Old TV, meet new TV

Television in the traditional sense consists of an audience watching a video stream, output by a box in their home. You don’t interact with the show but merely absorb incoming information as is. With a pre-programmed event, pre-programmed advertisements, pre-programmed scripts all fed as a one-way stream, the audience can only respond with reactions versus ongoing conversational interaction.

When I created Meatspaces TV, it was an experimentation and extension from Meatspace Chat after watching people interact with each other and seeing certain individuals have fans within the community.

The format is different from standard television and/or digital videos in the traditional sense - there is no audio, there only is the option to interact directly with the audience through chat and the opportunity for improvisation.

There is no improvisation with a one-way channel

Improvisation assumes that nothing is scripted, planned or directed in such a way that any part of the show is predictable. Things happen as they happen and the human brain creatively thinks about the next response to act out based on realtime input from the participants - in this case, the audience.

If the host of a show is able to converse with their audience, then this encourages feedback loops that build upon each other to affect both participants. If someone in the audience asks the host to do something, then they can respond accordingly and vice versa. With enough of this feedback loop, we end up with various levels of community bonding.

Audio is distracting

The frequent suggestion that I’ve been asked to consider for Meatspace TV is having the host stream a video instead of looping GIFs, similar to twitch.tv.

The problem with video is primarily the audio. As much as video is a great, powerful medium, audio can and usually is quite jarring. Audio requires full attention span and primarily two senses - hearing and watching - to fully know what is going on.

Passive interaction with the host is impossible for the audience since muting audio can mute significant portions of the experience and one cannot connect experiences with other unrelated activities, such as listening to your favorite music AND watching the show.

Live video/audio hangouts are consuming

Realtime video and audio services are really good for team meetings. That’s about it.

Trying to maintain focus on talking to a larger group of people in a video and audio meeting (or hangout) for informal purposes is very draining for all participants. You have to constantly be present, nobody wants to be silent, so everyone has to be “ON”.

If you have a looping GIF as a moment in time that periodically is updated by the host and audience, then you are forming an interesting association with visual moments and conversational context. Repetition creates a more memorable experience and an interesting bond between participants.

Communication between host and audience

Interaction in this format is more intimate as people can recognize each other. The host isn’t just some celebrity disconnected from the audience that just provides output - they also respond to the audience by their names and recognize them by their faces. A digital relationship of trust is formed through this familiarization and revisitation if subsequent interactions continue.

Responsible hosts and audience members

I started Meatspace TV as an initial experiment to see how the host <-> audience interaction would work over the course of a few weeks. The thinking is that my assumptions about human interaction through limited features could be adjusted to fit in various environments and situations - they would not all just be the same feeling and experience as Meatspace Chat over and over.

To do this, I made a very careful decision to only whitelist channel hosts to certain Meatspace community members. I knew that 80% would not use their channels regularly or at all but there would be a 20% that would continually experiment and improvise on new ways to entertain and be entertained.

Opening the channel ownership to random users has its risks - for example, people signing in to “own a channel” as a form of consumerism to buy and throw away after ten minutes of amusement or create a porn channel or possibly highly illegal and questionable content.

This is something I am not ready to deal with at this point - it would ruin the existing community, as small as it is - and would bleed into distrust and negativity.

This is not a place for building a successful startup that uses visitor numbers to generate profit or that forces foreign advertisements into the eyes of the audience in order to focus on meeting numbers rather than building interpersonal relationships.

This is a place for improvisation, creativity and a part of the internet that is leaving us from the past that encouraged discovery, friendship and hope.