From TV ratings to what happens to your digital content when you are gone, panelists at USC’s Silicon Beach conference discussed how media distribution is changing — and how Hollywood is tackling those changes.
YouTube’s Mitch Feinman, Qualcomm’s Liz Gasser, Mitch Singer of Sony Pictures and David Wertheimer of Fox Broadcasting talked about where they see entertainment heading.
One obvious change has been the decline of physical media as VOD and online services have taken away the friction of renting from brick-and-mortar stores. People have also moved away from building libraries of physical media while not entirely trusting the purchase of digital media stored in the cloud.
Hollywood’s UltraViolet initiative looks to dispel consumers’ concerns about the cloud and meet the demand for content in this digital world.
Wertheimer discussed multiplatform products that inherently incorporate various content — long and short form video, TV programming, interactive media, etc. — instead of merely having one type with supplementary adds-ons. “What kind of new storytelling experiences can we create with new technology?” he asks.
Feinman spoke about YouTube’s focus on making multi-screen viewing seamless by allowing devices to interact with one another. Similarly, Gasser talked about connectivity and how devices are moving beyond communicating with users and other devices — to interacting with real world places and things. Such a revolution requires people to rethink how content is owned and managed, she suggests.
This topic will surely be debated in the coming years as people reevaluate ownership and licensing rights, Singer points out, adding that related laws will need to be revisited.
The panelists also discussed how software and user interfaces have become more important than the hardware itself, in addition to the benefits and challenges of an a la carte distribution model.
Still, one thing remains true. “All the technology in the world has not changed the fundamental premise: people want to watch great content,” Wertheimer concludes.
Social media continues to revolutionize communication, while technology enables more sophisticated electronic devices, and media consumption is being rewritten by new distribution methods.
Aber Whitcomb, CTO for the Social Gaming Network, and Drew Baumann, CTO of the YouTube-oriented business Fullscreen, spoke about these changes — and how Los Angeles is where it all comes together.
According to Baumann, Silicon Beach is the place for media technology companies. The more established media companies in the area are intrigued by new technology-powered media ventures.
There is an assumption that technology comes from Silicon Valley and entertainment from Hollywood, Whitcomb agrees. But actually, there is a convergence of the two spheres, even more so in Silicon Beach.
The norm today is to “consume content on multiple screens and people expect to be able to do that,” Whitcomb notes of the new distribution philosophy. This also applies to gaming; his company works to provide seamless transitions between devices and platforms.
“The media business has been around for a hundred years, but it’s evolving,” Baumann explains. Brands and media companies are awesome at creating content, but don’t really know how to use new distribution methods, like YouTube, to their full potential.
“The video distribution business is really being disrupted right now and I’m excited to see what new businesses it creates,” he says.
Both panelists believe this is an exciting time to be in the industry, especially in Silicon Beach — even though the next chapter is difficult to predict.
Media professionals gathered at USC yesterday for the all-day Silicon Beach conference.
Sandy Gould, vice president of recruitment at the Disney-ABC Television Group, and Kevin Winston, founder of Digital LA, spoke about how Silicon Beach in southern California is changing the professional environment and approach to entrepreneurship.
We’re accustomed to a stiff corporate structure, but “now we live in a time when actually we should be driving the change,” Gould notes.
No longer are job titles or responsibilities static, he suggests. Flexibility is really important in applying for jobs as well as pitching entrepreneurial ideas — “go where the opportunity is strongest.”
“It’s a great time to experiment with what you want to do,” Winston agrees. While flexibility is key, commitment is also very important. “Follow up, see your passions though,” he recommends, adding that you shouldn’t hold off on pushing your idea forward. “Get it done; people want to see that you’re committed.”
The intersection of entertainment and technology makes Silicon Beach a great place for start-ups, the panelists said. Los Angeles is open to creativity and flexibility in addition to having big names that can boost your start-up’s reputation.
Also, with the expansion of digital and social media, “there’s so much more capability, power and influence in the hands of the community,” Gould points out. This makes sharing your idea and creating a user base easier. Established companies are leveraging the power of community to shape their own ideas — for example, using public forums to aggregate ideas for show episodes.
The panelists talked about the universal value of telling your story — of being able to excite people about your ideas or yourself. “You have to have passion in what you do, have creativity in an idea and then tell people what you do,” recommends Winston.
Fuji Film has announced that it will stop producing film stock for theatrical movies by spring of next year.
The company has been producing film stock since 1934, and is currently taking final orders for its only remaining plant still making the product.
“Fuji will continue to produce its Eterna-RDS archive film for film preservation work, however, while halting production of film stock used for shooting, editing and screening pics,” notes Variety.
“The three biggest makers of film stock globally are Eastman Kodak with a 55 percent share, followed by Fuji with 35 percent and Agfa with 10 percent,” explains the article.
With the shift from film to digital, worldwide demand for film stock dropped 70 percent from 2007 to 2011.
The Digital Domain Media Group won an Oscar for its reverse-aging special effects in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” worked on the 3D transformation of “Titanic” and awed audiences with its hologram performance of the late Tupac Shakur earlier this year.
Despite its impressive resume, the special effects company has filed for bankruptcy after its shares fell 94 percent from a peak in May.
“Digital Domain’s financials have long been a concern,” CNN reports. “Since the company was typically hired by Hollywood studios on a contract basis, its revenue stream was pretty small. Digital Domain expressed hope recently that expanding the virtual performer business beyond Tupac would be lucrative, as it would be able to get a cut of the ticket sales for such events.”
This June, the company’s debt outweighed its assets by $9 million. With a court’s approval, private investment firm Searchlight Capital Partners will acquire Digital Domain’s core production business for $15 million.
Digital Domain had teamed up with Lionsgate to produce a film based on the popular sci-fi novel “Ender’s Game,” to be released November 1, 2013. Regardless of the company’s bankruptcy filing, “the postproduction work remains on schedule,” a Lionsgate representative said. “We’re confident that we will release the film as planned.”
An estimated five million homes don’t get traditional TV service, but according to a new report from Nielsen, 75 percent of those homes still own a television.
“The company’s report shows how the nature of TV service is slowly changing,” Yahoo writes. “Before the percentage started declining about three years ago, more than 99 percent of TV homes received the traditional TV signals. Now that has dipped just below 96 percent.”
Instead of traditional TV, consumers are using their television sets for content on various platforms like DVDs, Netflix and Apple TV.
“During the first three months of 2012, the average consumer spent about 2 percent less time watching traditional TV than the previous year, Nielsen said. They more than made up for that by spending more time watching material recorded on DVRs or on the Internet through TVs, computers and mobile devices,” the article states.
The switch is in part attributed to economic difficulty. Nielsen said it may redefine “what it considers a television household to include people who get service through Netflix or similar services instead of the traditional TV signals,” explains Yahoo.
The report also found that the average consumer spends 14 minutes a day using game consoles, often for watching video; also, people of 65 years or more spend 48 hours a week watching TV compared to the 22 hours that 12- to 17-year-olds spend weekly.
Millennial Media released its September 2012 Mobile Mix report, “the latest edition of the industry’s most reliable source for mobile device and OS trends,” according to a post on the company’s site.
The report contains data from Q2 of this year and breaks down data regarding the Top 20 mobile phones, Top 10 mobile application categories and Top 5 tablets.
According to the report, Apple was the leading manufacturer and the iPhone was the leading mobile device. Samsung came in as the second leading manufacturer and had eight different devices included in the Top 20 mobile phones.
“The iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab and Kindle Fire were the top three tablets ranked by impressions, and all three tablets were in the top 20 overall mobile devices on the Millennial Media platform,” explains the press release. “95 percent of tablet impressions came over a Wi-Fi network, showing that many tablet owners are using their devices at home or work, where they have reliable Wi-Fi connections.”
“The report also found 46 percent of all impressions on the Millennial Media platform were on the Android operating system, compared to 34 percent for iOS, 15 percent for the BlackBerry OS and 4 percent for Windows,” according to the report.
Matt Cohler, former Facebook exec and current general partner with Benchmark Capital, argues that mobile ads will eventually be as influential as traditional television advertising and more effective than those on the Web.
“[With the Web] you’d get 12 different things going on at the same time,” he pointed out at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. “It’s not that immersive. The smartphone is one screen for the user to focus on, in a device they have a deep emotional connection to.”
Mobile advertising has historically struggled as users bemoan the experience. This leads to tight pocketed advertisers refusing to spend much on mobile.
Cohler has not invested in any companies this year, but suggests mobile payment systems and mobile marketplaces are set to break out into more successful entities.
“In the very early days of Facebook, around when they were moving into their first offices, the company would talk about itself as ‘a device in your pocket, that would tell you what your shared context was with anyone around you,'” writes TechCrunch, summarizing a story told by Cohler. “This was before the iPhone, Android and other smartphones of today — and now, that device in your pocket really is what you use, just like early Facebookers had imagined.”
CBS, the most viewed network, is benefiting from its older audience — averaged at 57 years old.
While the oft-targeted and prized consumers aged 18-24 are delaying the start of their own households and families, and commonly living without TVs, the youngest members of the Baby Boomer generation are just turning 48 and are often financially stable.
Luxury cars, financial services and pharmaceutical companies represent the three largest ad categories for CBS and play well with older viewers.
This year, CBS expects to generate more money though ads targeted to 25-to-54 year olds than any other age category.
“Reaching younger consumers, assumed to be more open to new products, has been the primary preoccupation of advertisers since the 1970’s,” notes Businessweek. “Now the relatively better-off consumers in their 50’s are willing to try new products — and have more cash to buy them.”
While advertisers still pay a premium for younger audiences, the older viewers are gaining more importance in the advertising realm with the realization that the struggling economy hasn’t affected them as much as younger generations.
The Atlantic got a behind-the-scenes look at Google’s “Ground Truth” system, which is responsible for the creation and sustaining of its intricate Google Maps.
These maps are widely used within today’s mobile infrastructure. “Where you’re searching from has become almost as important as what you’re searching for,” writes The Atlantic.
Google realizes this and continues to expand its mobile reach, with an ongoing and tight focus on maps.
Former NASA engineer Michael Weiss-Malik, who works on Google Maps, said of the creation process: “There are a couple of steps. You acquire data through partners. You do a bunch of engineering on that data to get it into the right format and conflate it with other sources of data, and then you do a bunch of operations, which is what this tool is about, to hand massage the data. And out the other end pops something that is higher quality than the sum of its parts.”
The truly impressive aspect of Google Maps is that “humans are coding every bit of the logic of the road onto a representation of the world so that computers can simply duplicate (infinitely, instantly) the judgments that a person already made,” explains the article.
“I came away convinced that the geographic data Google has assembled is not likely to be matched by any other company,” writes Alexis C. Madrigal, senior editor at The Atlantic. “The secret to this success isn’t, as you might expect, Google’s facility with data, but rather its willingness to commit humans to combining and cleaning data about the physical world.”
Hewlett Packard, known for its long history of technological innovation, released its Spectre One desktop computer over the weekend. And according to The Next Web, it looks like an Apple iMac replica.
“The phrase ‘Redmond, start your photocopiers’ was used to market Mac OS X Tiger back in 2006 and referred to Microsoft,” notes the post. “Microsoft is pushing something new and original with Windows 8, but the OEMs making computers for it seem to have done just that.”
“Note that even the keyboard and touchpad are nearly complete clones of Apple’s offerings,” writes TNW. “This is just a sad day for HP. There are nearly infinite combinations of components and design to choose from here and it decided to effectively clone Apple.”
Steve Jobs warned of this happening to HP during his interviews with biographer Walter Isaacson. He hoped he’d left a stronger legacy at Apple than Hewlett and Packard had at HP.
According to Engadget, the Spectre One desktop will be available November 14th starting at $1,299.
Businesses now invest more resources into individual computing, and particularly into Apple iPads, according to a report from Forrester Research.
Government and business computer purchases will grow only 1.7 percent over last year, according to Forrester’s estimates. Much of this growth comes from the purchase of iPads, expected to increase 76 percent in sales this year. This brings government and business iPad purchases to about $10 billion this year.
Forrester expects Mac sales to businesses to grow 9 percent while Windows products are expected to see a 3 percent drop over last year. Linux and Android tablets will rise 52 percent, estimates Forrester.
Forrester used surveys of I.T. managers to estimate Mac sales. Apple does not release corporate sales information, so it is difficult to verify the statistics.
One of the largest reasons for the Mac increase is the growing popularity of “bring your own device” policies. These types of policies often lead to Mac purchases, for which companies sometimes reimburse employees.
Forrester’s grim outlook for Microsoft assumes the upcoming release of Windows 8 and Surface Tablets will not create a great stir in the corporate world. “I think it will have a positive impact, but it just won’t be a great positive impact,” explained Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels.
Apple unveiled its new iPhone 5 and iOS 6 yesterday at a press event in San Francisco.
“This is a glass and aluminum two-tone affair and, at 7.6mm it’s a full 18 percent thinner than the 4S,” reports Engadget. “It’s even 20 percent lighter at 112 grams, which is even less than the mostly plastic Galaxy S III.”
The new phone touts a 4-inch in-cell display and 1136 x 640 Retina panel (closer to 16:9, but not quite there).
“That new longer screen allows for an extra set of icons to be displayed on the home screen, and first party apps have already been tweaked to take advantage of the additional real estate,” notes the post. “The iWork suite, Garage Band and iMovie have all been updated.”
Older apps will work, but will appear in letterbox format until an update arrives.
“The most exciting news is likely the addition of LTE,” suggests the post. “There’s still HSPA+, EV-DO, EDGE and all that jazz on board, but it’s the true 4G that is really generating excitement. Sprint, Verizon and AT&T will all be able to take advantage of the single chip (data and voice) LTE solution inside.”
The iPhone 5 features a 802.11 a/b/g/n antenna, but no NFC as previously speculated.
Apple claims the new A6 CPU is two times faster than the previous chip and 22 percent smaller. The energy efficient CPU allows for 8 hours of talk time, according to Apple.
The company also announced its new iOS 6, available September 19th. “The latest mobile system from Apple packs a boat load of exciting improvements, including tweaks to Siri and the new Passbook (which would have worked really well with that rumored, but ultimately non-existent NFC chip),” notes Engadget.
The iPhone 5 will ship on September 21st ($199-$399), while pre-orders are slated to begin on the 14th.
20th Century Fox has joined Disney to become the second major studio to support Dolby Laboratories’ Atmos audio platform to change “the way films sound at the megaplex,” reports Variety.
“The Fox deal is significant for Dolby as a sound system battle is quietly tuning up inside the world’s movie theaters,” notes the article.
“Dolby hopes the Atmos rollout will help it control a larger share of the in-theater surround sound biz as it competes with rivals like Barco, Immsound, Iosono and Illusonic 3D, which are also promoting new systems to exhibs, especially as more theaters make the transition to digital projection.”
Atmos has received high praise from sound designers and filmmakers thus far, and could end up saving theaters money in the long run because it “automatically creates mono, stereo and 5.1 and 7.1 mixes of a movie, optimizing distribution of one version of a film to most theaters and homevid formats,” according to Variety.
If Dolby can continue to encourage theater chains to convert, “Atmos is expected to be used by exhibitors as a marketing tool to fill more theater seats the way they promoted screenings with THX in the 1980s and DTS and Dolby Digital in the 1990s.”
Live2D aims to take your 2D drawings and render them in 3D. Developed by Cybernoids, the technology “makes the graphics appear exactly as the creator intended,” according to the company’s CEO Tetsuya Nakajo.
“You can also use the tools to work more easily and efficiently. This can be done in all kinds of ways, with all kinds of emphasis, depending on what the creator wants to do,” notes Nakajo. “This technology is an extension of drawing, so it works best if the creator has a good artistic sense.”
The tools support “content creation using either polygons or vectors,” DigInfo TV writes. “A 3D engine is used to power the polygon-based version, so it can achieve fast, fluid motion even on mobile devices.”
Live2D is available across various portable consoles and smartphones. For now, the technology is mostly used for games with limited movement, but Cybernoids aims to provide 360 degree animations in the future.
“We’re aiming for this technology to be used worldwide, hopefully creating a market for revolving graphics in 2D, like with 3D. So, our goal is for this technology to become a de facto standard worldwide,” Nakajo says.
