Pervasive Entertainment Times

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.

Quote "Is it a cult? Is it a game? Or is it a life changing adventure? Told From the players’ perspectives, the film looks over the precipice at an emergent new art form where the real world and fictional narrative merge to create unforeseen and often unsettling consequences. Follow along as we disclose a world whose secret identity may mean the difference between enlightenment and total incomprehension. Directed by Spencer McCall."

With current technology, to actually see your route, you have to take your eyes off the road. With this augmented reality setup, the road will become your display. Car manufacturers have taken advantage of heads-up displays in the past. For example, several Cadillac models project your speed, RPM, and song playing or radio station selected, on the windshield.

Quote "Ever since then, we’ve been working hard on the Glass Explorer Edition and we have great news: the hardware and software are now ready for you. We’re seeing the first few devices come off the production line right now.

We know you’ve been standing by patiently to get Glass. So, instead of waiting for all of the devices to be ready, we want to start delivering them to you now. We’re producing enough for everyone, but only a portion of them are ready today. Therefore, we’ll be notifying you in waves, and as soon as we’re ready to invite you, we’ll let you know. When the time comes, you’ll receive an email with all the details.

Quote "Mouse House cut 150 positions from several film studio divisions, nearly two per cent of the division’s 7,000 overall jobs, according to Bloomberg.

Disney’s studio department is made up of theatrical distribution, home entertainment, and television.

Disney announced the cuts as “part of an ongoing review to ensure that the Studios’ operational structure and economics align with the demands of the current marketplace” in a spokesperson statement.  

Last week, cuts were reported to be part of an internal audit ordered by Disney CEO and Chairman Bob Iger.

Quote "As a bonus Easter Egg, the chamber door email includes a link to a URL that appears to be a string of random numbers but is actually a call-back to a code introduced in an earlier episode of The Following. Mosey on over to that site and bask in some more ghastly iconography; a judicious click of the mouse during Carroll's recitation of "The Raven" leads to a video that cribs pretty liberally from Poe’s hemorrhagic short story "The Masque of the Red Death."

Every twist in the Tumblr journey is remarkably creepy, and there's a sort of authenticity at play that one wouldn’t necessarily associate with a broadcast promotional effort. "As the show progressed, we’ve been using Tumblr as a means to talk to fans in an organic way," said Robin Benty, Fox’s senior director of current programming and digital scripted brands. "Using Tumblr as the platform for this has allowed us to make the experience creepy and cool. It doesn’t look and feel like just another overt marketing campaign."

So while it’s not as cut-and-dry as “shopping is for girls,” “sports are for boys,” based on the data for number of app categories, the answer is yes, men and women do have different taste in apps. But not so much that it necessitates the existence of gender-specific mobile devices.

Quote "Why is this a big deal? Teens make up an $819 billion consumer segment, and the social media chatter about brands—positive or negative—is an increasingly large influence on their purchasing decisions. Just over half of all teens polled for the research (53 percent for female teens and 52 percent for teenage males) said social media affects their overall purchasing decisions, a trend that has gained strength in recent quarters."

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 "With the build-up to Episode 1, the expanded universe as it came to be called, went into overdrive. The film had more tie-ins than any other film before it. And since 1999, hundreds of books, comic books, dozens of video games, and even a television show have been produced in the Star Wars universe. It can be hard to keep it all straight. Here at StoryHobby.com we will be piecing it all together for you. You may have seen a lot of book/comic reviews in the news feed. This is part of a Star Wars project to piece the universe together. Visit the Star Wars Timeline to see what we've got so far."

...and of course 'there is nothing new about new media' but “There’s never been a better time to be a storyteller because there’s never been more screens and media forms to tell stories on.” Mike Jones, Australian multiplatform expert - still there are not many Aussies jumping on this particular cart at the moment...

One of the key techniques for Nashak is working on the interactive property alongside the development of the television show or movie. "Where we can get in with the creatives early, we try to develop in tandem with them a digital strategy," Nashak explained. "That's the wave of the future and BBC's been doing that."

One of the problems with games based on other media has been releasing games months or even years after the movie or TV show it was based on was at its peak. With mobile products it seems like it's more possible to release games near or even with the release of a TV show, which means that the game can really take advantage of the marketing for the TV show. "We definitely want to be there for the promotional tie-ins, absolutely," Nashak agreed. "But you also want to be there between the promotional heights to extend the brand. Dinosaurs are particularly easy because dinosaurs are so perennially popular, and this is a brand that can do dinosaurs like no one else."

Quote "Yahoo's earnings for the quarter were US$390 million, up 36 percent from last year, but revenue was down. Continuous improvements to Yahoo's products "will set up the company for long-term growth," the company said earlier Tuesday.

Yahoo is already making some progress in mobile. In the first three months of 2013, the number of monthly, mobile active users on Yahoo surpassed 300 million for the first time, Mayer said. That's up from 200 million reported in its last earnings call in January.

The number of daily active users on Yahoo-branded apps like Mail and Flickr also increased by more than 50 percent during the quarter, the company said. On Flickr, mobile photo uploads increased by more than 50 percent quarter over quarter.

Quote "The second screen experience slowly replaced the first — I barely looked up at the television. CBS’s reverent, almost whispered coverage took a back seat as I programmed my version of the Masters. The function that would have allowed me to throw the Internet coverage to my big-screen television was not enabled, but that’s only a matter of time. Change often comes very slowly, but then happens all at once.

CBS paid dearly for rights to the Masters, marketers ponied up to advertise in limited spots and my cable provider paid a hefty toll in terms of retransmission fees, but there I was, staring at the device on my lap, looking at a bright future — no cable, no commercials, no bundle required.

Quote “When you ask people what they’re doing while watching ‘Game of Thrones’ or ‘Walking Dead,’ ” Ms. Kopp said of those television series, “a lot of them are already doing exactly the stuff that I might describe in a more academic fashion. They watch ‘Walking Dead’ and they play the game, having a two-screen app experience, or they watch ‘Game of Thrones’ and they follow the characters on Twitter. People have been doing that for a long time now. What I think is interesting is how creative artists, filmmakers, are taking these things that were considered more a part of marketing and thinking of the Web as an artistic medium.”

Quote "I have made a film.
I have made the film I wanted to do.
I have made it with complete (and I mean it) creative freedom. Not a single producer/distributor/investor up my ass telling me what and what not to do (which sometimes can be not so good, but I’m glad I had the chance of experimenting it, since very few directors have the chance to make mistakes by themselves and make choices).
I have made it with 5000 new friends I made along the way that were there for me in the good and bad moments and that will talk about their movie much better than myself.
And all this allowed us to not only make the film we wanted but to also be able to skip the intermediaries if we needed to, to be able to negotiate in our terms many times and to distribute the film the way we wanted.

Quote "That scenario, my friend, is social TV in full swing. Television viewership nowadays is a totally interactive experience. Past are the days where watching television means family bonding time or some “me time”. Channel surfing is now enjoyed with friends or tweet-mates.

Recent data posited by The Next Web shows that the largest chunk of opinions that sway TV viewership come from social networks, namely Facebook and Twitter.  Websites for the TV show itself come in at third place and general entertainment sites come in fifth. Remarkably, the rest of the list is made of social networks as well such as Pinterest, Reddit, GetGlue, FourSquare, and others.