The Brian Manley

I love watching movies. Who doesn’t? But my cinematic preferences are quite disjoint with my wife’s. This is a bit annoying, because one of the fun things about watching movies is talking about it! Especially if the movie is insufferably lame. Let the sarcastic remarks flow! Watching alone, for me at least, takes a lot of the enjoyment out of the experience.

So what to do when you want to watch Dune for the 67th time, but there is no one around to watch with? This is the age of social-everything, so why not watch with your online friends? Make inappropriate comments, pause, rewind and slow-mo the scene of the exploding head, talk about how old the leading man looks and how hot the cyborg sex-pot leading lady is.

How might you do this online, in a social networking style experience?

Well, first of all, you need the movie to stream. Let’s just ignore this problem for now and assume that we’re Hulu or Amazon or Netflix…we’ve got the content and the ability to stream it.

To kick things off, I invite a bunch of my online friends to join my “virtual theater”, where tonight at 8pm, we’ll be watching Strange Brew. I do this via Twitter or Facebook or whatever. The invitation includes a web link which directs them to a virtual lobby where we all gather and wait for the show to start. During this time, we can chat about the movie about to be shown or whatever…chit chat.

Now, at precisely 8pm, the movie starts. Everyone that was invited is now watching the movie, which is streaming to each of our computers and is synchronized so that we’re all watching the exact same scenes at the exact same times. This is critical.

While watching the stream, we’re also watching each other. Each user’s webcam and microphone is streaming upstream so that we can see and hear each other. When a scene is funny, we all laugh together. When it’s scary, we all scream together. Just like we would be in the theater or in your apartment. Fun, right?

Of course, you can easily imagine this being extended to television shows and sporting events.

Somebody. Please. Steal this idea.

Desk clutter drives me insane. In theory, I could hide most of the the things ON my desk by putting them UNDER my desk. But for most things on my desk, that’s not practical. I need to see it, fidget with it, put a disk in it, watch the lights on it, etc.


So I came up with the idea of attaching a shelf to my monitor(s) on which I could place stuff. I built a prototype, but the build quality sucks and it’s less than attractive. Nevertheless, it works pretty well. I can put my XBox, my PS2 and a Roku player on top of a 26″ LCD television with no problem.


I think this is actually a marketable idea, but as usual, I don’t have the time or interest in actually trying to build a business out of it. So if you’re so inclined, please steal this idea, bring it to market and make a bunch of money. Just be sure to send me some for free!


Okay, so here’s the thing: Mount a bracket to the VESA mount found on most if not all monitors and televisions. To this bracket, attach a set of telescoping extensions arms; one going up to support the shelf, and one going down to add support. Slap a shelf-like surface on the top of the upward moving extension arm. Profit!