Cirkus: Competition For The Greatest Web-Show

Written by Igor Beuker on April 14th, 2009 | 1 comment

Internet is the biggest television channel in the world: thousands of shows, live events, new ways of storytelling and interactive entertainment are available anywhere at any time. For free. A new generation of stars has emerged.

Cirkus

You might not recognize them on the streets, but some of them draw more viewers then a traditional tv network. It seems that it doesn’t really matter what you do. What counts is how magnetic you are. So, Internet TV is the new circus, and its attractions make up “the greatest show on earth”.

Cirkus is an online competition aimed at discovering 10 original ideas for internet television. Cirkus is on the lookout for interactive formats, web celebrities, comedy shows, or brilliant ideas about trans-media narration.

Create an original format on a topic of your choice and send your project to Cirkus Competition by 5 June 2009. $200,000 will be invested by founding partner H-Farm to develop and produce the best projects.

The Cirkus project will evolve over the next few weeks, hosting a competition through which some selected brands, broadcasters and social networks will be involved with participants to create their innovative shows. SHADO will present them at the CIRKUS event on June 19 and will produce them.

You can also visit the Cirkus Facebook group.

We took a deeper dive and interviewed SHADO CEO Davide Bartolucci. Here we go:

Q1: Most broadcasters neglect the power of pull and interactive. How come SHADO has a different vision?

Answer Davide:
I don’t think the fundamental theme is how interactive the content is, but how adaptive it can be in terms of an increasingly fragmented audience.

We believe that the battle for the most sought-after market, i.e. attention, is fought on the ability to combine the highest number of contexts starting from a more or less complex narrative concept.

The new generation of communication overlaps the most advanced dynamics of engagement with the traditional rules of entertainment. In this scenario, interaction is a precious asset, but it must not become an obstacle to the fruition of the content or make it more of an effort.

We believe in any form that makes content more intelligent and we think that broadcasters must focus not so much on whether or not there are interactive or technological aspects that evolve from their products, but on the performance that these new characteristics are able to guarantee.

Q2: Maybe you can share a bit more of your ideas and vision with our audience?

Answer Davide:
SHADO is a somewhat unusual Internet company because it has grown within a context, that of H-FARM, which aims at innovation in all scenarios of contemporary life with single start ups dedicated to redesigning everyday models.

For this reason, just like a sponge, we absorb the daily development of digital technology, be it Internet marketing, physical space, the world of the mobile or new B2C models and crowd sourcing.

All this goes into our process of creating new television scenarios, producing trans-media formats, Internet shows and new forms of celebrity.

In an ever-wider and more crowded market, we are well aware that success doesn’t mean the number of users, but the quality of the audience and its commercial value.

Thus, we work obsessively even on aspects of packaging, product marketing and identity to valorize the content to the maximum, increasing perception even when it is a low-budget scenario.

With SHADO anyone can become a media company, given that he understands what is truly important to his audience.

Q3: Do you believe broadcasters should get to know the audience (like eCRM)?

Answer Davide:
Of course, we are talking about a decisive aspect for a broadcaster, because it allows supply to get even closer to the audience’s demand, even when that is unexpressed. In this sense we are fascinated by technology that tracks the users’ interaction with or around the content. Think for example, about the CBS viewing room or all the interesting features linked to video tagging.

But of course, any CRM tool, even the most traditional, can become fundamental for the segmentation of promotional messages aimed at ever more finely-defined niches, but there’s more.

We are carefully watching all the tools that reveal consumer behavior, technology that can understand and measure the level of enjoyment of every single shot of a video from the viewer’s facial expressions.

For now we are talking about frontiers, but soon we will be able to offer premium content free to whoever agrees to let himself be scrutinized by his own laptop web cam.

We are talking about tools that are going in the direction of perhaps a visionary concept, i.e. perfect entertainment, meaning something that is able to modify itself and adapt to its audience’s changing tastes.

Q4: What do you expect from online video in the future?

Answer Davide:
Online video certainly means the future vehicle of much global communication, not only entertainment.

I have always believed that Internet TV is a new Internet, initially aimed at one-directional distribution of content, but becoming more and more interactive and, in future, will be more adaptive, hyper-textual and indexed.

With an extra decisive aspect, video is the most complete and involving language of communication and knowing how to govern its new dynamics will mean playing a determining role in future communication scenarios.

Q5: What do you expect from iTV in the future?

Answer Davide:
I believe that the future lies in the integration of all the distribution contexts but that home entertainment will always play a decisive role.

For this reason the major broadcasters, as the more enlightened ones are already doing, and all new digital publishers with innovative vision, will have to plan their presence across all distribution platforms competing to fill the ever-larger flat screens that are invading our homes.

I think Apple’s role is crucial, with iTunes, HULU too, and IPTV platforms, which know how to open up to new paradigms, catch-up TV, digital devices with different features (e.g. sling media), game consoles and social media centers like Boxee.

With exactly the same dynamics as online video and flash-based players, the ability of these distribution tools too to be “interactively correct” will determine the success of the media brands that use them.

End of the interview. Thanks Davide. And good luck with the competition. Let us know when you decided on the winning concept.

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Spotted by: Flavio Rossi from Italy.

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