We ate the Blistered one.
Monday…a fresh start anywhere, even at SXSW. After the Sunday slump you rally a little and are starting to feel the nagging “only 2 days left of Interacticve…only 2 days to pump my mind so full of inspiration I’ll run on dreams and starlight for the next 6 months.” No pressure, really.

Flail or Fail: Marketing to Fandom

This was a panel of geeks and I loved it. Understand…there is being a fan of something and then there is being IN the fandom of something. Level 2 includes activites like joining online communities for the thing you’re a fan of, communicating with other fans, creating fan art for your fandom if you are so inclined…it’s a way more active way to be a fan. Things like fanfiction are a level of fandom that allows the fan to re-write or add to the “canon” (the accepted truth of the storylines as written by the official show writers). Marketing to these types of fans means you should listen to them, be authentic with them, and know they’ll see right through you if you marketing unauthentically to them. Using the right platorms to reach your fandom is essential…don’t use Twitter if your fandom is on Tumblr. That sort of thing. Yay geeks!

New Indie Frontier: DIY TV

This panel was a little bit slow for me as it wasn’t really about DIY TV series at all, but more about how you need a lot of money to produce something so high quality you have a chance of having it picked up by a major distributor like Netflix. Sigh. Fun fact though: 75% of videos streamed online every day are 15 minutes or less, so content can be short form and episodic and keep an audience. We’ve broken from the weekly half hour sitcom mode finally.

Then I went to a panel about how musician unions get musicians paid but it focused on people playing on Hollywood movie scores and that’s fine but not applicable so I wandered the trade show and picked up free swag.

Livestreaming Is Bigger Than You Realize

Omg, guys. Have you heard of YouNow? I hadn’t. It’s a livestreaming app that actually allows you to monetize your streaming. Streaming apps like Meerkat (which no longer does streaming) and Periscope have busted out at SXSW before, and while I’d argue there’s no real “it” app this year, this one seems interesting. On panelist was Zach Clayton, a 15 year old who has amassed a 700,000 subscribership on YouNow and broadcasts for an hour a day to 7000-10000 people on average. People tip him. He makes thousands a month. Other services like Twitch allow gamers to livestream them playing a video game, and thousands of people watch. (Zzz). I feel like this is the Wild West of the internet.

12 Inevitable Tech Forces That Will Change Our Future – Kevin Kelly

I love panels like this. Granted, the title is misleading…Kevin Kelly is releasing a BOOK with all 12, but he only went over 3 forces. But they were good. AI is going to change is massively in the next few decades…and not in the “thinking robots will kill us all and take over” way, but in a more helpful, benign way (according to Kelly). AI thinks differently than a human…so it can learn to do “productivity” based jobs that humans have to do now. Kelly maintains in 100 years we’ll be stymied about how people in the past used to do jobs that are obviously robot jobs. The jobs that will replace these are…not invented yet. This pie in the sky thought always makes me pause but he did point out…think about our largely agrarian society in the early 1900’s. If you would tell them that by 2016, only 1% of our U.S. population will be farmers, they would ask…”what does everyone do, then?” And we’d say things like “programmer, coder, fitness instructor, social media manager.” And it wouldn’t make sense. So think about 100 or even 50 years into our future…we have no idea what’s coming folks. And the robots will help us. The other 2 forces Kelly talked about were Virtuality and Tracking, which I could yammer on but I’ll just link to his website. Fascinating.

Thus ended my day…VR is really a thing, guys. Try some goggles. More on that in another blog post.