While idly scrolling through my Twitter feed one evening, I stumbled on a Tweet containing a video of Matt and Phil trying their absolute hardest to make us submit talk submissions before the last moment humanly possible.

As usual, I laughed in derision, and reached out with my oversized thumb to scroll away, but then Phil said something that stopped me in my tracks. “Smell-o-vision”, he said. Could it be that simple? Could this be my golden ticket to the Demuxed hall of fame? So I started down the strangest, smelliest rabbit hole imaginable, researching the complete history of smell-o-vision, and let me tell you, my eBay recommendations will never be the same again. This tongue-in-cheek talk is a whistle-stop tour of all things olfactory in the video technology space. We’ll start in the early 1900s, with movie theatre owners selecting and blowing their own scents into the theatre, in many cases before the films even had audio tracks, traveling through to smell-o-vision and the competitive AromaRama standard wars (Spoiler: they both turned out to be betamax). Next we’ll jaunt through the deeply questionable history of “scratch-and-sniff” cards, both in the movie theatre, but also shoved in a DVD case for you to enjoy in your own home, culminating in a live, on stage, scratching and sniffing of a 40 year old “ODORAMA” card, with second opinion from Matt McClure himself. Penultimately, we’ll take an ill-advised detour into the noxious dark ages of smell-enabled VR headsets with a very unsocially distanced look at the Nosulus Rift (the only device ever designed to emit a custom Fartgrance), and ponder if any of the upcoming “Digital scent technology” devices on Indiegogo are actually worth buying. Finally, we’ll arrive in 2021 and review what’s to become the future of streaming – O(dor)TT. It might surprise you to hear that there isn’t currently a standard for delivering smells via HLS or DASH manifests, so first up, we’ll fix that, and only then can we take a scene from one of the terrible scratch and sniff movies I bought, and wire up my very own home made smell-o-vision device. Join me, live on stage for the world’s first demonstration of `EXT-X-SMELL` in action. (This is not a joke, you can check my eBay history if you don’t believe me…) Presented at Demuxed 2021.