the game? I’m not sure, but it’s an interesting question, and it’ll be interesting to see what users make of Virtuallife.tv. Tune in for more.
Feeds
I’ve been a big advocate of bringing TV to SL. I was sad when the SLTV experiment failed for various reasons and I think there should be a lot of competitive TV stations coming in. It’s very important to get local spot news and a kind of civilizing mission going that brings basic behavioural norms to the world in a variety of ways, whether PSA’s, do’s and don’ts, etc.
The idea that it is to run 24/7 and have 100 active channels planned sounds way too ambitious to me. And having it run not by a credible news organization with an independent editorial board with a sense of public mission is highly troubling. Unlike RL, where the corporations would be buying the advertising but not buying the spin on the news in some blatant way, we’ll have to worry what it means about news coverage when a metaversal consulting company with lucrative contracts bringing Big Business to SL takes over avatar eyeballs on the media slot on their land parcels.
ummm. There’s a Pink Floyd lyric that comes to mind related to 100 channels which immediately sprang to mind, thus I’ll wait to hear what these channels may be. I’m not exactly going to log in to watch stuff that I can see on my regular television set.
From an educational perspective, this is pretty froody.
From an open content perspective, this is pretty froody.
From an entertainment perspective, the jury hasn’t even been instructed.
And as far as the ‘bug’ where people watch feeds with different start and end points - that could also be seen as a feature in some regards.
Personally, save me from tvs and podcasts. Make notecards more useful first.
Rivers Run Red plant TV-Network in Secondlife…
Gerade auf 3pointd.com gelesen. Das Unternehmen Rivers Run Red plant für November den Aufbau eines TV-Netzwerkes in Secondlife. Laut einer Pressemitteilung beinhaltet das Projekt virtuallife.tv News, Dokus und Unterhaltungs-Sendungen die in Second…
TV coming to SecondLife…
A new blog on me, 3pointD.com is reporting that a TV channel Virtuallife.tv will be coming to SecondLife in the coming weeks.
You’ll be able to get your hands on a portable TV package in the game for free, and streaming services will be available…
Rivers Run Red to launch Second Life TV channel…
Rivers Run Red have been doing a lot of cool stuff in Second Life for a while now, including work with Duran Duran and Adidas (who have sold 18,000 pairs of virtual trainers).
They announced just before I went on holiday that they were launching a TV…