Create a service by which people can add commentary to videos. Their commentary can be applied as annotations in text, directly on the screen, or as audio mixed with the soundtrack.
You’re going to need something that works like Flash Media Server, or Wowza, for this.
The service should allow people to choose who’s commentary they want to hear/watch and mix with others. You could use a Twitter-like follower system.
You’re going to need a way to resolve collisions if two or more annotators being followed by the viewer choose the same part of the screen at the same time. You would have the same problem with audio (of course, it’s a 1-dimensional space).
You could create a time-synced track for Twitter-like comments that run along the edge… so people can joke about what’s going on in text without having to locate the stuff on the screen. Perhaps that’s just an option of the view (“show on-screen annotations in timeline”).
As far as I know, the idea of syncing comments to the video timeline is pretty new. Rather than watching a 7 minute video and bitching about it afterward with 10,000 of your friends on YouTube, you can just put in a “Yeh right!” when you see some guy make a wild claim… and it’s synced up with what he just said.
You could also have teams that get together to collaborate on a prepared commentary, Mystery Science Theater 3000-style, and submit them to try to win contests.
This same service could find or create videos and let people collaborate on new soundtracks including voice-overs. You have contests on the funniest new soundtracks to old movies, whatever…
Of course, you’re selling advertising on the site. You could even get advertisers involved who create little videos, featuring their products, with dorky situations that are fun to make fun of…
The porn connection: Do the same thing on a porn sample site, allowing people to replace the bad dialog with even funnier dialog and music done with their mouth, “Chicka chicka bow bow!!”
The software could be written to only accept voice-over in slots… there would be a track for each actor’s dialog, but someone could only contribute something for the specific amount of time a line a dialog takes in the original video. This way, it’s an audo-madlib… and people could listen to all of the replacements available for a line, and vote… eventually people could listen to the best combination, regardless of the contributor… It might be funny to hear a character voices with a gruff voice, then a kid’s voice, then another voice…
The viewer would have complete control over which combination of features to view/hear.
The server software and Flash client pieces, I think, would be worth something in themselves as you could license versions to other companies for serious projects.
Considering that people mainly use the Internet to waste time, I think entertaining them with stuff like this makes good sense to bring in the advertising dollars.
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