Interview – Treet TV’s Wiz Nordberg and Texas Timtam

Treet TV are ground-breakers and Australia-based ones at that. I’ve been following them since mid-2007 (original profile here) when they were the Second Life Cable Network (SLCN), and they’ve been plugging away ever since, growing to arguably the world’s most credible and prolific virtual world TV production outfit. I say plugging away because even though they have a pretty solid track record now as innovators and quality content producers, establishing a wider profile within the Australian business sector has been a challenge.

Treet’s Mt Eliza-based founders, Gary Wisniewski (SL: Wiz Nordberg) and Grace Roberts (SL: Texas Timtam), caught up with me for a chat last weekend on everything Treet plus some broader themes. If you’ve thought about getting a team together to make your own show, read on as Treet are interested in new pitches.

Lowell: We last caught up in June 2007 when you were still SLCN TV – what are your strongest memories of those early times for you?

Wiz: Strongest memories?  Confusion. 🙂 No, really, I suppose the strongest memory is how “new” the idea was, of using a virtual worlds platform to create true television-like content, and the reaction of people to what we were doing. It was very fresh and very new and it seemed like there were limitless possibilities.

Texas: It was very exciting then. We were learning new things everyday and it was still in the glory days of Second Life hype so everyone around us was filled with optimisim about the opportunities.

Lowell: So has that confusion abated or just changed in dynamic?

Wiz: Well the dynamic has changed a lot. It is no longer new, and a lot has been learned – I was only joking when I said confusion actually.

Lowell: On learning: if you had to list a few key learnings over the past three years, what would they be?

Wiz: It seemed obvious to us that doing virtual worlds television was the right thing to try.   I have to say it was almost the opposite of confusion, but total confidence back then. Well, one thing we learned is that people in Second Life have almost boundless energy to create, and to us it is the reason to remain committed to Second Life despite many people’s negative feelings about it right now. We also learned to divide machinima into two broad categories: documentary and story telling. Documentary is easy. Storytelling is hard. I suppose the list could go on for pages.  After three years, you learn a lot of things!

Lowell: So for those who don’t know Treet TV, can you give an executive summary of what it offers today?

Wiz: Treet TV offers the largest collection of live television broadcasts and archives made almost exclusively in Second Life, documenting the activities, sports, lives, and stories of Second Life residents and creators.

Lowell: Your work is most recognised in Second Life but do you use other platforms / grids?

Wiz: We are starting to use OpenSim and you will see a lot more OpenSim based shows in the coming year. But almost everything is still done in Second Life.

Lowell: What are the limitations of OpenSim so far when compared to what you do in Second Life?

Wiz: The limitations don’t apply to us at Treet so much as they apply to those creating and participating in the shows.   Filming in OpenSim can be done as perfectly as we do it in Second Life. The main limitations show producers face are – there are fewer people and thus less diversity to pool upon for guests, interviews, lifestyle and sports content; there are fewer vendors of products, thus less available if you want to devise your own original show content; and stability is, incredible to say, not as good as Second Life, so the production reliability is lessened. But those things are changing fast, I should add.

Texas: OpenSim-based grids are just now gaining enough momentum to have enough users that will make for interesting viewing and stories to tell.

Lowell: Second Life has copped a lot of negative press: what do you see as its strong points and do you remain confident in its longer-term viability?

Wiz: The strong point of Second Life is that it is a new kind of virtual world, based upon an empty slate, where people can do and create what they wish without any limit to their imagination.  Arguably Linden Lab invented this type of world.   I am not sure they will end up playing a major role over time, but I am certain that this kind of world will survive, grow, and probably displace many many other types of virtual spaces. I am confident in the long term viability of such worlds. Not so much of Second Life itself. But today, Second Life is the best.

Lowell: Without going too negative ourselves, what is it about Linden Lab and Second Life that makes it likely to be overtaken?

Wiz: The need for Linden Lab’s product has grown beyond their ability to service it and respond to the market. This has to do with very early decisions they made before they realised what they really had. Some of those decisions will be hard to recover from, and I’m not sure they can.

Lowell: What in your opinion were those key decisions – architecture related, community related or others?

Wiz: Most are architecture related. Essentially, they locked themselves into an architecture where it takes approximately 25% of the resources of a fairly high-end server to support a gathering place with 100 people. Imagine for example, that you required  a full Xeon server to accommodate a website which would accommodate 400 people.   You would have a huge liability. This is the reason for most of their problems, including the inability to scale, and inability to create cheap land available to more people who perceive it as having much better ROI. I am not sure any amount of “thinking outside the box” in terms of their customer service and company structure can make up for that problem.

Lowell: The thing is, as OpenSIm evolves they may avoid some of those issues but not all – are the architecture issues really that solvable in the short-term?

Wiz: OpenSim has the same liability in terms of architecture, but it has the advantage of greater ROI with reduced cost. This will cause more people to engage with it, and more people can be involved in trying to rejig the architecture to solve some of these major problems. Open source groups have proven time and time again that “if there is a will, there is a way”, and I have a lot of hope for OpenSim because I think it will soon reach a tipping point where the necessary technology people will be able to truly hunker down and start making dramatic steps forward. In the short term?  No. 🙂 That means that those of us who are already at the limits of our patience need to be more patient still!!

Lowell: Let’s talk business for a while – I can imagine you still struggle with the credibility issue i.e. that a lot of the business / funding sector see virtual worlds work as R&D rather than ROI. Are you seeing that shift at all?

Wiz: Well, we don’t struggle with it so much at Treet. We are very committed to having a broad range of content creators producing shows. While there are surely revenue issues we now struggle with because corporate money is not flowing like it once did, this is a shared problem we all deal with. I also believe virtual worlds have been R&D all along. I think that any assumption that there was ROI was predicated by assuming a great deal of PR leverage for having “engaged in something new”. Once you remove the PR leverage, much of the ROI for many corporations didn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Lowell: So obviously without expecting explicit detail, what is Treet’s business model and strategy?

Wiz: Treet is like any other start-up gambling on the increasing trend to do something online which has never been done before. So, our business model evolves and changes over time and mostly is a model of “sustainability” at this point, mainly because there is so much R&D going on in the area we’ve chosen. I think the biggest limitation of any business model for a virtual worlds content company is the small size of the market.

Lowell: Which is a good lead-in to your shows – how many shows do you now produce?

Wiz: 12 shows are currently in production, 10 of them with weekly episodes that are aired live every Sunday and Monday. We have over 3000 archived episodes, not only of those shows, but of many shows no longer in production, or special events and features.

Lowell: What are your most successful shows, both as far as view statistics but also in regard to audience feedback?

Wiz: The three most successful shows in terms of feedback and numbers are Metanomics, Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe, and Designing Worlds….not necessarily in that order. Some shows actually have much greater consistency than those, with very loyal audiences, but haven’t achieved the high points those have. Two notables are the Best Practices in Education Series and the ISTE Eduverse series, both of which are short term productions and both achieved signifcant viewership and web buzz.

Lowell: Over your time producing such a large amount of content – have you discovered any unique trends on what works in SL as compered to more mainstream TV production? That is, have any of the shows worked really well when you thought they wouldn’t or vice versa?

Wiz: Comparing SL to mainstream TV is an interesting “apples and oranges” exercise.  The viewership of each is fueled by very different things. The “unique trend” is that Internet based TV is more dependent upon having an active community surrounding the content. Mainstream TV is more dependent upon a streamlined and efficient delivery channel. The former requires more social capital.  The latter requires more financial capital.

Lowell: On community: does Treet do active engagement there or is it more up to each show’s team to drive that?

Wiz: It is a combination.  Each of our shows is a partnership.   Treet works actively to build a community of those interested in “virtual television” and many people’s shows are discovered because there is crossover from the Treet community.  On the other hand, each show brings new communities to Treet, and this is probably one of the main ways Treet’s viewership grows, by having each producer’s community join in a larger community which has greater momentum. Three years ago it was the reverse.  Treet had no community and it was show communities which essentially “bootstrapped” Treet into having people who could cross-over into other communities.  Now, such crossover is the norm.

Lowell: On the partnership, how does that work? Where are the boundaries with creative control etc?

Wiz: We try our best to let our producers do what they want.  That’s the honest truth.  We try to let them envision the show, decide on the format, and drive the creative behind the shows with little or no intervention from us. We try to provide feedback about audience size, live viewership, and if we do exert creative control, it has more to do with the mechanics, such as trying to assure that shows are more “watchable” on the web, that intros are the right length, that advertising is used in ways that are most effective.

Texas: The Treet website offers the ability to include a much larger audience than could be achieved with only the Second Life residents. We can live stream to a much larger number of viewers via the web.

Lowell: So let’s say I have a great show concept and I approach Treet and you like it a lot as well. What happens from there?

Wiz: We are very interested in new pitches at the moment. We have a number of broadcast slots open because of the way we have rearranged our schedule. The main thing people with show ideas need to consider is that it is not about the idea or concept. A good concept does not make a show. A good, dedicated team, and a lot of effort in production make a show. A good concept helps because it makes it easier to attract people to the effort, and of course, once the show is produced, it makes it more appealing. But, building a team, and being realistic about the effort required at production are the most important things for people to consider. Two shows, “The Daily PWN” and “The Grid’s Honest Truth” are complete outside machinima productions which air on Treet.   Most people think Treet “wants” to produce everything.  That is not at all true, we are very receptive to people doing complete productions.   But – our requirements are rather stringent.

To be honest, the realities vary from show to show. For sports shows, there is no script, the main thing is being sure that announcers are ready, and that stats are prepared.  Some shows require a script, and there is a completely different team effort.  Some shows require 1 hour per week of pre-production, some shows require 40.

Texas: We are also keen to include serial stories to Treet. Not necessarily produced by us.

Lowell: Texas you mentioned serials and Wiz you mentioned earlier that story-telling is difficult – is that an area you’d like to do lots more in?

Texas: Yes, very much. Moving from a live broadcast model to post-produced drama / comedy is another exercise in “apples & oranges”.  🙂 But we are very interested in headed that way.

Wiz: Yes! We would love to have more people who are willing and interested in working with us on fictional series.

Lowell: Who are the core Treet TV team besides yourselves now?

Wiz: There are four of us that make up the core team right now, Wiz, Texas, August Lusch, and Yxes Delacroix. We have many other people assisting as well.

Lowell: Is Treet now a profit-making entity for you all? If so – what is your primary revenue source?

Wiz: No, Treet still runs in the red. It is funded by Texas and I. We do have a 24/7 studio which is unlike any other in the world, capable of doing these kinds of live broadcasts for anybody, so we are always interested in corporate work and other revenue, but ultimately, we are building a brand and an audience with Treet and revenue will require that it grow several times larger. As it is, however, Treet has over 100,000 monthly viewers across all our shows, but doing what we do is expensive, and even that many viewers doesn’t really generate enough revenue to fund this.

Lowell: Crystal-ball time: what are your ambitions for Treet in the coming 12-24 months?

Wiz: Expansion in two areas. First, to involve more and more independent machinima producers in Treet to take advatnage of our distribution and audience, and to add to the diversity of our content. Second, to move more and more into OpenSim specificaly and any other platforms we see that have “creator leverage” in the way Second Life does. We also have a couple interesting things we are doing that we can’t talk about . We also expect to continue to work more with Linden Lab – we have had many good joint promotions with Linden Lab and they have helped us fuel growth in many ways.

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A disclosure: I’ve appeared once on Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe and once on The 1st Question with Pooky Amsterdam.

Departure from Second Life: one story

For the duration of the four-plus years I’ve been involved with Second Life, I’ve known Wolfie Rankin. He’s been one of the driving forces behind the ABC Island community since its launch back in 2007, and has also been outspoken on a range of issues, including his perspective on furries. For me, he’s been an enduring Australian presence in Second Life, so I was more than a little surprised when I discovered this week that he’s decided to cease his involvement. I commissioned Wolfie to write a piece about his decision, which is shown below. Obviously it’s his opinion only and each person’s reasons for departing or entering Second Life are different, but I still thought it was well worth sharing.

———-

For the past five years I’ve used Second Life. Being fairly shy it helped me to come out of my shell, to find new friends, and discover that I could do more than I thought I could.

And during the time that I was recovering from cancer treatments it was a real boon, it lifted my spirits and made me feel wanted and needed.

Others who had a serious illness or were stuck in rural locations found they too could meet like-minded people, and found sanctuary within this virtual world.

Despite all the slagging off about Second Life which came from both the public and the media, those who used Second Life, and made the necessary connections to make it worthwhile, found it to be a wonderful experience.

One of the things worth trying is what they call Machinima. If you have wished that you could be an animator, but had no drawing skills to speak of, then this is brilliant. Just build a set in world, bring in some characters, direct them, film them, then edit the results with something like Sony Vegas, add music and effects, then upload to Youtube. The quality of what you can create here is astounding. and I would highly recommend trying it, even just for a bit of fun.

Five years ago, I was asked by several people to give Second Life a go, which I was reluctant to do as I never considered myself to be a gamer, and from what I knew of Second Life at the time, it was some sort of game -therefore I wasn’t interested.

Then I saw a report on Channel Seven about Second Life and thought that perhaps it had some merit after all, so being the curious type, I logged in.

The first time you log in, it can be a pain. It’s possible to end up lagging away on an island full of grey people, which is incredibly frustrating, and I feel we lost of lot of potential users who got caught in that situation and logged out thinking that was what Second Life was.

I checked into Second Life with a couple of friends who wanted to create an island just for us, this would cost serious money, I tried to stop my friend from going this far, but the next thing we knew, we had an island of our own. It’s a cheap proposal for a corporation, but a bit rich for individuals.

This gave us a private place of our own where we could meet and chat about our day with others. We could log in from anywhere in the world and somehow get the feeling that we weren’t all that far away at all. Those who put down Second Life by saying that we should only meet friends in the real world are so lucky to have their entire ensemble of friends, family and co-workers within walking distance of each other, and yet they still cling solidly to their mobiles. Most people have friends and family who are very far away, and if not for the phone or computer, we’d be back to pens, paper and envelopes. My friends were a mixture of American, English, Canadian and Australian – there was no way that we could meet for coffee at the local café on a daily or weekly basis.

I had a pub in Second Life, which I thought was lovely and airy, something like a Queenslander. I made it as comfy as possible, and we used it for events and get-togethers, but mostly it was just my home. Ahh yes, the disputes. I would log into Second Life and appear at my pub, on this island, to find that objects I had placed, had been moved to odd places, as though a three year old had got into crayons and tossed them everywhere. That, or that an item was returned because it was taking up too many prims (the constant talk of prim usage is annoying). The land itself could be altered too, which led to other irritations such as finding the nice flat land that I once had, was now the slope of a hill, and everything I had placed, including my home, was now buried… or the land was now a sunken valley, and all my trees and flowers were floating in the air.

This tended to be the result of selfish actions on the part of another island manager.

If I write a blog post, it remains there, it’s fixed, I own it and nobody can move it or alter the wording, I prefer things this way.

I left the private island and spent most of my time on ABC Island, Abi and the island staff were very reasonable, and there were few arguments, and certainly most of them were easy enough to resolve. ABC felt like a better home for me than Eragon. The problem here was that I really tried to get things going, but it was always difficult.

I would spend a week writing Rockit, my virtual quiz show, only to get about eight people showing up. We tried getting Pool into ABC Island… Lilli did an awesome job with the architecture, Abi gave us a hand, and we were all set to go. but when the ball was out of our court – as in Pool doing their bit, or the ABC doing theirs, everything stalled, whether it was legal issues or disinterest, I have no idea. This was fairly standard.

The idea for ABC to get into Second Life was a bold one, and one that we supported as a group, but the problem often seemed that ABC had forgotten us, there was a lot that we could have done with that island, but the volunteers could only do so much.

ABC has TV and Radio and web-based material. Having Second Life is a logical step if you’re going to experiment with as much of the digital world as possible, but I don’t think that it was handled as it should have been.

ABC had CSIRO people coming in for a few weeks, when ABC Island was new, to talk about science, something that went down exceedingly well. I was asked many times by a lot of people, if we’d ever have the science discussions again, it seemed to have been most peoples favourite ABC Island event – it was mine too. I tried to lure various science people into Second Life to do this, but none were interested.

There were things that we would have liked to have done, but we were blocked because we were not ABC staff – I suppose that’s understandable. The volunteers all felt like there needed to be someone from ABC who was there a fair bit, someone who not only worked with ABC but also someone who really enjoyed and understood Second Life, that would have helped so much.

If ABC is serious about getting experts from segments of New Media, they should send talent scouts into places like Second Life and say “You look like you know what you’re doing, would you like to work for us?”

Second Life has a vast potential, but often sadly that’s all it has. Perhaps it’s too new, perhaps something like this should have turned up twenty years into the future, when most people would look at you like a moron if you thought the internet was full of axe murderers.

I tried very hard getting people to come into Second Life. I mentioned it on mailing lists, forums and Twitter but nobody cared. “That sounds like crap”, they’d say, “Why would we want to do that, when we can just email each other?”. “I use Skype to talk to my friends”, “I use Facebook” and the oh so original, “Get a real life” which I’d heard nearly a million times. Sure there were technical reasons too – some had old machines that couldn’t handle Second Life, others had poor internet access. Fair enough.

Second Life has great potential, but people will never see that potential if they don’t at least try it. Green Eggs and Ham, anyone?

It’s funny how users of one social media will happily use one or two things and mock another. People don’t bother to research the software themselves, just rely on sketchy rumours, and if those rumours are bad, well tough.

I signed up and researched them myself to see how viable they were, and to be honest, there’s only a few that seemed not up to scratch, as far as I’m concerned, Myspace being a great example, Here’s something which is trendy to mock, but to put it bluntly, it’s a cow of a thing to use.

I loved Second Life, I really did, but not enough of you dared to try it yourself. I was there, I would have been delighted to have helped, and did help people on numerous occasions. I wanted others to see a potential and see how far they could take it… some did very well indeed…

Anyway, after five years of trying to bring people in for a look and waiting in vain, of dealing with arguments about prims and lag, of being whined at, and banging my head against a brick wall as projects simply stall because nobody seems to care – I know there are those who continue use Second Life and love it, and to be honest, I’ve had a lot of good times in there myself – but it just got to a point where I didn’t feel like I was happy there anymore, so I just walked away.

Wolfie Rankin.

Original content versus fan content

With studios and publishers flinging infringement notices around about fan-based role-playing environments online, it’s worth looking at the situation from another perspective.

After all, why not just create new, original theme properties rather than basing role-play environments on popular books, movies and television shows? Why do so when official gaming environments already exist in some cases?

Well, there’s a number of reasons. Creating a fleshed-out themed environment that isn’t just a rehash of something that already exists, is actually really hard. It’s time-consuming, requires any would-be gamer to learn a lot about your specific property (which means endless amounts of documentation, lore and history needs to be written), and you generally start out without any real support. How does a gamer even know they’ll like your theme – as a non-profit effort, your advertising options are limited, and you may never attract a large enough following to make all of the effort worthwhile.

By contrast, plugging into an existing theme is easy. There’s always a wealth of pre-existing material to work from. DVDs, books, movies, fan-fiction and more. Everyone already knows whether the theme is to their taste, all the information they could wish for is widely available, and the only matter for their consideration is whether they like or dislike the software on which the environment is running, the rules and the management. Even grabbing the smallest fraction of an established fan-base can make you a huge hit in role-play circles.

When it is embraced, it can work very well indeed. I used to participate in a particular Star Trek MUSH online. Among the players were a handful of members of the crew, cast and writers for the series. It was fascinating seeing story elements from that game appearing later in later seasons of the canon television series.

That’s perhaps an almost ideal symbiosis, but all of that was happening without the knowledge of the rights-holders who probably would have shut the arrangement down punitively, had they become aware of it.

These days there’s now a Star Trek Online MMOG, but dozens of Star Trek role-play environments still exist online, and new ones still get created. Why is that?

It’s because the ‘official’ environments don’t offer the role-playing versatility and opportunities that many online, fan-created role-playing environments do. You can take your pick of game-systems. You can even find environments without any coded game-systems, simply relying on the creativity and fair-play of participants – essentially limiting play only to what players are jointly willing to agree to.

White Wolf’s World of Darkness is perhaps the single most popular role-play setting online over the last couple of decades. That property has become a part of CCP, the makers of EVE Online who are now working it up into an MMOG.

What will happen to the hundreds of role-play environments online that operate under the World of Darkness rules and/or setting? Will CCP’s lawyers come after them as the game gets closer to release? Will they only get shut down if the World of Darkness MMOG fails to attract enough usage? World of Darkness games are – traditionally – rather light on scripted game-mechanics, and trend towards humans creating their own stories and performing their own dispute-resolution, aided by administrators – a model which I do not see CCP necessarily indulging in.

A World of Darkness MMOG might simply not appeal to the tens of thousands of WoD gamers already playing in virtual environments today, and that could well put CCP on some awkward public-relations ground if it chooses to protect its rights – rights for which many millions of dollars have been spent already.

Man vs Second Life: the sequel

Back in July 2009 we covered Man vs Second Life, one of the funnier pieces of Second Life machinima around. At the time it had reached more than 50-thousand views on Youtube.

At that time its creator, Sean Krueger (Hugity) posted a further piece to YouTube stating the original piece was a school final project, that he was going to seek real video work and in between some interesting insights on the making of the film, he made some fairly judgemental comments on furries in particular and Second Life more broadly. That video from Sean Krueger has since been removed from YouTube and he’s now released Man Vs Second Life 2.

You can view it here, but a warning it’s not safe for work or kids:

There’s also an interview with Sean over at New World Notes with some behind-the-scenes insights. This is one funny machinima from a team with an ambivalent relationship with Second Life – which is probably one of the key ingredients of their success.

Weekend Whimsy

1. Ms ladysunfire Erin Second Life Model Video

2. Second Life – Botanical Landscaping

3.Seperate Ways (Second Life)

Weekend Whimsy

1. OpenEnergySim – Walking Among Bots (Pedestrian Experience)

2. Promo: BURN2 Festival in Second Life, October 16 – 24, 2010

3. Second Life Halloween: Dying in Style

Weekend Whimsy

1. Second Life Tribute To Charlie Wilson Super Sexy Starring The PLAY GAL BUNNIES

2. Polyamour: A Second Life Dance Project by La Performance

3. eDiZ Silverfall – DANGEROUS WORLD TOUR in Second Life

Weekend Whimsy

1. Second Life – Decay

2. Second Life Slam Poetry by Kamille Kamala – Second Life Machinima

3. The Troubleshooter – Microsoft & Second Life advert for Sclera Design – Episode 1

Weekend Whimsy

1. SECOND LIFE: The Trial

2. The Hot Men of Jungleboys in Second Life

3. Second Life – King Kong meets TÜV Nord

Weekend Whimsy

1. MachinimUWA II: Art Theft done in Second Life

2. Second Life: Reacting vs. Experiencing

3. Surreel Skizm and Skyl Luik Second Life Wedding September11th 2010

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