Coming to a Small Screen Near You

Yesterday I was part of a very interesting panel for LA Tech Week that was held out at Woodbury University in Burbank, CA.  Von Johnson organised a diverse group of technolgists with a remarkably wide range of perspectives into the future of screen-based entertainment,  Our remit was “mobile and broadband” which obviously left us a huge realm for discussion.  I was the only game guy in the room so the discussion did tend a little toward film & television but Von did an excellent job of moderating the panel and mixing things up.  Randy Greenberg also set the scene with a very rich and insightful perspective on the how mobile and broadband technologies have already and will continue to work their way into mainstream entertainment.  His analysis seemed to surprise much of the audience, separating distribution medium, content and business model into separate areas of discussion and weighting distinctions in content more by commercial than traditional weightings.  His analysis was so interesting that I wanted to reproduce it here and Randy kindly agreed.  Courtesy of The Greenberg Group you can click for JPG or PDF versions of his powerpoint.The panel discussion was quite lively and we covered a lot of ground, as might be expected from such a diverse group of people.  Apart from me, there was;

• Christopher Carey - CTO and Chief Marketing Officer, Technicolor by Thomson
• Randy Greenberg - President and CEO, The Greenberg Group
• Douglas Hunter - Vice President of Licensing, Dynamic Digital Depth (3D Technology Company)
• Jeremy Laws - Senior Vice President, Universal Mobile Entertainment, Universal Digital Platforms Group
• Elmo Weber - President, Nutshell Media - Content Summarization Software
• Moderator: Von W. Johnson - President and CEO, Von Johnson & Associates, Inc.

I don’t want to paint a detailed summary of all the topics of discussion here as I would not do it justice.  However, some of the interesting points that I took away;

• There will be increasingly complex content-recycling systems that will allow us to enjoy old TV series’ and movies on all of our various devices.
• Hollywood is learning from the music industry’s failures and although not all of the hierarchy “gets” digital on-demand distribution, there are a lot of folks that do and they are working hard to do interesting deals and repurpose or create content to take advantage of the tech.
• Saturday night football looks incredible in 3D and this likely will be the killer app to drive 3DTV into our homes, although we will have to wait for some of the novelty of HDTV to fade before things really get interesting.
• Blu-ray has an online component.  I wasn’t previously aware of this actually so I must read up on it.
• There was some disent but the majority agreed that HD-DVD has failed and Blu-Ray is victorious, so I really need to do that reading and Sony has finally won a format war!
• Very few projects from any significant motion picture company will rest entirely on the box office receipts; film companies are becoming more like IP exploitation companies and are interested in any distribution method that can turn a profit, especially if it has low cost of entry (repurposing content instead of remaking it).
• The strong communities that we’re so good at creating in the game industry are very highly prized by film marketers, whom are increasingly working to create communities that are pre-sold on a movie prior to release.  They aren’t relying on it yet but that is only a matter of time and the right project, presenting an incredible opportunity to the right collaboration of film-maker and game company.