Do you Care What's Comin' Out the Other End?

Most of us in this crazy thing we try to call a business work on delivering video, audio, and their related emotions to remote locations.  I’ve talked about production values and their influence on the overall message but I want to talk about receiver locations and guessing – guessing on those locations, the ones of our followers, then guessing on their moods, their friends, viewing/listening conditions, time of day, even their blood alcohol levels.

Yeah, you gotta guess about it all because, somehow, you have to use it to calibrate your thinking.  What am I talking about here?  OK, here’s the “duh” version.  Valentine’s Day.  What content do you offer.  Go for the goulish?  Ripping hearts out and roasting them on a Smokey Joe™?  I don’t think so.

Now, if you start paring it down, you get more granular.  (Is that the department of redundancy department?)  You start asking about which love story to tell.  Or about which love song to play.   Then you ask about timing.  You think about followers as individuals as opposed to this monolithic group, all with the same feelings.

The bottom line is, you can try to figure out your audience really is – make that are.  You create an average and shoot for that.  You can treat them as individuals, too.  But if you don’t have separate channels to deliver different versions to each individual, you’re kinda stuck.

Sometimes you luck out.  You can upload for Youtube, Hulu, Brightcove and others along with MP4, H264 and WMV players.  Then you can offer additional versions for iPhones, Android phones, and, hey, if you wanna, broadcast TV.  NBC Sports and The NFL are taking a big leap by offering the Superbowl online for the first time.

In doing so, they’ve recognized that they have different channels…and they’re delivering content tailored to each medium and, in some cases, to specific devices.  Son-of-a-gun.  They broke the code.  The found out they could deliver different messages and they’re doing it.  It caters directly to their audiences.  Note the plural.  The rabid fan will have multiple screens open alongside the broadcast.  Heck, so will the rabid gambler, but you didn’t read that here.  But the point is that they’re offering multiple angles, replays, facts, stats and sideline views – if you want them.  Cannibalize the broadcast feed?  No way.

Of course, not every event has all of those channels to the viewer.  You can open them but the cost may be prohibitive.  In these cases, you just have to guess at what’s out there because there’s only one medium and one channel reaching your audience.

Flashback:  once upon a time, I had a phenomenal idea.  I mean brilliant!  I sure thought so and I convinced my boss and his boss that it was.  We’d do research to find out what preferences viewers had in adjusting their television sets.  (Yes.  We called them television sets.)  The plan was that we’d find out what they did to “misadjust” their sets and we’d predistort our audio and video in the other direction.  That way, our products – these were commercials – would appear as they should on the screen.

Well, we actually did some research.  At a fine little strip mall in Bloomingdale, IL, we found out that, at least in our slice of the world, people adjusted their television sets way around to the red and with much too much saturation.  It may have been the “Hey, I paid for color, I’m watching color,” thinking along with the dislike of the green component in flesh tones (and that’s not just Caucasian…green seems to be objectionable to viewers in just about all skin colors.  Martians, feel free to take issue) but that’s what we found.  And on the audio side, we found what nearly anyone drawn to this writing would guess – the smiling equalizer…boosted lows and highs with the midrange down about 6-9dB compared to either end.

And the plan?  Well, that should be pretty evident.  Rotate all of our materials around to the green (we figured about 15 degrees.)  Back down the saturation about 10 percent.  Then re-EQ the audio to a frown so that the receiver’s “smile” yielded an overall flat line.

Anyone see the problem yet?  Fortunately, my boss and I figured it out before we went any further…if people want more red, they want more red – in everything.  Including their corn flakes package.  Including their double cheeseburger.  If they wanted lots of highs and lows in the audio, well, they wanted it.
 
So what do you do?  You may have your own ideas…I’d love to hear them.  Mine is, shoot it “normal”, edit it “normal”, distribute it “normal”.  If Mary Elizabeth Dudenclaber decides she wants more red, let her add it.  If she wants green, let her have that, too.  It’s her call.  At the same time, you still have to think.  Old folks will remember “the day” when nothing went out without looking at it on a black & white monitor.  And most places still listen to a mono mix before releasing the content.  That translates to thinking ahead about viewer/listener conditions. 

Bottom line is, you have to know your audience and know your channels.  So many possibilities.  You put it out there in 1080i, full bandwidth. Top notch quality.  Twenty percent of the people are watching on receivers that can handle it, directly off air.  Another 40 percent are watching on cable.  Your 1080i is transcoded to 720i and is being pushed through a bunch of cable as a QAM signal where, at the receiver end, 80 percent of that 40 percent (32 percent for those of you in East Bumquat) feed the signal to a cable box and the rest feed to an integral receiver card or other processor.  And don’t forget the issues created by writing to a DVR’s hard disc and then playing it back.  Then there’s the group of satellite…and on I go covering all the ways of delivering.  Downconverted, upconverted, 16:9, 4:3, limited, “calmed”, 8VSB, QAM, NTSC, you name it.  Don’t forget cell phones, PDA’s and Youtube.  And it’s not just the end format, it’s everything that goofy set of numbers had to go through to get to the viewing screen.

So give it all some thought.  In many cases, You Don’t Know.  But if you do a little digging and thinking, you might figure it out.  If you know your audience, know their preferences and their preferred channels and modes, then you can try to match their preferences.  But don’t leave the color bar chart at home.