Breakout Session: Tomorrow’s Entertainment – Technology and Devices
Moderated by Jim Louderback, CEO, Revision3; with Rob Chandhok, President, Qualcomm Internet Services and Qualcomm Innovation Center, Qualcomm; Tim Disney, Executive Producer, The Last Mountain; Lew Douglas, Board Member, Exodus Film Group, and President, Lewis Douglas Consulting; David Garrison, CEO, iBAHN; and Ed Lantz, President and CTO, Vortex Immersion Media
Tomorrow’s Entertainment: Technology and Devices
Louderback: A law similar to Moore’s Law, every 2 years the number of pixels
per dollar doubles. Is that realistic?
Disney: Two ways to go, more pixels per pic, or cheaper pixels.
Number of pixels has not been shooting up in projection.
Q: How far away is a roll up (organic LED) projection?
Disney: I’m not seeing that emerge in the market.
You can get instantly, for cheap, high res output.
Louderback: We’ve got SLRs now, they cost 1,000 dollars. We can do this cheaply.
Disney: there isn’t a 4k x 4k camera. Maybe in a year or so.
It’s a law of physics.
Garrison:3d is new. It’s great but requires physical media. It wont be on your phone, through the air, for at least ten intel cycles.
3D is in luxury hotels. Do you want to have to get a disk from the front desk. You have to guess (as a 3D supplier) which of millions of titles people want to see.
Disney:3D takes either twice the bandwidth, or they suffer lower resolution, in which case you might see it sooner on mobile devices.
Garrison: 3D missed the timing, 6 years from now 3D might have a crack
at becoming mass media.
Louderback:People say Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t as good because it was dark in color.
Comment: Last year 3D was overly exploited by Hollywood. Audiences don’t feel that they get what they’re paying for with 3D. It takes big event movies like aAvatar.
The new samsung 3D looks good.
Disney: The polarized glasses work well.
Louderback: Yeah, you can take them home and use them on your home TV. (Laughter)
Garrison: The 3D game guys have great displays. I asked someone in broadcast and they said “ughh”, “it’s not good” they had it down to 30 megabits a second, 6 is the average. Mobile carriers will charge more for bandwidth.
Louderback: Buying 3D channels will cost a lot. How many will pay 100 bucks for 20 3D channels (based on current price of bandwidth)?
Glenn Dong: “How do you define entertainment today?” I watch something historical and pause, check facts on Wikipedia. People want it immersive, but i’m much more engaged if I take 3 hours to get through an hour and a half movie. As opposed to the theater idea, which is much more social.
The limitations of the medium of programmed tv was in certain formats, 30 minutes, 40 minutes. On demand gives you shorter form, where you watch something for a couple minutes and then go back to something else. If you go to a theater and it’s dark and you can’t move, you’ll watch it, but otherwise you’ll do something else.
If something is 16 minutes long you’ll choose not the video.
We had content aggravation, too much content. We need a trusted source to recommend good material. We need more trusted sources.
Disney: This is also linear content reliant. Playing a video game, you’re in it. You stay focused.
Sponsors and advertisers are used to buying adds in a certain forment. how has revision 3 broken that format?
Louderback: We went back to the old Ed Sullivan show mode, we had a hoset doing it. We do prerolls and overlays etc., but they aren’t necessarily as good. Now there’s selective advertising, we pick our own ads to watch free content.
Farmville uses this, you can pay 30 dollars or watch an ad for a new tractor. You’ll see more ad selectivity in the future.
Comment: In the story world you’ll see transmedia. You can watch the feature film and experience the story elements for an iPod apps, but theyre looking on moving into a story world that will engage the media base.
Louderback: Are there examples where transmedia has really worked? The guys who did lonely girl did a show called harper’s island that wats good, harper’s globe was terrible and failed.
Comment: It depends on what they do.
We’ve done operas after movies and vice versa, we made an opera out of hte The Fly.
Same with football.
The fans can’t get enough content. they can run one quote from the Giants game. Giants fans want to see every quote. They can run press conferences and shows. Custom draft shows.
Budgets are coming down, barriers to doing this content are gone.
You can try new ideas that won’t bust the budget if they bomb.
Philip Nelson: The Horizon League is an NCA conference. 50 live sporting events a year on budget. Small group got coverage. Deployed new tech to schools and went from 50 live events to 400. They were then able to do all the olympic events that couldn’t get sponsors to roll a truck.
MTV has had such success, The Hills aftershow, became this big studio show. As HD has become affordable, this goes live to air. the foo Fighters did a media launch from a fan’s house in L.A. They brought in a satellite truck and went live to air. Now CBS wants to bypass the truck. Live production to an mpeg encoder through the cloud, they did an 8 camera high def production with no trucks.
You can do more for less money, and it’s drastically changing business models, you can now do the cloud transmissions. We use Dixi, but you have to have insane bandwidth on site (Like a medical school etc.)
Not so much scripted stuff, which needs to be scripted and edited
Catherine Velvell(?) Jones in New York, with a loaned tricaster, shot a live broadway show from a house straight to the web. They did another with multiple nights this year. They believe they can revitalize acting troupes.
If you run a small drama theater, you can stream it to a huge population. The market becomes huge, even global.
Sound technology is important as well. New tech called Wavefield synthesis. holographics and reproduction. Io sono speakers, although they’ve had some issues.
“German Max Plancke Institute had sold the technology […] they were not cool with the licensing deals they’d done in the U.S.”
They could make objects move throughout the theater, into your head like a train or casper the ghost. They had point source sound, which make sthe sound come from 45 degree angle behind you no matter what your seating position.
Surround sound you can remember that its just the sound, but with a wrap around screen the object is there.
Louderback: Is the check-in idea of social media working?
Comment: I stopped doing it, the whole idea of people tracking me is too much, people don’t need that.
Comment: Foursquare checking in for concerts is cool.
Response: But that app is getting overrun by facebook, which is a bigger market.
Younger kids are checking in, we haven’t seen that demographic reach maturity, they’re all 6-13.
Kids are comfortable with the idea of checking in to a concert and finding people through media that share an interest.
Disney: Interplex idea, where you go somewhere to socialize. Cinemas don’t have that as much, you go and leave. Video game contests work. Or put dome shaped screens so you’re in the video game and watch the competitors.
How do you get and grab and keep the kids’ attention at the museum?”
Give them incentives, ask questions later with a leaderboard of scores of responses.
Look at alternate reality games and use that as a model for the entire museum experience.
Disney: Games are excellent, we have a moonbuggy race where you go in, build the buggy, and race it.
Comment: Build a lunar lander game with high def graphics.
Louderback: Use augmented reality material. Change what you see.
Comment: That adds the incentive of being able to find things within the game, which is valuable.
Glenn Dong: “Don’t lose the game-afication aspect of it. DARPA did that red balloon thing, people would go on trips to go find them all over the country. It was amazing how quickly that took off!”
Kinect stuff is good, where kids can make a character do what they do.
How do we engage kids in science, using new forms of media?
People can play games and then see the math behind them.
Disney “The head of the National Academy of Science showed that the U.S. ranked number 48 in math and science, which is apalling.”
Kahn Academy offers thousands of lessons in all levels of math. It works to teach at that level.
Louderback “These iPad games can also have 4 or 5 year old children learning their times tables and geography.”
Lew Douglas: John Delaney’s project in the ocean allows 8th grade science students to drive arms and even do microscopy. Unfortunately that kind of thing costs 600 million dollars, though it did get funded.