Second Life Television

And here it is: Rivers Run Red announces a Second Life Television project.

From 3pointD.com:

"PR agency Rivers Run Red, which plans to launch a broadband television and content network in the virtual world of Second Life in November. Virtuallife.tv “will enable news, documentary and entertainment content to be distributed and shared across the entire virtual world,” according to a press release.

It sounds an ambitious project, due to launch in early November on a 24-hour-a-day broadcast schedule carrying music, film, audio and text. More than 100 active channels are planned by the end of 2007, and the network, a Rivers property, plans to produce around 1,000 hours of original programming a year.

The service will be free, though pay-per-view programming is planned for the future. How do you tune in? “A television package will be freely distributed. Streaming will also be available to all landowners.” One question is whether Rivers has found a way to solve the worst problem about video streamed into Second Life: each person watches a different stream of the same content, making it nearly impossible to watch the same program with the same start and end time."

From the comments: Prokofy Neva

"I’ve been a big advocate of bringing TV to SL. I was sad when the SLTV experiment failed for various reasons and I think there should be a lot of competitive TV stations coming in. It’s very important to get local spot news and a kind of civilizing mission going that brings basic behavioural norms to the world in a variety of ways, whether PSA’s, do’s and don’ts, etc.

The idea that it is to run 24/7 and have 100 active channels planned sounds way too ambitious to me. And having it run not by a credible news organization with an independent editorial board with a sense of public mission is highly troubling."