Curating the Week's Best in Film, TV, Video, Transmedia & Digital Business

Each week I offer my own (human) curation of links, posts, and articles that have informed me in the markets in which I actively consult -- film, television, video, transmedia, and digital business. You can scan the summary, click through, or go to my Twitter account (@nickdemartino), where the items below are among those "favorited" with a star. 

TELEVISION AND VIDEO

• It will be interesting to watch the new TV venture from Mark Cuban, Ryan Seacrest, CAA and AEG, reported here in Variety (a gated community). 

• Long Tail Video created a really excellent overview of HTML5 by cramming a ton of info into easy-to-digest charts and graphics. This is a model of clarity in presentation, especially  if you're into tech subjects.

• Cable networks are emerging as the most innovative users of social TV apps, as noted in Mashable's rundown of efforts by FX and USA.

• As part of Netflix's resurrection campaign the company noted that its streaming service is now available on more than 800 devices (!) and that mobile is taking over. 

• Think Netflix is worried about Hulu and Amazon catching up? Nope, the threat is "TV Everywhere," according to this TNW post.

• Maybe they should worry more about Apple TV, which GigaOm asserts is finally gaining marketplace traction. 

• I loved this piece on the impact of VOD binge viewing on future TV business models, posted on WIRED. I'm a binger, aren't you?  

• YouTube's Reach Begins to Eclipse Television, claims Read Write Web, based upon recent data.

• As it shifts towards more professional content and a channel-based interface, YouTube reached out to its base of member-creators this week. 

• John Seabrook's analysis of Robert Kyncl and YouTube: Will it Revolutionize Television? New Yorker 

• Tribune Media Services Special Report on Online Video. Register to download free copy

• Perhaps in reaction to YouTube's strategy, Vimeo this week released new features, including a new player and a streamlined look. 

• One YouTuber who is jumping quite a shark is Dane Beodigheimer's ANNOYING ORANGE, which announced a deal with Cartoon Network this week. 

• Video is powering a global classroom, according to this story from Mashable.

STORYTELLING AND TRANSMEDIA

• O'Reilly's interview of Narrative Science CTO Kristian Hammond was the week's eye-opener for me, starting with the title: "Transforming Data into Narrative Content." http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/narrative-science-kristian-hammond-data-content-generation.html 

• RealScreen reports on the initiation of production on a new "transmedia documentary" dealing with the Arab Spring from a team of Portuguese journalists. http://realscreen.com/2012/01/25/transmedia-doc-series-about-arab-spring-begins-production/

• PSFK spotlights a new AR app-enabled interactive doc from the National Film Board of Canada called "BEAR-71" that makes powerful use of augmented reality.http://www.psfk.com/2012/01/interactive-ar-documentary-nfb.html

• Canada is in the transmedia spotlight in this rave post in the Hollywood Reporter: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/expert-canada-primed-become-major-282926

• Check out this beautiful display of components that comprised the "multilayered transmedia campaign" in support of HBO's GAME OF THRONES by Steve Coulson who presented this week at the newly named STORYCODE meet up group at Lincoln Center. http://work.stevecoulson.com/portfolio/game-of-thrones 

• If you have the time, check out this 26-minute video offering a case study of BZRK, the transmedia story by young adult author Michael Grant, from Pixel Report in London. http://thepixelreport.org/2012/01/24/case-study-bzrk/

• Finally, SXSW announced the finalists for its Interactive Awards with a list of links to products in each area, including activism, amusement, art, business, community, education, experimental, film/TV, music, motion graphics and so forth. So helpful if one wishes to actually check out the sites. http://sxsw.com/interactive/awards/finalists

FILM

• With the announcement of the Oscar nominations, we move into the home-stretch of the movie biz annual race. the web awash with analysis and predictions, like this one from the Reporter, offering "key factoids." 

• At the other end of the biz --perhaps in honor of Sundance which is in session-- check this out: Jeffrey Winter, Sheri Candler, and Orly Ravid, three of the four authors of "Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul" offer another batch of DIY distribution success stories, posted on Ted Hope's blog.

• Indeed, Sundance's Robert Redford opened the festival with a nod to alternate distribution. 

• Cinedigm joint venture seeks to help indie filmmakers compete in the digital space. 

DIGITAL BUSINESS 

• Apple's entry into the textbook market got lots of attention last week, including a nice post from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, "The Day the Bookshelf Shook." 

• Though "the network effect" may be the holy grail for digital business, maybe not so much, according to this really smart post from the Business Insider. 

• The impact of the epic struggle over SOPA has resulted in some interesting long-view posts, including Chris Dorr's analysis, which centers on the fundamental differences between the technological networks employed by the adversaries (Hollywood, Internet). 

• The Hollywood Reporter dives into "what went wrong" for Hollywood in a nice piece of reporting by Kim Masters. 

• One sign that a company is important is how much new it makes when it introduces change to its user base. Hence, Twitter made news with a shift in how it "withholds" certain tweets -- is it censorship? The twitterati are atwitter.

• That will be nothing, however, compared to the online flutter that will attend to the long-awaited filing by Facebook of its long-awaited Initial Public Offering, rumored to be as early as next week.

This is the Week that Was, in both tech and content. Wow!

This was a very busy week for news in both the blogosphere and the content world, so this post will probably be newsier than most. Dig in, and I promise, there'll be some long reads popped in as well.

But first: on Monday I gave a lecture on the emerging market for transmedia this week which I call "Transmedia Sorting Hat." Check out the presentation slides and notes if you missed that post. I incorporated some wonderful new discoveries and content, including an info graphic from Steve Peters and a look at the work of Jan Libby.  Related links: Musician and protogeek Thomas Dolby is interviewed by Steve Peters (audio) about his big project, The Map of the Floating City, on ARGNetcast. Transmedia and ARG producer Jan Libby is interviewed (in text) by a Berlin site.

SOPA, ETC.

Certainly the biggest news from the digisphere this week was the astonishing collapse of the effort to pass restrictive bills targeting internet piracy. Both the House and Senate versions were dead by Friday, victim of an amazing run of events this week, starting with a cautionary announcement from the Obama White House (which may cost him campaign contributions from some studios and other Hollywood types) and capped by a day-long protest online, as many sites went dark or urged their audience to call or email their legislators. The MPAA, which dominated the coalition that pushed the bills, has cried Uncle, with its President and former Senator Chris Dodd admitting as much. 

Related, of course, was the Justice Department shutdown of  file-sharing site MegaUpload, and, in retaliation, some of the most widespread hacker attacks, with responsibility claimed by Anonymous.

And perhaps coincidentally, the Supreme Court decided to rule this week that Congress should be able to "re-copyright" public domain works. Wow. 

CONTENT & DISTRIBUTION

Analyst Will Richmond posits that we're entering a virtuous circle for "online-only original" production (what GigaOm this week calls the "golden age of content"), taking on Marc Cuban who is the biggest cheerleader for conventional broadcasting one can find. Cuban himself was in the news with the announcement of AXS, a reformulation of his HDNet channel with heavyweight partners AEG, CAA and Ryan Seacrest. Andy Wallenstein at Variety focuses on the channel's innovative business model. Cuban's partner AEG is front and center in a well-researched New Yorker profile called "The Man Who Owns L.A.," namely AEG's Tim Leiweke (and his boss, Phil Anschutz).

Sundance 2012 launched this week with a flood of reviews, gossip and all the rest. I found the opening remarksfrom Redford and his Sundance colleagues on alternative forms of distribution pretty interesting

YouTube announced its own short film festival this week, as well, called "Your Film Festival"  in conjunction with Ridley Scott, the Venice Film Festival and Emirates airline. Big prize is half a million bucks for production.

Speaking of new forms of distribution, Marc Schiller and Mike Lee of Bond Strategy posted a smart piece on Tribeca's site about film marketing and the social graph. 

Speaking of YouTube, the New Yorker's John Seabrook baked a nice slice about the pending shift of the video site towards professional channelization. Nothing really new, but it's mainstreaming the obvious. 

Nature, the UK-based science journal, ran an interesting story about how scientists are now beginning to use crowd-sourcing sites like Kickstarter to fund their research. Fascinating. 

Also, the LATimes' "Hero Complex" blog digs into the "making of" the new STAR WARS: OLD REPUBLIC video game, calling it 'a galactic gamble.'

EDUCATION AND PUBLISHING

Apple made a big announcement this week focusing upon the educational and e-textbook markets, with predictable mega-coverage. Some analysts decried the move as greedy and evil. Or Apple at its Absolute Worst, shouts Business Insider. Other coverage compared Apple's strategy to Amazon's failed bid to capture the textbook market three years ago. The Atlantic offers a longer read, namely a brief history of textbooks, calling Apple's announcement "actually revolutionary." Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab offered four lessons for news organizations, though I found them useful and I'm neither. 

Twitter bought news delivery platform Summify this week, evidently with the goal of ingesting the Vancouver-based team that built it, as TechCrunch reports, noting that some of its features are being disabled.  Web designer Mike Davidson offers insight into why: as does WIRED. I'm a daily Summify user, and I find its daily email summaries quite useful as a filtering device, along with Zite and Pulse on my iPad. I hope Twitter doesn't screw it up.

COMPANIES 

• Kodak files for bankruptcy. 
• Jerry Yang resigns from Yahoo.
• Google misses its numbers Lots of controversy over a move by Google to emphasize its own social network (Plus) in search results. Here's an especially pointed post by John Battelle, suggesting that Google may succeed in forcing brands (and people) to use its social network in order to show up in search results.

Transmedia "Sorting Hat"

I've been involved with helping launch multi-platform stories for several decades, you know, what folks are now calling 'transmedia.' On Monday I spent a few hours in a room filled with Ph.D. students in Santa Barbara, looking at the evolution of the form in a talk I call "Transmedia Sorting Hat," with a tip of the lid to one of the most successful commercial transmedia properties of all time. The slideshare upload embedded below includes my notes. Love to hear feedback.

Transmedia sorting hat

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Week's Best Posts in Transmedia, Film, Tech, Biz & More

A few months back I began curating my favorite tweets, posts, and links at the end of each week in a feature I call "Nick's Great Information Friday" -- NGIF as a kind of lame play on the TGIF abbreviation we all know and love. Problem is: it's too hard to predict how busy my Friday's may be, as was the case this week. So in the future, watch for my weekly roundup sometime between Friday and Sunday. Or simply subscribe to my newsletter and get the posts in your email in-box. 

It was a very busy news week, what with CES, the Oscar race, and the usual slice of tech squabbles. I focus upon links that offer context and understanding, though occasionally you'll find some flat-out news that I think shouldn't be missed. Enjoy!

DIGITAL BUSINESS 

• I started the week in Orlando with a speech to a group of local television broadcasters, blending some futuristic projections about the way we will be viewing TV along with practical suggestions to counter "disruption." Here are the slides with notes, should you be interested. 
• It was CES Week, and there was LOTS of "news" about various gizmos and trends -- yes, LOTS. I was interested to see the continued evolution of the studio's movie locker project UltraViolet, including a deal with Samsung that could be significant, and this one on the Panasonic deal. And this one about the deal with Akamai.
• Marshall Kirkpatrick outlines the implications of the recent deal between Facebook and Politico that will track mentions of candidates from the social website.
• "Network" is a beautiful piece of motion graphic film that illustrates some disturbing stats about how carriers amass and resell our vast data trails without permission. I tackled the topic in a recent post entitled "The Virtual Self."  

Click to read more ...

Digital disruption in the local TV market

If forced to pluck a single theme from my talk to a group of local television station executives this week at Disney World it would be this one: "TV is just another application." Today's consumer still loves TV, make no mistake. But technology provides more and more choice -- both types of content (games, messaging, non-TV video, and so much more) and the way it is delivered (phones, tablets, laptops, IP-TVs, et. al.).

The trend is clear -- TV viewing as we know it will evolve dramatically in the coming years into some new form. Think about the evolution of radio, from the central focus in the living room to a driving companion under the onslaught of TV. 

Over time, the explosion of choice and technologies will necessarily erode incumbant providers -- disruption in publishing, music, movies, and network TV. But what about the local TV broadcaster, lynchpin of the American system of distribution? If I can get the shows I like over the internet, and I can, why do I need my local channel? 

Local broadcasters still have immense brand power in the marketplace, derived not only from habit but because they deliver news, weather, traffic and often live programming like sports which are unavailable from other sources (for now). These and other strengths must be leveraged in the new digital marketplace, which is crowded by all sorts of competition, fueled again by the Internet. Hyper-local websites, blogs, networks and "deal" sites are going after advertisers and viewers. 

Local stations must think like digital natives and bring their brand and content to audiences where they live, especially younger consumers who may simply not have developed the same TV viewing habits as their parents. Some of my suggestions and analysis are contained in this presentation, including an endearing photo of me as a young media activist (aged 12), my first angry letter to a TV station.

Future of local tv

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