Being Passive in an Active World

As we roll into full launch mode at Overlay.TV, I’ve been spending more and more time "giving the pitch" in front of anyone that will put up with me, but recently it’s got me thinking. During my opening pitch I would usually include something like, “At Overlay we are turning the passive video watch experience into an engaged interactive one …”. While this is very true, I’ve started thinking more about the word "passive". If I look at my life am I ever passive, either physically or mentally? More and more the answer is no. Now don’t get me wrong, as addicted to social media as I am, my thoughts at this time of year often turn to unplugging everything and taking a vacation, but this is a very rare event. During a normal week, I am never passive. Even when asleep my mind is invariably racing about some business situation. Then it suddenly dawned on me. The only time I am ever passive is when I sit in a movie theatre watching a show. I can’t multitask, my cell phone is on mute, my Mac is nowhere in site, and Wi-Fi signals are weak. If the movie is half good I passively sit and watch. So I ask myself, "Am I the norm? Is anyone passive?" I bet the answer is no, especially when there’s a laptop close at hand. We are always multitasking: Email, IM, Skype, Twitter etc, etc. We watch TV, but "work" on our machines at the same time.

This leads me to the question. Should online video be passive?

At Overlay.TV we clearly believe we enable the user to add layers of relevant (hopefully) stuff over the video. I’ve read the comments on the Google acquisition of Omnisio, and surprisingly, many of them are negative. They criticize Google for trying to make YouTube a more interactive and connected application. My view is all the power to them. If they can achieve this objective for a mere $15M then that’s amazing. I personally think that Omnisio is only a small step along the path of what YouTube could really be, but I’m very biased given what I do.

What do you think? How passive are you?

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