We have a small panel here about the future of media in connection with virtual words.
Life4U: We do 'classical news TV' in Second Life, we have avatar-reportes and use their raw material like we use normal RL material in our TV-work - on the cutting table. And we lipsynch the moderators. The result is a 10 minute news format.
Software Support Verlag (publishing): We usually just ask people to identify markets for future magazine titles. Sometimes magazines also help markets to emerge. It's hard with open source as there is not so much investment in advertising. If there is a industry active in a topic area a niche product is possible. We do mags for specialists in niches. We also theink about what virtual worlds mean for our business.
Christian Scholz ('Mr Topf', consulting, development): Weblogs are helpful as communication media about virtual worlds, news spreads much faster there than elsewhere. also classical media can profit from the information on blogs and get better and first hand information.
Life4U: We use SL als a practicing area before we send intern out with real and expensive camera teams. It is an ideal practising ground for cutting, planning and arrangement of TV news items. And people really like entertaining news formats. We want to expand to other virtual worlds. We produce in English. In Sl the markets won't split along country borders but really along language barriers. We are looking for sponsors for a German edition. As we are a small startup we now concentrate on the German SL-community. Through the streaming setup and logging we cannot be really sure how many people are watching. Now we also move to the web and you will be able to see sour broadcasts via flash. Now we have numbers between 50 people and 20.000 people. (Christian suggests to have it also as a video podcast, which is planned.)
Software Support Verlag: We have an island called "IT Republik", like in real life we also do conferences there, like the Metaverse 07. You can also read our newsfeeds there. But we have no avatars present at all times. We are a traditional publishing house that is exploring this area. We could also imagine to present special talks in a jour fixe. (Christian suggests to do interfaces between RL events and SL events.) We are also working on an SL follow-up to IT recruiting events.
SL4U: We plan to expand to all Virtual Worlds. It's like the different countries in RL. We can just film the screen... It's easy. It's not really clear which volume requires a broadcasting license. On the other hand it is not live but on demand. If we look at advertising in world advertisers don't have enough cash, we need RL-advertisers.
Software Support Verlag: Second movers are not necessarily copycats, they might also just enter at a higher level of knowledge.
Markus Breuer: I don't see any innovation in the media currently produced in virtual worlds. Anything they do is a a more or less direct replication of models, which already exist on the web or in physical reality today. Do you see any new aspects here?
SL4U: We don't know. We are sometimes unhappy with the 'old fashioned stuff' we do. I think we will see new formats in the future but we don't know what they will look like.
Discussion: There will be immersive 'soap' formats in which you are an actor as avatar.
Maybe in news formats people will be in the studio.
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