Lonely at Lycos Cinema
Lycos is pushing their "Watch & Interact" technology in a new social networking site called Lycos Cinema. It's a glorified chat room, really. Attendees can watch and talk about a movie that's playing in the top window. Some of the free films available for this "SimulStream community viewing": "The Crossbones Caper," "The Beverages," and "Confessions of a Porn Addict" which someone named "Xlevanus" reviewed:
"it was cool and i can relate haha! it was heartwarming even though it's porn.."
We were sold at "heartwarming." "Porn" kinda helped, too.
For Xlevanus, maybe it was exciting to imagine that the long-gone seediness of Times Square's porn theaters were being built on the internet. Without the sticky floors.
But Xlevanus wasn't in the "theater room" for "Confessions." No one was. Same with every theater we clicked into. And the only "movie" that worked were the Dove ads preceeding the film. After that, we kept getting "service unavailable."
We watched the same commercial of a woman applying new Dove deoderant to her pits over and over again as we "snuck in" room after room. We began to wonder if the new SAG contract will boast an armpit model's minimum for online streaming. We were hoping to ask someone in one of these chat rooms. But no one came in.
Apparently, somewhere on this site people can watch and vote on their favorite movies. The top 21 films will get invites to the Independent Features Film Festival (which has no affiliation with New York's IFP). The fest was created by some guys who made a film, got doors slammed in their faces, and decided that "Instead of producing another film... to go another direction, they created a platform that will give independent filmmakers the global audience they deserve."
We're sure all armpit, indie film models out are loving the exclusive exposure.
Michael Jones is the film festival editor at Variety.com. 
On behalf of the Lycos Cinema team, we wanted to address the error message you received when using Lycos Cinema. We had sporadic reports of that error, and have since identified and fixed a bug that was causing that problem. In regard to the concern about concurrent viewers, the service continues to grow. Viewership is periodic throughout the day, which could account for why you didn't find others in the screening rooms. Finally, on the topic of Lycos Cinema's social functionality – it’s really much more than a chat room for film fans. It's a fully-interactive destination for synchronous viewing. In fact, our patent-pending technology for synchronous viewing distinguishes Lycos Cinema from other video platforms on the market now. Thanks for your time.
- The Lycos Cinema Team
Posted by: Lycos Cinema | 6/12/2008 4:33:16 PM