The Dominatrix and the Case of the Missing Tools

When I first heard about the BBC’s Sherlock, my heart sank. Talk about flogging a dead horse.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson’s adventures in 21st Century London. A thrilling, funny, fast-paced contemporary remake of the Arthur Conan Doyle classic.

Last night, I watched it for the first time. It was exceptionally good. Bursting with character and rapier dialogue. The problem was that no matter how engrossing the drama, I kept being jolted out of my suspension of disbelief by the tenuous clips dropped in to reiterate the plot.

There is a scene where Sherlock cracks the code to a particularly alluring dominatrix’s safe. The code we see him entering immediately explains how he does it (spoiler alert: it’s her vital measurements). However, just to make sure that every viewer gets it, the dialogue has to lapse from rapier into journeyman so the dominatrix can laboriously explain this to Dr Watson. Later on, they parachute in a remarkably artificial clip where Sherlock summarises the entire plot, for no reason whatsoever, to two henchmen driving him to the airport.

I mention this because it illustrates the difference between mass media and the web. (As with most years) it’s widely predicted that in 2012, TV and the Internet will really converge. We’ll have Dropbox logos on our flat screens and our iPad alongside the remote. TV that puts the user in control of what they watch and how they watch it. The joy of which is that viewers who get the plot first time round needn’t suffer the tedium of its reiteration.

What’s interesting is that, whilst this is the inevitable consequence of convergence, content production companies are almost entirely untooled for the future that’s rearing up in front of them. Consider a standard production workflow. You have footage captured to disk, an edit and a mastered file. When delivered over IP, this file is streaming using something like rtmp://.

Now, if we want to personalise the stream of content, this is perfectly doable. Something like FMS or Wowza can serve content dynamically based on information provided. However, as the documentation testifies, the techniques to do this are incredibly low level. There are no simple libraries like Popcorn.js.

For user centred content to become ubiquitous, we need some building blocks, like:

• a standard “uccp://” prototcol for responsive, user centred content streaming
• modules for web servers that implement the prototcol
• libraries for application developers
• plugins for content authoring software to master and publish responsive content

I’m sure there is a lot of relevant technology out there. However, can it be cohered around by both producers and developers in the way they can cohere around web frameworks like Drupal and Wordpress? It looks to me that the networks and the data are there but that the tools are missing.