The Social Moviegoer
I was working in the office late one night a couple of weeks ago when I got the urge to watch a scene from one of my favorite movies. Since I didn't have the DVD handy, I found the entire movie was posted in 10-minute segments on YouTube.
And so I watched the whole thing on there. It wasn't the most convenient thing in the world, to be clicking a new video every ten minutes, but I found that it was interesting to read the comments for each section of the video. While I was watching something I had seen dozens of times before, I was reading what other people were saying about particular scenes.
This experience isn't really available anywhere that I know of. I got lucky, in that someone happened to have pirated the entirety of the movie I wanted to watch and stuck it online. And on YouTube, a lot of the comments were posts by anonymous trolls (a redundant phrase) who were just trying to start arguments about unrelated matters.
But this doesn't exist on Netflix. There are reviews, but not inline comments from other people like me that are available to me as I'm watching the movie. For those who remember the show "Pop-up Video" on VH1, being able to see little comments while I'm watching the movie sounds like it might be an interesting experience. (As long as it's an option I can turn on and off.)
This isn't like watching a DVD at home. It's not really like anything I can think of, but I think it would be a good social experience for even the casual moviegoer.
Another idea: let people choose their favorite scenes from the movies they like and share them with others. Other people can "up vote" these selections, much like on social bookmarking sites like reddit.com or digg.com. The items with the most recent votes are displayed in an ever-shifting "Top 20" list that everyone can click to watch the chosen scenes.
Maybe video is still relatively young on the Internet. I'll bet we see these things crop up somewhere in the next five years.
And so I watched the whole thing on there. It wasn't the most convenient thing in the world, to be clicking a new video every ten minutes, but I found that it was interesting to read the comments for each section of the video. While I was watching something I had seen dozens of times before, I was reading what other people were saying about particular scenes.
This experience isn't really available anywhere that I know of. I got lucky, in that someone happened to have pirated the entirety of the movie I wanted to watch and stuck it online. And on YouTube, a lot of the comments were posts by anonymous trolls (a redundant phrase) who were just trying to start arguments about unrelated matters.
But this doesn't exist on Netflix. There are reviews, but not inline comments from other people like me that are available to me as I'm watching the movie. For those who remember the show "Pop-up Video" on VH1, being able to see little comments while I'm watching the movie sounds like it might be an interesting experience. (As long as it's an option I can turn on and off.)
This isn't like watching a DVD at home. It's not really like anything I can think of, but I think it would be a good social experience for even the casual moviegoer.
Another idea: let people choose their favorite scenes from the movies they like and share them with others. Other people can "up vote" these selections, much like on social bookmarking sites like reddit.com or digg.com. The items with the most recent votes are displayed in an ever-shifting "Top 20" list that everyone can click to watch the chosen scenes.
Maybe video is still relatively young on the Internet. I'll bet we see these things crop up somewhere in the next five years.