The common wisdom on ubiquity is that consumers want everything, everywhere...a raw ubiquity of power. While this is probably born out of championing consumer choice, the usefulness rapidly diminishes once the everything part passes a certain scale or the everywhere part succumbs to bloat. For instance, in a world where 600 minutes of video is uploaded to You Tube every 60 seconds, I don't actually want everything (emerging term: choice fatigue). Similarly, the Playstation 3 is part of so many everywheres that it ends up nowhere. Nextflix by contrast thrives by offering a sensible ways to limit choices and relax the pressure of real-time decision making (just add it to the queue and forget about it until it arrives at your door). The Wii doesn't play Blu-ray DVDs or store video or do calculus, which makes it easier to turn it on when I want to play a game.

On the other hand, I do wish I could add to my Netflix queue from my mobile phone (perhaps via text message) and that I could buy Wii store games from my laptop. Similarly, ffwd's vision is that applications on different platforms should communicate information to each other but should focus on functions that conform to the highest and best use(s). This sort of integration implies a limited feature set in a given platform, but increased usefulness across all relevant devices. Additionally, we lack presumption about what the highest and best use for a given user is on a platform, but rather than pack all functions in to "cover bases", we suggest making client applications configurable. This is a ubiquity of presence, the optimal experience is threaded through all the platforms that do their part in completing a task.

Yesterday at the Television of Tomorrow show, I demoed for the first time how ffwd enables asynchronous "two screen" applications. It's unremarkable in a way: use your laptop to find web clips that you think you will like and queue them for your TV, then switch to a box that connects the TV to the Internet (our choice is the Wii) where with one click you can start a streaming sequence of those selections and one-button skip through the ones that turn out to have been bad choices. What is significant about our implemented is actually (and I realized this only as I was demoing it) what you can't do on the TV client: you can't search, you can't browse user profiles, you can't share videos. In theory the user could configure the client to do those things, but we chose not to because those functions are more easily performed on the laptop. This is both an uncommon technology and an uncommon way of thinking about technology.

There are many examples of how pragmatically difficult it is to simultaneously hold both these ubiquities. Microsoft may have an identity crisis because of it. Advertising creative types are coming to grips with it. The kids, well, they prefer the ubiquity of presence, and that's really the prospect that matters. Interestingly, there is one group that's been managing this transition for a while, and they are doing quite well at it: interactive TV programmers. The example of the moment is Lisa Hsia who keeps extending the presence of Project Runway and won an award today for the effort. After my presentation, I had the pleasure of meeting people who have 10 years of experience with interactive video applications and who learned the hard way that (among other things) a two screen (laptop/TV) application can be better than trying to stuff interactivity into the set-top box or TV on the laptop. It's not uncommon for pioneers in a new medium to presume that the old medium failed because of the people, rather than the intrinsic limits of the medium, and they then proceed to fumble through the same early confusions. Looking to avoid this mistake, I'll bring this lessons of interactive TV to bear on our API launch later this year.

Mark Cuban asks the rhetorical question, "Will you watch what I watch?" to probe a question that is central to ffwd's vision: how will viewers decide what to watch in a world of limitless choices? He dispenses with search as not providing real access to limitless choice (functionally limiting choice to the first page of results). I would add that search engines only enter the flow after most of the decision process is over. You must already know well enough what you want to watch to formulate a search string. He further questions if the currently ascending model of the celebrity endorsement, illustrated by Oprah, is destined to be the king.

At ffwd, we have a systemic understanding of the landscape that may help Mark's inquiry. There are two axes to consider. First the archetypal cultural role at work here is the curator, the custodian of a collection - the Who part (like a museum curator). Secondly, the fundamental cultural operation in question is the transmission of information, or how the curator documents the collection - the How part (museum curators publish The Catalog for this purpose). The product of the curator and the transmission in video traditionally (pre-computers) has been called programming. I really want to emphasize that the essential problem post-computers is still the same (say it again, programming). What has changed is the number and configurations possible for the cultural components, the curator and the transmission method, has expanded

Some examples of how this this categorization plays out:

• Who: Corporation, How: media empire, Example: HDNet
• Who: Individual Celebrity, How: media empire, Example: Oprah
• Who: Common Collective, How: Democratic media, Example: VideoSift, MeFeedia, VodPod, YouTube Homepage
• Who: Celebrity Collective, How: Democratic media, Example: Funny Or Die?
• Who: Artificial Intelligence, How: Recommendation Service, Example: Matchmine, Taboola
• Who: Artificial Intelligence, How: Internet Publishing: YouTube recommended videos
• Who Corporation, How: Internet publishing, Example: Next New Networks

Like the periodic table, a structure like this makes it easier to see the relationship between known quantities (like the two examples in Mark's post, HDNet and Oprah) conceptualize another options by mixing and matching the variations of each sub component. For instance:

• Who: Individual Celebrity, How: Internet Publishing, Example: ??? Could this be where Mark Cuban himself fits in? or Robert Scoble?
• Who: Corporation, How: Democratic Media, Example ???
• Who: Artificial Intelligence, How: Media empire, Example: ???

Well, we are busy enough allowing for the integration of any programming method and finding ways to measure their relevance to a viewer. We'll leave the speculation over and creation of these possibilities to others. Hope this helps, Mark!