The Independent Television Service (ITVS) funds, presents, and promotes award-winning documentaries and dramas on public television and cable. The Online Video Engagement Experience (OVEE) attempts to capture the spirit of community cinema, where audiences come to watch and engage in conversation around a film. Carbon Five designed, built and launched the first version of this innovative platform, and is beginning work on a major new milestone.” Source: CarbonFive

The concept is simple: Gather viewers online in one spot to converse electronically as they watch PBS and local station content. ‘OVEE is like a traffic management tool,’ said [Dennis Palmieri, director of innovation and media strategy for San Francisco–based ITVS]. ‘It lines everyone up so the individual streams on PBS.org are all synched to within three seconds of each other.’

The concept for OVEE sprang from ITVS’s flagship outreach program, Community Cinema, a series of screening events convened monthly in some 120 cities to bring people together to watch and discuss films. Community Cinema continues to expand to more cities, but ITVS has a limited capacity to support more events, Palmieri said. Each month ‘we send out hard copies of DVDs, line up brick-and-mortar facilities for screenings, even supply branded popcorn and postcards.’ When exploring how to offer the experience to even more people, ITVS saw the potential for doing so online.” Source: Dru Sefton, Current.org