A lot of things regarding IPTV have started to click into place for me today. I’ve posted before on what I think the real IPTV revolution is going to look like. This article over at 1up was the catalyst for my latest thoughts. I now add the following observation to my thoughts on IPTV: machinima is poised to become a lot more accessible as more and more companies facilitate machinima in their products. This in turn is going to fuel an explosion in machinima content creation. How does this relate to IPTV? Glad you asked, but first some background.

Machinima?
The 1up article is reporting that the newest version of Halo, Halo 3, will include built-in capabilities to record video within both individual and multiplayer modes. Recording video or images in a virtual world is the essence of machinima. Halo 2 is already the king of machinima - Red v. Blue and This Spartan Life being the most well known examples in the genre - so this move by Microsoft and Bungie is likely to help them to keep their position.

Yet despite its dominance Halo isn’t the only virtual environment within which machinima is being created. World of Warcraft has facilitated the creation of a large volume of machinima content, from comics to videos to treatises on society. Even a recent South Park episode contained Warcraft machinima.

And Halo and World of Warcraft are only two of literally hundreds of virtual environments within which content creators can generate machinima. This diversity is creating a very rich canvas for content creation, and it’s making that canvas available to amateurs with a very low barrier to entry.

A Compelling Foundation
If machinima were limited to the Halo and World of Warcraft environments, its future would be bleak. Content consumers can be fickle and the same old thing in the same old environment would get tired, fast. Luckily, we’re not so limited - consider the screenshots below from current and future games (click to enlarge):

These screenshots give a clue as to how powerful and visually compelling modern game engines can be but eye candy does nothing for content creation. What is more fundamentally important and interesting, and what is not shown in these screenshots, is that these game engines have been designed from the very beginning to be “modded”, to have their look fundamentally changed or new content created for them by others - including amateur content creators. Awesome visuals combined with structural flexibility? Now we’ve got something!

Framework for Creativity
Compelling visual content combined with a flexible structure within which to place that content is the key to how machinima is going to revolutionize everything. Just as programming language “frameworks” and abstraction layers (high level languages) have brought computer programming to the masses, the machinima frameworks that modern game engine designers are building into their products will bring content creation to the masses.

I don’t think it’s overstating the potential of the medium to say that widespread, creative, original content creation will be taking place shortly, thanks to innovative content creation frameworks. For everyone who has become a Flash master, or a PHP guru, or a Rails wizard, there is a structure - a framework - behind the individuals creations. Most users would have been powerless without the tools to assist them in their creation.

Similarly, as we are now seeing tools and frameworks emerging for interested amateurs, I think the time is right for large-scale content creation to be taking place around the Internet.

Where’s the Link to IPTV?
My vision of IPTV has little to do with corporations and advanced set-top boxes. My vision is about small publishers using the incredible cheapness of bandwidth to directly distribute home-grown content to a global audience - all without need of tremendous amounts of infrastructure or promotion or funding. Prior to today I thought this could only resemble the content produced by sites like Revision3 or Basic Brewing Video. Shows that are more traditionally produced and developed, such as sitcoms and dramas, seemed to me to be outside the scope or the ability of amateur production.

My mind has been changed. Using machinima means that there is no need for a cast in the traditional sense, or a set, or an actors guild, or catering, grips, best boys or a budget. Machinima allows creative individuals, using a computer as their only real resource, to produce content that includes elements that are outside their ability to acquire or use in the real world. Machinima is going to be useful in all genre of entertainment, from action to drama to comedy.

Machinima enables small content producers to leverage the work of framework creators in such a way that the content will be easier to create, more quickly, at a high quality, at less cost and this makes machinima is ideal for IPTV. Low budget but high quality productions are going to rock the landscape in the coming years. Traditional media companies will have no idea how to deal with this.

To paraphrase the Chinese proverb, media companies are living in interesting times.