epredator, people in movie houses pretty much act the same. I don’t think you can take the experience of 400 people at something in SL, with all the facts or SL (anonymity, creativity of presentation, interaction at different levels of IM, or picks, or links, or p2pability, or 100 other things, and compare that to throwing popcorn or booing. In some countries, a movie plays one way. In others, it plays another way. But it’s the same movie, with variations in reaction.

I don’t think you can try to rationalize clients’ fears of lack of an audience by trying to sell them on the idea that a movie theater is some kind of unique individualized experience without a lot of eyeballs, either. That’s because the ads in the moviehouse are going to reach millions because there are thousands of movie houses. There’s ONE movie house on your island or my island. So you simply have to be selling something different; a very unique and special experience; an asynchronous experience; a rollout that gets a big old media hit; a rollout that starts a community inworld that spreads and interacts, etc. etc.

You really, really are reaching by saying the real world does not rez and can never be identical — please, let’s not be overly technical and wonky here when you have a really simple problem: clients who don’t get why they can’t reach eyeballs. You cannot reach eyeballs in Second Life. End of story. You can reach hearts and minds. 40 at a time, one at a time, not in real time, not in direct ways. The job is more like a ward heeler or a Mormon going door to door, reaching people, than it is like a quick fix of a spot at half time on the most-watched televised football game of the season.

>“Millions is spent on a feature film when only 400 people watch it together in a theatre” Another gem from Sibley. The worry about concurrency in a single space.

Yes, he’s right at the literal level, and it’s important for people to understand that and not obsess about the sim capacity. However, there is something different about a movie: every time you press and play a movie, it’s exactly the same. It doesn’t change. Everybody in a movie theater sees the same movie. They aren’t supposed to talk and interact, and even if they break the social taboo, they only whisper to a neighbour. so the dynamics of push media and the setting are simply different.

SL, because it is streaming, is never the same twice. And even if you try to build multiple instances or have a rock band interacting with multiple sims, you cannot make the experience uniform the way it is in old media. That’s all fine for those of us who are pioneers and trying to crack it. But for the mass audiences, uniformity of experience does matter, and the companies that can ensure them that are winning the ad contracts.