Pervasive Entertainment Times

Quote "Right now Facebook is trying to get more of your opinions codified in its graph, and Sections with ratings are a big step in the right direction. As I wrote, Sections and now ratings could be a data goldmine for Facebook’s Graph Search, as they encourage people to forge connections with apps and media they care about. Graph Search relies on those connections to generate and sort search results for queries like “Movies my friends Like”. Facebook would know to show your friends’ five-star rated movies above lower rated flicks they’ve Liked.

Quote "

“If you’re using two screens, you have to take your eyes off the football game or reality show you’re watching and go to your second screen when you want to complain about a penalty or celebrate with your friends when your favorite contestant wins the game,” Steve Turner, founder and president of SimulTV, said in a statement. “That means you are either watching or interacting, but not doing both.”

There’s something to what he’s saying.

Quote "

THE QUESTIONS REMAIN

Still many questions remain, including: who are the likely winners and losers in the second screen market? Shay Fan a member of the marketing team at Miso, a social TV platform, says, “Success will come when someone figures out the magic formula for ‘stickiness’ – something that will make users want to stay and interact with content. With so much competing for our attention, it will be a difficult, crowded industry.”

Toeman adds, “I think all the traditional players will remain winners for quite some time to come, it's their game to lose really. This is a big challenging space, and I think success will come from the companies who best understand what consumers actually want to do with their time and how they enjoy watching TV. Those who are trying to shape or shift behaviours will have an uphill battle, as well as those who pay too much attention to hype, and not enough to reality.”

Quote "Weiler: I feel as if I’m storytelling agnostic. It is not platform specific. I see it as storytelling. I’m trying to find some type of an emotional core for the work. Can I help the viewer / player to feel something? Can I help them to connect with the characters and story? I’ll often develop projects that mix analog and digital elements. Projects that spill beyond the screen and into the real world and back. The inspiration for the projects can come from anywhere. Similar to when I write for film and TV, the inspiration can come from a place, a feeling, a character, a situation or something that I see or feel in the real world. Lately, I’ve be inspired by things that I feel are challenging or at the onset seem impossible."

Quote" Defiance is a transmedia effort from Trion Worlds and TV network SyFy. The show of the same name broke records at the network, netting 2.7 million viewers for its debut episode. The premiere was SyFy's most-watched scripted series debut for adults in seven years.

When you ask Canadians how they spend their free time at home, many say they now use the Internet more than watching TV – although researchers suspect most understate how much TV they watch and overestimate their online time.

According to statistics from 2012 compiled by the Television Bureau of Canada, the average 18– to 24-year-old said they watched 14 hours of TV weekly and spent 31 hours online.

Quote "This is the most interesting new product since the iPhone and I don't say that lightly.

Yeah, we could say the camera isn't good in low light. We could say it doesn't have enough utility. It looks dorky. It freaks some people out (it's new, that will go away once they are in the market). 

But I don't care. This has changed my life. I will never live a day without it on. 

It is that significant. 

Now, Larry, find a way to make it $200 and you'll have a major hit on your hands.

Quote "At the outset, the Toy Box world is populated with a mash-up of buildings and environments from different Disney properties. The creativity part of the platform is designed to be intuitive. With Toy Box, you can use a magic wand to highlight different objects. Once it is highlighted, you can move that object around, delete it, or edit it. You can rotate the item or use it to build things like castles in the sky. When you’re editing an item, you can change the texture of the item so it will look different in the world. You can modify the nature of the world very quickly simply by putting a power disc on the Infinity Base.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/15/disney-infinity-preview/#HiXZDQyUbvEbVOW7.99

A Cross Media User Journey…should describe the route a user takes through a complex multi platform service. It can refer to their thought processes, the actions they take at various points, the story fragments that are revealed at each junction as they travel across a plethora of channels, devices and forms. It often captures the essence of their UX, user experience and is often displayed as a complex chart.

Quote "

Social TV will also be available “on demand”. It won’t matter if you’re watching live or days later – you will be able to see content and what your friends and other influencers were saying as an ongoing thread between and during episodes.

And you’ll be able to sign up to follow celebrities and see what they’re saying so co-viewing with friends or people you aspire to be friendly with will be part of the experience.

Transmedia storytelling will be a part of the social TV experience. Multi-platform storytelling will be commonplace, as will fan content co-creation based on the TV watching experience. You’ll be able to enjoy programmes as standalones, or branch off to go deeper into specific storylines created by the producers… or fans.

Quote "This clearly reflects a quality “lean back” experience, but there are other numbers that show how much this content engages and inspires its audience. Do a search for “the lizzie bennet diaries” on Google now and it returns over 3.5 million pages of LBD content; this includes pages from the story itself, articles written about it, social media memes created, and fan frothing of the highest caliber.  The first LBD episode with over 1,000,000 views has spurred over 2,100 fan comments, while the exciting episode 60, has received over 500,000 views (100,000 of which were received in the first 24 hours) and over 7,000 comments. Keyword research shows that people are searching for “the lizzie bennet diaries” over 12,100 times every month (which compares to other modern retellings such as “pride and prejudice and zombies” with 9,900 or the Bollywood “bride and prejudice” with 22,000 searches).

quote "Essentially, until very recently, video links shared via Twitter and Facebook or even email have been challenged by the need for a client-side app (to count streams for the advertiser, etc), resulting in very low viewing rates as consumers either have to hunt for and download the app or become frustrated while the device switches from streaming the ad to streaming the actual content.  Now that the technology exists to stitch the ad and the content together "on the fly" combined with an industry recognition of matching the pre-roll to the size of the content (ie no 30-second pre-rolls for 30-second videos), networks are starting to see their ad stream viewing rates climb and their resulting effective CPMs climb (they only get paid for completed ad views).  With ad targeting servers from companies like FreeWheel and VideoPlaza targeting consumers in real-time with more and more personalized information, we should expect to see CPMs meet and exceed those of the analog broadcasting world...soon.

Quote " Immerse People In The Narrative

The Walking Dead, the famous comic and now TV show, used a polling Web app (AMC’s Story Sync, if you like marketing-speak) to ask viewers questions and show related content as an episode was being broadcast on TV. While the app was simply timed to each scene, it was an experiment in multi-screen storytelling that invited audience participation, not just audience attention. Polling has a gimmicky feel to it, but that probably came about as a result of Hollywood pressure and doesn’t reflect the value of the concept in general.

Quote "It doesn’t exist, and it probably won’t. Augmented Reality is a horizontal technology, which means that the nigh-limitless applications make it a challenging endeavor to develop the Evernote-YouTube-Wordpress-Instagram of Augmented Reality. We did however see the AR Angry Birds, and even if it isn’t official it’s still a pretty clear indication that a successful AR game could lead the way for massive adoption. There are already some good examples out there, like the new JengAR game that inserts the 3-D content into the environment itself rather than needing a printed image."

Quote "To that end, the team developed an iPad app that uses motion tracking technology to "map" a user interface onto different parts of an object. The example we saw was a simple radio with a a pair of dials and a speaker, and when the iPad's camera was pointed at it, a circular interface along with a menu system popped up that cannily tracked the radio. From there, Huen mapped various songs onto different positions of the knob, allowing him to control his playlist by moving it -- a simple, manual interface for selecting music. He was even able to activate a second speaker by drawing a line to it, then "cutting" the line to shut it off. We're not sure when, or if, this kind of tech will ever make it into your house, but the demo we saw (see the pair of videos after the break) seemed impressively ready to go.

Quote "

Creating truly cross-media experiences isn’t easy. It takes considerably more resources and a collective team that can explore new ideas but also agree and execute upon a single vision.

That could be a difficult transition, given the traditional leadership and ‘final say’ that has been enjoyed by directors in the media industry for many decades.

Scheduling could also be problematic. The time needed to write a books, develop a video game and shoot a TV show varies; George R.R Martin takes a number of years to write each instalment in the Game of Thrones series, for example, which would be tricky to coincide with an annual TV season.

Quote "Thinking about producing from the perspective of more generic business descriptions, one can examine a bit more of what it takes to create a project in the media space, regardless of the platform or platforms it exists on. Each new storyworld is a new business proposition, and while to succeed your story must be strong and well elocuted, without a producer’s business experience or tenacious spirit, it may never make it off the drawing board.