Talk Back – SMS Television App

Talk Back – Careful Jack, the Characters Talk Back!

Elevator Pitch – User-generated MST3k. Users watching a show on tv/web can text in any comments/questions they have and the characters will respond back, the best of which appear on the screen for everyone to see.

Origin – Talk Back was created out of a desire to pick up the snarky commentary on screen that was used in “Blind Date,” “Next,” and other dating shows, not to mention Pop Up Video by VH1, and expand it to television and movies to a point where you are interacting with the characters. Our constraints included the use of only pre-taped material, so we decided administrators would read the comments texted in and respond as in the characters voice. There was a level of excitement that came with improvising responses immediately and then showing them on screen as they arrived. We ended up choosing a 5 minute scene from “Real Genius,” due to Robert Carlsen and I’s mutual love and the film’s insatiable quotability.

Structure – Textmarks would send the messages to a page, which was then redirected into a Google Spreadsheets, wherein, multiple admins could be logged in at the same time. We each would speak in the voice of the character. Each row has a Flag column. When the flag was marked Yes, the Question and Answer were sent into a queue to be shown above and below the screen.

Success – The textmarks did transfer into Google Documents and the information was able to show up on screen.

Failures – Google Documents would not let the sheer amount of text messages to be injected into the database, so we ended up with a bottleneck with the messages, which created a delay time for the responses to show up on screen.

The Future - In Phase 2, the messages would go directly to the individual who wrote it. Eventually, there could be the capability to respond to people in various languages.

Screen Grabs:

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Genius – Live Improv TV Our homework was to create a 5 minute television show...

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Live Interactive TV, Mobile Me(dia). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

David Phillips