YouTube has built an epic production facility in Los Angeles for creators, but it’s the Residency program which helps established YouTubers reach a new level with their content.
The Nielsen Co. is expanding its definition of television and will introduce a comprehensive plan to capture all video viewing including broadband and Xbox and iPads, several sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.
The decisions made by the committee are not binding but a source at one of the big four networks was ecstatic at the prospect of expanded measurement tools.
Nielsen already captures a small amount of out-of-home viewing, such as at a few colleges. If a student comes from a Nielsen home, his or her TV viewing is tracked when the student goes off to college.
Nielsen also has a “customized” program to capture some viewing in places like college dorms, bars and restaurants.
Last week an experimental program in New York City called New Cinema shared a tiny glimpse of what that might look like. The works-in-progress are the results of a hackathon from last December organized by The Creators Project and NYC's Eyebeam art and technology lab in collaboration with Framestore, the Oscar-winning visual effects studio behind films like Children of Men and Where The Wild Things Are. And each one, however small, seems to hint at some larger idea about how interactive software could dramatically alter — maybe even outright replace — cinematic storytelling as we currently know it.
Jim Silver, editor in chief of timetoplaymag.com, estimates that more than 90 percent of the “so-called app toys that were trotted out last year sold poorly,” reports the Wall Street Journal. But toy companies are still trying to make it work, begging the question: “why have a hybrid, combining some aspect of a tablet with an actual physical toy or game, when a tablet alone will do?”
“Overall toy sales including electronics have remained relatively steady at around $17 billion according to market researcher NPD Group,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “But traditional toys such as board games and baby dolls have lost market share in the U.S., where consumers are spending 30 percent less on them than they did in 1998 according to research firm Euromonitor International.”
“Meanwhile tablets and educational videogames from companies such as LeapFrog Enterprises have become some of the industry’s biggest sellers, accounting for four of the top 10 toys sold last Christmas, NPD says.”
When it comes to education, Christensen said that the availability of fairly high-quality online learning would be the disruptive force because “it will take root in its simplest applications, then just get better and better.”
“You know, Harvard Business School doesn’t teach accounting anymore, because there’s a guy out of BYU whose online accounting course is so good. He is extraordinary, and our accounting faculty, on average, is average. Some [universities] will survive. Most will evolve hybrid models, in which universities license some courses from an online provider like Coursera but then provide more-specialized courses in person.”
The notion that Youngstown, Ohio, is the epicenter of the 3D-printing revolution probably came as news to many people who have never heard of the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute that the president referenced.
The Department of Defense provided $30 million to help get NAMII going, which will be matched by a consortium of big name corporations, universities and non-profits including Boeing, IBM, and Carnegie Mellon University, just to name a few. NASA (already a big fan of 3D printing), the National Science Foundation and other big time funders are also expected to kick in a few million shekels.
The holograms in the USC project, however, are actually 3D, and are projected into space rather than onto a screen. The New Dimensions team has also taken pains to make the holograms into more than simple projections: For example, 80-year-old survivor Pinchus Gutter, who saw his family herded into a Nazi camp's gas chambers, sat for hours answering 500 questions about his experience in order to create a hologram that can field questions from a live audience.
If you’ve been on Netflix lately, you may have seen a trailer for House of Cards, the company’s first big original content play. But chances are, the version of the trailer you got to see is different from the one that the site presented to me. That’s because Netflix is using ten different cuts, geared towards different audiences – and presents them to viewers based on their past viewing behaviour.
That kind of targeting is part of Netflix’s approach to use “a balance of intuition and analytics” for its original content, explained Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos during an interview on the sidelines of the at All Things Digital’s Dive into Media conference in Dana Point, California Tuesday. Netflix is using “really big data,” as Sarandos put it, to evaluate everything from promotion of its original content to the question of which shows it is going to pick up next.
And we are talking not just simply audience size levels, but very fine-grained data, down to the engagement level with each individual piece of content, as well as the mix of content each subscriber is watching.
...a ratings-free approach is so appealing to creators, and potentially so disruptive to the industry as a whole. “
In a pre-emptive move designed to avoid another proprietary sound format debacle, exhibition groups in the U.S. and Europe have released a set of requirements for new immersive/3D audio technologies.
The requirements spell out two approaches to sound system setups that both adhere to open source standards. These approaches would make it possible for theaters to choose to present films using any new immersive/3D audio format that's designed to the open source standard. The National Association of Theater Owners and the International Union of Cinemas have joined together to endorse the requirements.
Dolby declined to comment said in a statement it would "continue to work with industry bodies, including NATO, to share our expertise and address best practices as the evaluation of potential open standards continues."
Barco did not return calls or emails asking for comment.
YouTube has built an epic production facility in Los Angeles for creators, but it’s the Residency program which helps established YouTubers reach a new level with their content.
Last week an experimental program in New York City called New Cinema shared a tiny glimpse of what that might look like. The works-in-progress are the results of a hackathon from last December organized by The Creators Project and NYC's Eyebeam art and technology lab in collaboration with Framestore, the Oscar-winning visual effects studio behind films like Children of Men and Where The Wild Things Are. And each one, however small, seems to hint at some larger idea about how interactive software could dramatically alter — maybe even outright replace — cinematic storytelling as we currently know it.
The holograms in the USC project, however, are actually 3D, and are projected into space rather than onto a screen. The New Dimensions team has also taken pains to make the holograms into more than simple projections: For example, 80-year-old survivor Pinchus Gutter, who saw his family herded into a Nazi camp's gas chambers, sat for hours answering 500 questions about his experience in order to create a hologram that can field questions from a live audience.