At Neuros, just by virtue of the fact that we have an open device, we encounter so many interesting modifications and enhancements to our device. So I decided to create a little series of videos, where we talk about the technologies, social phenomenon, the trends and the hacks that are shaping television today and in the future. Some of the trends are the obvious ones that we know will come: The future will hold more choice, better time shifting, and access to content on more devices. But the future of television will be much more, and much more interesting than just that. Connecting the open internet to the TV will give us a lot more than a better, faster, cheaper experience. It will connect us in new, previously unimaginable ways.

One of those ways I call "crowd narration" and it's the product of a hack done on the Neuros OSD at a BBC sponsored event by Matthew Wild . What Crowd Narration does is to overlay two lines of text chat over the bottom of the TV image. In the attached video, we have a hypothetical chat room discussion superimposed over the state of the union address. In production, you can imagine that would be multiple chat channels to chose from, some professionally narrated, some by your friends, some that are open, some closed. All together, there might be dozens or hundreds of channels for each event or show.

The instructions are pretty simple, but do require you to telnet into the box.

Download the program from heavy-horse

Put it somewhere accessible on the OSD, telnet in, and run it:

./chatbox bbcone@chatbox.heavy-horse.co.uk OSD

The first parameter is the room to join, the second is the nickname it will use.

Any of the rooms from http://chatbox.heavy-horse.co.uk/ can be
accessed.

When you want to stop the program, press ctrl+c in the telnet window
(or run: killall chatbox)

We live in a world where every minute technology is increasing our empowerment, increasing our ability to participate in every discussion, sales pitch, and political debate around the globe. It won't all be pretty, honest or kind, but if the history is any indication, we can expect that free communication will do a better job of bringing the truth out than an central gatekeeper ever could.

http://open.neurostechnology.com/content/crowd-narration-future-tv