Remember when you were a kid and you watched the Dukes of Hazzard every week with your family? Or how about getting really psyched around the holidays partially because of the specials?

The scheduling, the anticipation, the holding your bathroom breaks until the ads. The “bust out the popcorn” as Jeff Chausse put it, that is all gone. Thanks VCR, Thanks DVD. Thanks Tivo. Thanks YouTube. Thanks Hulu. Those are not sarcastic thank yous. Those are sincere, that-sucked-compared-to-today thank yous! Now we get to watch what we want to watch whenever we want to watch it! But why should it stop there?

Even as a kid, I was into deciding my own destiny. While other kids were picking up Nancy Drew mysteries and Judy Bloom books, I was looking for the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. I would make a serious attempt to read the whole book, often working backwards from a particular outcome to see how I could get there. Now, 20 some odd years later, that has been introduced for TV. Video delivery platforms like PermissionTV give entertainers and marketers the opportunity to take “television”, a very much linear activity and add it to the non linear paradigm.

My friend, Martin Sarafian, is one of the great unknowns in the world of research. Not only does he have very broad knowledge about topics like foreign policy, entertainment and the entertainment industry, economics, advertising and technology, but he dives in to the depths of the Internet underground (you didn’t even know that existed did you?) and pulls the nuggets that make the Drudge Report cringe. Research is a passion for him, and he uses it as something that allows him to create.

About 8 years ago, we started talking about a project that we would work on together. The overarching concept was something that we called Non Linear Entertainment. This allowed the user to control how they experienced the story line and how they got to our desired outcomes (if they ever go to them at all). At the time we were talking to major entertainment houses as well as venture cap. They got the concept, but did not think that we could charge for the content. They were probably right and at the time I was concerned both with building the CMS as well as the revenue model. to figure out how I was going to build the platform. This was long before blogging. Long before online communities were inter connected and things like PHPbb allowed people to easily setup forums, let alone integrating all of it together. I started working on CMS-like technology so that Martin would be able to make updates to the site via either XML documents or forms. In parallel we (mostly he with me to bounce ideas off of) kept flushing out the idea for the content and designing and building the universe.

The idea of Non Linear Entertainment is that the user can choose what they want to consume, when and how they want to consume it and that everything they do adds value to their personalized customized experience. Instead of a linear storyline, the story is a tangled web of story lines. You still have the sort of buildup to outcomes, but the user can choose if they want to go off and experience something else for as long as they like instead of going right for the payoff.

So Non Linear Entertainment is:

• Personalized
• Customizable
• Reusable
• Replayable
• Not the same thing twice

A perfect example of Non Linear Entertainment is World of Warcraft. While not all Non Linear Entertainment allows the user to be an avatar in the universe the point is that it is highly interactive. A content consumer has the option of going through the content in their own way and ultimately will experience many of the same pockets of content that others do but not necessarily in the same order or time. At the end of the day the discussion between two people who have a NLE experience is about their payoff and how they got there. They might even suggest a way that they thought was fun or interesting and encourage their friend to try that way, thereby giving NLE the potential to be repeated, or at least to have pieces repeated. In this way the experience is highly customized and the rules of engagement have changed forever.

Platforms like permissionTV can enable NLE by

• Allowing the placement of a hotspot on the content that yields other content.
• Allowing the user to make a decision for the characters in the story
• Provide areas to upload user generated content
• Allow the user to create their own content by slicing up the content.
• Embed and Share
• Much more

Enter the marketers. Some obvious marketing uses are that people can click on product hotspots within video content and get more information or even be able to purchase. Decisions made during the video might yield different ads that are based on the decision that was made. For instance if someone decides to make a character go on a roller coaster versus staying home and soaking in the tub, they might get to see an add for Cedar Point where the second scenario might show an ad for L’Occitane bath products. Decisions could also be saved in a user’s profile and choices, including ad choices, can be aggregated to form powerful segmentation that could power the ads themselves.

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