Exactly what do you actually do with the living room of the future after you’ve managed to build it?
That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way; Time Warner unveiled its 9600 square foot state-of-the-art facility designed and built to study customer behavior in January this year, and now it wants to know just what it should do with its particular brand of high-tech surveillance.
The Medialab, as TW calls the space, is based on the company’s Manhattan Time Warner Center headquarters and exists to, in official terms, “[incorporate] cutting-edge technologies and research techniques [to provide] an unmatched ability to test consumer engagement throughout the entire 360° media-to-retail experience.” Complete with biometric monitoring and eye-tracking capabilities, as well as focus group space for the old-fashioned analysts out there and broadcast capabilities to finetune test content, the massive location includes retail space, video game stations, an “in-home living-room simulation” and a 50-seat screening space to best sample product in a variety of settings. According to the project’s official website, “In order to foster the company’s continued growth as a progressive supplier of engaging content, Time Warner and its core divisions–HBO, Time Inc., Turner, and Warner Bros.–consider the Medialab an essential instrument in understanding consumer behavior, evolving media habits, and industry trends.” There is, it seems, only one problem: What to use it for.
Via the Hollywood Reporter, it turns out that Time Warner’s solution to that problem is to open the space up to academic organizations, via an open RFP (Request for Proposals, for those who didn’t know) from those who have an idea or theory that they’d like to use the Medialab to prove. “The Time Warner Medialab wishes to fully utilize the capabilities of the Time Warner Medialab for university‐based research initiatives, especially for exploration, innovation, and original thinking in the arena of media and its usage,” the RFP explains, adding that “For that reason, the Time Warner Medialab plans to make the capabilities of the Medialab available to university research groups, as well as financially support use of the facility, in order to further the quality of research available in the public domain.”
(That last part is interesting; the RFP explicitly states that the Medialab is only available to academics for research that “will not be deemed proprietary in any way.” That’s not the only request TW is making of applicants; the RFP also states that “All writings, findings, and/or publications resulting from completion of research must include acknowledgement of the support of the Time Warner Medialab.”)
The Medialab is accepting proposals until November this year; those interested in finding out more can download the application process directly from the Time Warner Medialab website, and then work on brevity; proposals have to be 300 words or less (That’s less than two thirds the length of this blog post, to give you some idea of context).
Although I may not agree with all of Time Warner’s decisions and their corporate agenda, it is pretty cool to see them open up this space to academic research. Hopefully something useful/helpful will come out of it
TIME WARNER CABLE WANTS TO KNOW WHAT TO DO IN THE FUTURE Here is a goal for you TW Cable, stop frauding your customers with your cable service. I recently upgraded my cable to include HD digital, used the favorites feature to create a list of all HD channels at the push of a button. The next day two of them are “not available” then three, then five. Don’t think we haven’t noticed that you keep re-organizing the channel line-up, pushing the most watched channels up into the next “TIER” then filling in the spaces with ethnic channels. Why don’t you let me pick a package where I only pay for the five channels I watch, oh and how hard could it be to give the HD channels in the 400′s the same numbers as in the rest of the tiers? And another thing, give me back my 30-second skip forward button! I am sick and tired of having to sit through your self-promoting commercials, about how your so much better than “Dish” and how dish customers won’t get “Breaking Bad”. The dish commercials don’t talk smack about you! Unless you include the meaning of “Smack” to be, telling the truth about how much you over-charge. Although nothing I’ve said here has anything to do with the article I’m posting to, it doesn’t matter, because the CEO’s of Big Mega-Conglomo-Corporations don’t care, they sub-let that division to a subsidiary dummy corporation that’s routed to a call center in India