Josef Assad

The archetypal examples of linear content are television and books (with some flexibility where genres such as Choose Your Own adventure are concerned, where there is flexibility around the progress of the plot and deterministic if multiple outcomes). Non-linear content has many examples of varying degrees of exoticness: tivo is an example of trying to reduce linearity of television broadcast, many computer games are now praised for non-linearity such as The Sims and Alpha Centauri. Browsing the web is an example of nonlinear content consumption, assuming one is flexible about the subject matter.

Linear content is less interactive and is therefore probably easier to distribute in the majority of cases. There is no need for either a feedback channel or an engine for programming response to feedback.

The distribution of content to various platforms depends on a variety of factors complex enough to render the 4,000 word limit insufficient by far. Revenue expectations if any, targeting, platform peculiarities, ad infinitum.

To take a few examples though, non-linear content is probably better targeted to platforms with some local processing capability. Personal computing devices from the cell phone up to the computer will remain under-utilized media until the content targeting them is fully non-linear and non-deterministic. Twitter is a current good example of how low tech (SMS) may be used to achieve results which transcend the by-design capabilities of the technology, employing SMS to create what is effectively an IM network, liberating the user from high technology prerequisites by working on any mobile device no matter how old or cheap.

I think that user-generated content would be considered an important component of non-linear content production. The new generations of the Web focus more on providing the framework within which the users generate content than actually producing the content itself (Second Life, youtube, the various prediction markets out there to take some good examples). This could be interpreted as a call for content producers to assume roles more resembling of architects and stewards.

Linear content could also benefit from more non-linear distribution methods. Consumer bandwidth is rapidly becoming a ubiquitous and cheap commodity, and more importantly people are increasingly defining their social network as an online mesh. This makes sharing a potentially powerful phenomenon for organic diessmeination and includes the incidental and very desirable characteristic of letting the social network target the content on behalf of the producer.

User driven non-linear content should and will not cannibalize more traditional programming, but it ought to make it better.