CFP Fall 2013 Plenary
Ultimate Media, Andy Lippman, MIT Media Lab
People are inherently social, active and expressive. Personal computers (desktops, laptops,
phones and other mobile devices) have finally brought these human qualities to the world of
narrative media. They are programmable and malleable. When you look at the world of
media, it has finally changed – media has control over the platform it never had before. The
platform that enables social creativity is therefore king. We are building a platform for
exploring the limits of how we create, understand, and engage with media.
Several years ago, if HBO developed content that didn’t play on the set top box, they couldn’t
use it. Those days are over. You can now issue the content and the platform along with it.
Content is king is only half right. Content is the ante, the platform is king.
Thirty years ago, we were thinking that historically, the creative users of the medium were
also the inventors or creators of the medium (e.g., painters made their own paint), but with
the advent of electronic media, those roles were separated. You had engineers who designed
the medium, and then the talent or the users of the media. At the Media Lab, we’ve tried to
make these two people into one. We merge design, technology and the message so that one
person – our students -- have expertise in all three areas.
It’s the evolution of the platform that people in the world of media are overlooking. You go
to Fox or the New York Times – there are a few highly creative, highly paid people that stand
in front of the camera and others who are involved in the creation in the platform that goes
along with it – a recipe for failure.
Spending equal energy on the evolution of the platform as on the content is the key. In
terms of how the future is likely to evolve and scale, you have to understand what scalability
means. It’s not just inventing a radio system that is 1000x more capacious. That’s shooting at
a point – it means you’re shooting to fit onto a new curve. The advent of the PC and the fact
you can evolve the platform at the same rate as you evolve the content is a change of the
curve. That’s the context for Ultimate Media.
We believe that TV or visual media is probably going to be around for a while. Narrative
entertainment in general has been around for 3000 years. Our program focuses on exploring
the view of visual narrative entertainment in a world of plentitude – there’s a lot to watch on
many different distribution systems. We are focused on how to explore all that content in a
data-driven environment, i.e., not just what’s on, but understanding what the content is about
and its relevance to you, the social environment into which they fit. As everybody
understands, most of the stuff I consume in any area—cars, tv—is because somebody tells
me to. I didn’t stumble into it.
Another dimension is that media has never been consumed in isolation. We view media s a
means of expression not consumption. We are never not expressing ourselves when we
engage with media. We are always expressing ourselves, but the means of expression has
been clunky especially re television. Today, we are oriented towards expressing ourselves even
during the most lean-back, passive type of experience—through our interactions with fellow
viewers or by engaging with our iPad or iPhone while watching a show. In the 1950s people
watched soap operas while ironing on the phone with other households doing the same. It
was klunky, now it’s fluid. But the notion that we are active and expressive in the course of
watching and enjoying media was always there but now there are more opportunities new
opps in the nature of what narrative means, how we use, absorb, do it and how we interact
with other people.
Two other things. Visual media in particular is important for the synchronous campfire that
brings society together. A speaker from Al Jazeera talked about how the journalists weren’t in
Egypt at the time of the uprising…
Those are the founding principles. How does that play out? Don’t know yet… It’s only been 7
weeks. Here’s what they’ve worked on so far:

Media Universe: A visual recommendation tool that provides a networked view of
movies.

Exploration (Crystal Ball): A search and discovery tool that negotiates the preferences
of multiple viewers in the room

Tele-correlator: Aligns news programs based on content, e.g., what each network is
saying about Iran

Re-casting: a video blogging app that functions as a “news DJ” tool
Mike Bove: re 4K TVs – that much resolution over a large screen creates very different
relationship between viewer and screen. We’re exploring what it means to have that many
pixels. You can’t perceive the difference when watching a movie from the couch, but
when you walk up to it, with today’s touch screens, you have a different sort of
interaction that makes the remote control highly unsatisfying. It’s more than lean forward
and lean back, it’s walk right up to it. It’s more like a white board – but what to do with
all that pixel real estate?
Audience: Advertising implications? Does anything in the charger prevent you from
looking into this?
Andy Lippman, MIT: We don’t know exactly what the relationship with marketing will be,
but it’s central.
Audience: In terms of what to do with the real estate, one could easily imagine the
screen being divided up.
Ana Serrano, CFC: Are you looking only at “flat” screens vs VR? What about things like
the Oculus Rift?
Mike Bove, MIT: People watch TV for 7 hours a day, would you wear an Oculus Rift for 7
hours a day? No one would do that. It’s all encompassing, attached to your head. It’s
interesting for certain applications. We are interested in light field and 3D displays,
telepresence… for rich interactions
Tessa Sproule, CBC: re in-the-news-room, having 4 screens up to see what the other
networks are doing has been going on for awhile but what’s starting to happen is
another screen is popping up, displaying chartbeat, showing us where the traffic is
moving and what’s going viral. And so we make editorial decisions based on that. Also,
how do we use these tools to broaden our perspectives vs creating echo chambers?
Henry Holtzman, MIT: That brings up another question: the push vs pull tension of
television. Historically it has been push, and pulling was limited to changing between 5
channels. Internet is pull, moment by moment. Getting TV into the Internet era is the
challenge. On some level people want a push, wash over experience, but there’s too
much content for that. So some people’s pull activities are pushing content out to others.
I see the challenge as striving for balance. How can people move across that spectrum
through a common interface; sometimes you want to sit back, sometimes you want to
explore, either through recommendations or through your own exploration. Here’s a
thought I heard earlier: TV as it exists today makes sense if you’re the producer or
channel owner. You’re looking down a pipe and you see all your customers. In the early
days, this was pretty much the consumer’s perspective as well, although they were
looking at a few pipes. But today, there’s too much diversity in media choices, they can’t
make sense of what’s coming at them. It’s a completely fragmented experience. Ultimate
Media is about asking what do we want out of the experience (the viewers) – how do we
make sense of what’s available. How can we both push on that pipe not just pull on it.
Andy Lippman, MIT: Note that the larger context for this is The Center for Civic Media
program. They are concerned with larger global issues – what media covers, what it omits.
So while we are concerned with being directed to a diversity of media sources (i.e.,
preventing the echo chamber), it turns out that within media, a lot of what is happening
in the world is not reflected. Why do some stories get overlooked while others dominate,
is part of the program. They are developing a program called The Newsroom of the
Future.
Sheau Ng, NBCU: Ultimate Media is about making TV about what the user wants
whereas, as Henry pointed out, it was traditionally what the producer wanted. UM makes
sense in a paradigm in which the machine becomes the broker, i.e., the media to a user,
becomes something that has intelligence that understands the user so it can transform.
Smart media. I don’t need the user to actively say I want news at this hour, comedy at
this hour, etc. That’s a dumb user model. But just sitting there, understanding my facial
expressions, etc. it will respond to user needs. This is taboo territory – cameras
everywhere, data, etc. All that information will become input for the machine to become
intelligent.
Henry Holtzman, MIT: This sounds like the right architecture, on the other hand, it feels
frightening in that I don’t want to turn the TV into more of a drug that it already is,
making me numb. That machine has to achieve the right balance. Maybe I should be
uncomfortable for awhile
Bill Lehr, MIT: re the pipe analogy, as you start pushing the frontier of the devices you’re
also pushing the frontiers of the network. You’re talking about pushing the envelope. Re
network research – what should we be thinking about in terms of latency measurements
for example, given what you’re trying to do in Ultimate Media.