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The SXSW music, film and interactive festival continues picking up steam this week, and the usual army of amateur video journalists will be on hand to document all of its panels, performances and people. As in years past, Twitter will play a large role in this, especially if AT&T can shore up its inadequate network in the area before the music portion of the festival starts on Wednesday.
Unlike last year, Twitmatic SXSW is cobbling all of this Twitter video into a single, passively-viewable channel with a fast-forward button and another button for "fail" — as in, "delete this video from the stream so other people don’t have to suffer through it." You also get a re-tweeter button.
But the main way to use this site is as you would a television
without a DVR: by flipping through the channels, only instead of
switching between stations, you’re skipping between fresh SXSW-related
videos that live on YouTube, Vimeo and elsewhere. The site also lets
you tune into live UStream and PBS feeds from SXSW.
The festival is in its film and interactive phase until Wednesday, so at
this point, Twitmatic SXSW mainly consists of indie film trailers,
street shots and the occasional panel clip.
However, once the tool starts picking up footage from the music shows
happening later in the week, we expect Twitmatic SXSW to get a lot more
interesting.
"Twitter, as the dedicated real-time communications platform, is the
best place and audience to demonstrate how ffwd enables an
instantaneous community-driven television channel," stated ffwd CEO
Patrick Koppula. "Plus, it’s just so much fun to watch the visual
stream of collective consciousness take shape."
Twitmatic also exists in a general, non-SXSW version. The site runs on ffwd’s MyTV feature, which lets people create embeddable video stations about whatever topic they specify.
See Also:
- Wired @ SXSW 2009
- SXSW: IPhone Influx Pushes AT&T to the Limit
- SXSWi: Web Awards Honor 2009’s Big Names, Underdogs
- SXSW: Will Code for Food — Jittery Geeks Look for Next Big Job
- The Shorty Awards: Why Nerds Hate Twitter
- Full Coverage: Wired @ SXSW 2009
Screenshot from ChrisMartin.tv’s video
Source: Eliot Van Buskirk
