Blockchain’s Ever-Expanding Impact on the Entertainment Industry

NAB

article here 

Blockchain has the potential to disrupt the way content is produced, aggregated, distributed and consumed — and the possibilities for content creators, brokers and arbiters of intellectual property are too big to ignore.

Major studios, angel investors and crowdfunding platforms are actively exploring the potential impact of blockchain and cryptocurrency access and investment on the entertainment industry.

Although blockchain is still most associated with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, the emerging technology has the potential to offer multipurpose business applications for a range of industries.

“Media and entertainment offer an interesting use case because of two challenges the industry has struggled with as content has gone digital: the ability to protect as well as monetize intellectual property,” says banker JP Morgan. “For media companies, blockchain has industry-wide applications that can transform the way content is created, consumed and protected.”

Funding to blockchain companies doubled between 2017 and 2020, according to CB Insights, and actual spending is expected to reach $16 billion by 2023. While the most visible changes thus far have been in the financial sector blockchain’s gaining popularity is set to have a lasting impact on the entertainment industry.

According to Tony Fountain in an article for Rolling Stone, entertainment executives are starting to identify how it can impact their businesses. “Smart contracts, which are powered by the blockchain, could influence entertainment agreements, providing a secure alternative to traditional negotiations, ensuring reliable payment of creators, a more seamless way to work with the crew on global projects and eliminating the red tape that hampers many large projects.”

Ahmed Shabana, a founder of Parkpine Capital, tells Fast Company: “With crypto and blockchain, the movie and entertainment industry is poised to reinvent its business functions, facilitating secure, transparent, and traceable transactions across the market.”

According to JP Morgan, the entertainment industry stands to benefit from the implementation of blockchain-powered processes, like content micropayments, the elimination of content aggregation, more reliable and accurate royalty distributions, and support for consumer-to-consumer sales.

Experiments are stacking up. AMC Entertainment says it will be accepting Ether, Bitcoin and Litecoin for ticket and concession purchases by the end of 2021.

Last year, indie movie Zero Contact was among the first to be auctioned as an NFT.

Marvel and Fox have released NFTs, including a limited edition set for Deadpool 2. MGM did the same for the release of No Time to Die.

Cryptocurrency firms like CoinFlip, Robinhood and PayPal are tapping celebs like Tom Brady, Spike Lee and Neil Patrick Harris to drive mainstream adoption of the technology.

The IOC minted NFTs for a mobile game themed around the Beijing Winter Games and to drive digital merch for the same event.

“It’s only a matter of time before blockchain technology becomes core to the way in which we interact with new media,” says Fountain at Rolling Stone. “However, there remains a need to increase access and funding to diverse entrepreneurs and startups all over the world that often get lost in the background.”

Like the launch of the commercial internet in the 1990s, Fountain believes we’re at a transitional point. In a decade, media and entertainment will have transformed completely.

“As entertainment companies begin rolling out new technology to distribute media and collectibles through blockchain, it’s imperative that leaders watch this space.”

 

MWC22: Enter the era of super connectivity

IBC

Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was an understandably low-key affair that showcased 5G gains, 6G plans and metaversian visions of the future.

article here

Everything seems trivial in the face of the Russian onslaught in Ukraine, not least a conference famous for its visions of the economic and societal benefits to humanity of mobile coverage.

Telefónica Chairman & CEO José María Álvarez-Pallete, however, gave an impassioned keynote.

“The complete eradication of hunger and poverty is for the first time in our history a possible achievement,” he began. “Yet, despite the fact that today the world is more connected than ever, we are losing faith in ourselves and our future. The reason is that the link between material progress and ethical progress has been blurred. The [current action] in Ukraine has reminded us that technology lacks values. Technology gives us power to change and do more, but that power can be used for good and bad. When it is used for hyper-individualistic values instead of solidarity, empathy or mere connection between people [it sows] distrust.”

This was a sober start to the world’s biggest mobile technology conference, but it got lighter.

Mats Granryd, Director General of mobile industry body GSMA, proceeded to talk about Star Wars, Blade Runner and Total Recall. Think about how much those classic science fiction films got right about the future, he said. “Space travel, human-like robots, self-driving vehicles and absolutely no cables anywhere. They imagined the future and brought it to life. So, what type of tomorrow are we dreaming of? What type of reality do we want to create?”

5G – update on rollout

Underpinning the telco industry’s current investment plans is 5G. The GSMA revealed the latest figures for rollout in its annual Global Mobile Economy Report that coincided with the show.

The total number of 5G connections is expected to top 1 billion this year, and by the end of 2025 will account for around a quarter of total mobile connections worldwide.

In 2021, mobile technologies and services generated $4.5 trillion of economic value, equating to 5% of global GDP, the report said, on path to reach $5 trillion in 2025. 5G is expected to benefit all economic sectors of the global economy during this period, with services and manufacturing experiencing the most impact.

Meanwhile, the average retail price for a 5G phone has now fallen below $500, with devices under $150 available from some vendors, such as Realme. This bodes well for 5G adoption in less wealthy markets and opens the door to innovative services built around the technology.

In terms of coverage, Vodafone CEO Nick Read said South Korea had 90% of its population covered, China 60%, the US 45%. “Europe is under 10% with Africa barely at the starting line”, he said. Europe will only catch up “if we reverse the fragmentation of the sector, otherwise it will be the passive bystander of the new tech order. We all need to face this challenge head on and resolve it together,” he added.

The GSMA also said that mobile operators are facing a capex hike of over $600 billion worldwide between now and 2025, roughly 85% of which will be in 5G networks.

Much of the argument by execs at MWC is framed around its call for regulatory and policy frameworks “conducive” to that investment such as “adopting a balanced approach to collecting revenues through taxes and fees on the mobile sector, without jeopardising medium-term investment and economic growth”.

Metaverse enters the picture

“We are living in the biggest technological evolution in human history and its impact will be four times as big as the industrial revolution,” declared Álvarez-Pallete. “We are entering a new era of super connectivity.”

He continued: “The pandemic is like a time machine accelerating further digitisation and this is irreversible. Ultra-broadband is already here; processing and storage capacity is growing exponentially going to the cloud; VR and enhanced reality is changing how we experience everything. More is coming - blockchain, quantum computing, edge compute and AI. A new immersive world is almost here with web3 and the metaverse.”

Ah yes, the metaverse. It will also undoubtedly start as a niche service, given the connectivity and device requirements. However, the momentum behind applications seeking to incorporate AR and VR with social media and the cloud is growing.

Meta used the occasion to announce the Metaverse Innovation Hub, a research centre in Madrid to be set up with Spanish telco Telefónica, intended to help operators and partners get ready for metaverse applications.

In a Tech@Facebook post, Meta’s VP of Connectivity Dan Rabinovitsj said video streaming will need to be faster in the metaverse, because headsets need more pixels.

“Streaming a 720p video on a standard smartphone screen requires 1.3 to 1.6Mbps of downlink throughput, and on a smartphone held at arm’s length, 720p resolution is sufficient to achieve human retinal resolution. But on a head-mounted display sitting just centimetres from the eyes, retina-grade resolutions will need to be many orders of magnitude larger, even beyond 4K resolutions.”

Korean operator SK Telecom debuted its ‘4D Metaverse’ display where visitors could take a ride on a giant swooping robot arm and get a glimpse of a future virtual world.

Telefónica’s Álvarez-Pallete pointed out that the technology underpinning this new immersive reality “will be the most advanced infrastructure built to move the world forward. We have a reason to make sure this new reality mirrors the best of our democracy and open society - the best of our values.”

“We need a new social contract,” he said.

Avatars for everyone at Weta

Microsoft’s plans to buy gaming giant Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion play into a long-term vision which puts gaming as a key component of the future virtual experience.

The $1.6 billion acquisition by video game software developer Unity of VFX powerhouse Weta is widely viewed as a sign that it is exploring monetisation opportunities in gaming and beyond.

Overseeing that sale was Prem Akkaraju, CEO of WetaFX, who presented digital character Junior from the 2019 film Gemini Man starring Will Smith. Gollum – also animated at Weta on the back of Andy Serkis’ performance – was the first photoreal CG character on film, he said, and Junior “was the first full digital double from head to toe”.

The pact with Unity means that the technologies that went into making such leading-edge characters will be made available to everyone.

He implied that Weta’s software that went into building Pandora for director James Cameron in Avatar 1, 2 and 3 could be opened up to builders of virtual worlds in films, games and sports.

“Imagine what the world will look like when the tools that made Junior, typically only available in companies like mine, are now available to any future 3D artist,” he said. “Any artist out there that has a dream and a device can make such compelling immersive content.”

“So, the way we look at Weta now is not only do we create content but we create creators that create content.”

Collective action on climate

Telia CEO Allison Kirkby was among many execs using the MWC stage to add concern for the climate.

“The race to net zero is one of the most important catalysts in the coming year,” she said. “This requires the fastest transition in the history of business. We need radically accelerated innovation when it comes to resource efficiency and using technology to improve existing operations.”

AWS launched a carbon footprint cloud tool to help businesses understand their emissions output.

AWS is attempting to become net-zero carbon by 2040 and said its new tool will help other businesses achieve their own climate goals. That includes broadcasters where to-date data about the carbon cost of production from cloud providers has not been forthcoming.

This was a key finding from an IBC Accelerator project on sustainable live production. A collective effort involving BT Sport, Sky, Microsoft and the Premier League prompted Microsoft to engage with the industry directly on the matter. Both Microsoft and AWS have pledged to share their data, opening what has up to now been a black box with the aim of producing metrics that can be used to inform future decisions regarding sustainable productions

During a keynote, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said his team hoped the new carbon-focused cloud tools would “help customers move faster towards our shared sustainability commitments”.

6G being prepared

For all the talk about 5G, the industry is preparing for its successor and at a pace that could mean commercialisation around the end of the decade.

At the event, Jessica Rosenworcel, Chair of the US’ Federal Communications Commission, spoke about the importance of paving the way for 6G. In particular she wants US telcos and government to start identifying midband spectrum right now that can support faster speeds and wider coverage beyond 5G.

“Let’s not forget the lessons we’ve learned with millimetre wave spectrum and 5G,” she said. “These waves are fragile. And, while there’s a lot of this spectrum to deploy, it doesn’t travel very far, and right now deploying it is awfully costly.”

She added: “These are early days, but if we’ve learnt anything from our experience rolling out 5G, it’s that wireless service matters for economic and national security.”

South Korea aims to commercialise 6G services as soon as 2028, the country’s science minister said in another MWC conference session.

“We are continuing our preparations for the 6G era with the aim of commercialising 6G from 2028 to 2030… It will offer a network 50 times faster than the current service and an expanded coverage of up to 10km,” Lim Hye-sook said.

South Korea became the first country to commercialise 5G services in April 2019. She said that it is talking with counterparts in the US, Finland and Indonesia to discuss partnerships in 5G, 6G and metaverse.

There has been a flurry of announcements related to 6G in recent months, with governments and industry players outlining plans to move the concept beyond just a vision to identify use cases and roadmaps.

Orange has laid out its view of future 6G use cases, including ‘holoportation’ and large-scale digital twin technology; the Chinese government plans to prioritise development of 6G to 2025; in North America, the University of Texas has launched a 6G research centre (6G@UT) with the support of AT&T, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia and InterDigital; meanwhile MIT and Ericsson have entered into a research collaboration to design new hardware for 5G and 6G networks.

The GSMA said: “Since it takes nearly a decade to move from research to commercialisation, today’s 6G discussions are timely and necessary to ensure equal opportunities and a global approach to 6G standardisation and development.

 

Let’s Not Discount the Pretty Genius Production of “Jackass”

NAB

Some critics are claiming that Jackass, and especially the latest entry in Jackass Forever, should be seen on par with Buster Keaton and the classics of silent era comedy. Are they serious?

article here

Over at Hyperallergic, Juan Barquin makes the case that the Jackass series deserves serious recognition as documentary art.

He argues that the pranks of Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine and company are a direct line from the slapstick of revered cinema comedians Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges.

What’s more, the creators are well aware of this legacy.

“Jackass Number Two (2006) closes with an elaborate musical sequence that references everything from Keaton (with a direct recreation of the house gag) to Busby Berkeley and Esther Williams dance numbers,” Barquin contends.

Knoxville tells Hyperallergic, “When we’re in the middle of making it, we’re not in the moment of reflection — we are in the right now, because you have to be.”

That leads Barquin into a rhapsody: “The refreshing simplicity of [the show’s] gaze, the efficiency with which it presents its truly wild assortment of stunts — this is the true appeal,” he writes. “As documentary, these films aren’t quite vérité — some scenes are obviously staged. But even those segments have a bracing immediacy that lets the viewer play along.

“Regardless of how much Steve-O or Wee Man may talk to the camera, these are actual human beings risking their well-being for the sake of laughs, and audiences are drawn to this realism, no matter how heightened and performative it may be.”

Not only did Jackass take on the legacy of silent cinema’s stuntmen, but it also presaged the onslaught of prank and joke videos across social media, according to Barquin. The “DIY daredevils” that appear all over YouTube, and TikTok have their archetype in Jackass.

“A great deal of what the crew does feels like something anyone could replicate, from trying to light a fart on fire while underwater, to aiming everything from a hockey puck to a baseball at somebody’s groin,” Barquin says. “Anyone could pick up their cellphone and film their friends engaging in such idiotic behavior, which lends the show and films a sense of familiarity.”

Yet he is not an outlier in lending Jackass critical appreciation. Mark Kermode, perhaps the UK’s most influential film critic, also found something refreshingly honest about the new movie’s approach to inflicting pain on camera. Kermode also pointed to the unusual degree of male frontal nudity — repeated across the show’s history — as a rare instance of equality when female nudity is usually foregrounded on screen. The penis is also treated as an appendage for laughs.

That’s the point that The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw also makes in his favorable review of the film.

“In Jackass Forever, the penis is shown repeatedly, explicitly and in a way that’s weirdly the opposite of macho. Its vulnerability and absurdity is what comes across. It’s like an exotic, strange creature…”

“This isn’t a Mensa convention!” says one player in the film. “Is that disingenuous?” poses Bradshaw. “Isn’t there, in fact, some advanced showbiz intelligence and surrealist savvy in the way Jackass is set up and edited?”

 

The holodeck emerges into the light

IBC

Light Field Lab’s holographic displays are nearing commercial reality with a development trajectory bringing holographic TV within range. 

article here

The Abbatars of pop giants ABBA begin their Voyage tour in a purpose-built London arena this May, but don’t be fooled into thinking these are holograms.  

The expertise of over 100 digital artists and technicians from ILM promises to make the experience the most sophisticated rendition yet of Peppers Ghost, a magic trick popularised in the Victorian era. But it remains a 3D projection of a 2D source lacking parallax or the ability to look around the 3D image. 

This is the breakthrough that US firm Light Field Lab claims it is nearer to producing than any other company. It has already begun manufacturing the technology to sold out pre-orders which will be installed in commercial environments from next year. 

“Over the next few years you will see the release of larger and larger holographic walls,” says CEO Jon Karafin. “From there you can create a very large holographic volume ultimately leading into our vision for the holodeck where there’s no limitation to where the objects can exist in 3D space.” 

To do this, Light Field Lab has developed technology capable of emitting particles of light called photons from a custom display that is not only able to generate light from billions of pixels but is able to converge the light in waves at a specific point in space rendering a three-dimensional object visible to the naked eye. 

“One of the most important rules is that you can’t freeze a photon in mid-air,” Karafin adds. “You are either projecting onto a medium or it is VFX. We don’t defy any laws of physics. Perhaps it may seem like we are but there’s some neat optical and electrical science that backs up exactly what we are achieving.” 

Behind the technology 

The key to creating a holographic moving image, according to Karafin, is pixels. Lots of them. 

“It is the pixels that allow us to form objects in mid-air,” he says. “Pixels dwarf the other cost drivers, including electronics, controllers, computation and optics. To date, the inability to create a large digital display of sufficient resolution to form holographic objects has limited the proliferation of real digital holograms. 

“An accurate recreation of the behaviour of light in three-dimensional space allows viewers to see full parallax from any angle and displays an image that’s indistinguishable from the real thing. But it also requires an increase in resolution of multiple orders of magnitude compared to a traditional flat display.” 

Light Field Lab’s basic technology, branded SolidLight, is a 28in panel that is able to output 2.5 billion pixels, or more than 10 billion pixels per square metre.  

“It is doing this at full P3 colour space in a way that has not been possible until now,” he says. “Just one of these panels by itself is already the highest resolution display that has ever been designed.” 

Each panel packs a proprietary FPGA, GPUs, wall and display controllers. In front of that is the key innovation of a ‘nano particle polymer surface energy relay’. “This gives us the opportunity to form a singular continuous wavefront composed of cones of light,” he explains.  

The wavefront contains amplitude based on patterns and frequencies that is being modulated by a phase guide that sits on top of the polymer surface.  

“The phase guide control plane is what allows us to converge the amplitude into a focal region,” he says. “In order for anything to exist as a true wavefront you need extremely high density sampling to generate billions and billions of photons.” 

Since it is modular and bezel-less, these panels can be combined to form video walls of any size with configurations exceeding hundreds of billions of pixels. 

“You can go from forming an object the size of a single seahorse to a whole aquarium of fish and dolphins. As you increase your photonic budget you are able to do more things – meaning you can increase your angles or projection depth. You can trade off these different parameters depending on what application you need.”

For example, the standard viewing angle is 60-degrees but this can range up to 120-degrees. By making the objects smaller the viewing angles can be wider. 

Light Field Lab is initially targeting “premium video wall installations” such as corporate lobbies, out of home advertising sites, museum installations – all markets where a wow factor is important and where many customers already have media servers to drive the content.  

Video wall applications 

Light Field Lab’s own projections for the market for larger video walls show growth from about $19 billion today to nearly $26 billion in five years. The fastest growing segment is for high-end panels with narrow pixel pitch – not coincidentally, the market segment where holographic offerings will play. 

IMARC Group expects a growth rate of around 12% to propel the video wall market to $32.1 billion by 2025, and Fortune Business Insights sees the market reaching $36.16 billion by 2026. Both forecasts make Light Field Lab’s own look conservative. 

Its kit is being sold turnkey, including the software and plug-ins required for customers to generate holographic experiences. 

A WaveTracer, for example, plugs into any existing third-party content creation package like Maya, Unreal, Unity. “You don’t have to do anything differently,” Karafin says. “You could use the content you’ve already generated and then in real time you can see that running on the holographic display.” 

Any content that has a depth pixel associated with it can be displayed. That includes 3D movies. Since all Disney’s MCU films are processed this way does that mean you could playback Spider-man: Far From Home on a SolidLight holographic wall tomorrow? 

“Assuming that the content had any depth information with it that the studio provides, then yes,” Karafin says. “If it exists as 2D you can also convert it to 3D and display it in real time.” 

Holographic TV 

The SolidLight hardware includes a codec to deliver ‘visually lossless encoding’. “We will see increased efficiencies over the next few years that will further increase that performance,” he says. “A commercial broadcast format is where we are moving towards in the future.” 

Believe it or not the building blocks for holographic TV are emerging. Among them is a standard format for creating, processing and transmitting content which is being supported by IDEA (Immersive Digital Experiences Alliance), a group including Light Field Labs, and other autostereo, VR and holographic developers such as Otoy and Looking Glass Factory, along with cable networks Charter and Cox and cable industry think tank CableLabs. 

Currently, there is no standard nor formal specification that addresses the wide variety of display formats available, from XR headsets to advanced light field panels. This is the gap that IDEA intends to fill with its Immersive Technologies Media Format (ITMF) – a suite of royalty-free specifications that establish a baseline for an interchange of immersive media.  

“You need a format standard that allows you to stream into the home. We’ve been working on this with a number of big telcos. We’re planning for the future. We’re getting very close with 5G rollout and as more streaming bandwidth is available. Those are the things that need to come online to support live streaming holography to every device.” 

Light Field Lab is also touting “aspirational” applications. These include holographic telepresence, a type of communication also being worked on by Microsoft and Google among others. 

This would require the system to be bidirectional and twice its current astonishing pixel density “because we’re not only projecting the holographic image in real time but receiving it also”, Karafin says. 

In theory, this is would be like looking “as if through a window 3000 miles away”. 

Another idea seems like closer to the science fiction of Black Mirror. Imagine if it were possible to playback our home movies as holograms? Since it’s perfectly possible to record video in 3D (or 180/VR) today this isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. 

“There is no better way to see and capture our memories than to have that experience recreated directly in your living room,” Karafin says. 

Light Field Labs hopes to produce the panels in greater volumes, in turn reducing the price and making it more affordable to the wider market. Ultimately, the company envisages whole rooms – potentially the cinema of the future – as the holodeck: “all our panels, all around you, immersed in it”. 

“We see the metaverse as the encapsulation of all things that are virtual,” says Jeff Barnes, EVP Creative Development at Light Field Lab. “There is nothing more directly integrated into the virtualisation of the world than a true holographic display. VR and AR is a stepping stone that gets you into stereoscopic so you can move around and see portions of a virtual environment, but if you can replace physical things with nothing but photons of light that is our belief for what the metaverse truly has in store for the future of society.” 

Holographic filmmaking 

Could holographic video walls upgrade the LED displays currently used on virtual production soundstages? There’s no reason why not. In fact, their use would allow a DP to shoot without concern for moiré or chromatic aberrations, and without focusing on an LED screen.  

“If you had a holographic wall behind your actors – or you had holographic actors on set – you can photograph those objects or that background identically to having the real thing there,” Karafin says. “In other words, if you racked focus it would give you true depth of field. Your lighting of the scene would be based on that hologram projecting into space.” 

Holographic characters could be initially used on set to block scenes in pre-production. Another huge advantage, says Karafin, is enabling multi-camera capture.  

“You can’t do this today on volume stages where the background display is directly linked into the viewpoint of one camera aperture. But with holographic you can shoot as many cameras you like as long as it’s within the holographic field.” 

Expectation, Expansion and Exclusivity = Record Content Spending

NAB

With spend on content projected to reach an astonishing $230 billion globally in 2022, is a new formula needed to justify its value?

article here

Consultancy PwC thinks so and has come up with a three-point plan. It’s broad and will vary from streamer to streamer, and even market by market, but the prevailing approach won’t guarantee success — or even survival — as the streaming wars rage on.

“With rights holders pulling their content from streaming services in droves to offer it on their own, the rules of content ROI have changed dramatically,” PwC execs Kim David Greenwood, Kate Kennard and Chris Mowry state.

“The days when companies could count on a stream of revenue during theatrical ‘windows’ — box office, DVD, premium and basic cable, broadcast syndication — are coming to an end. So are the cushy licensing deals that allowed poorer-performing titles to be packaged with blockbusters.

“In this new world, every content asset matters. One clunker can mean a mass subscriber exodus. That’s why we created a three-pronged formula for content valuation that can help drive meaningful and sustainable ROI.”

The formula is simple and consists of three variables: demand, expansion and exclusivity.

Demand

Understanding demand in the era of streaming is not easy. Most platforms opt not to make detailed viewership data public. There are independent analytics from firms like Ampere and Parrot, however, and these can serve as a good starting point, says PwC.

The next step, as PwC outlines, is to aggregate all forecasted and actual revenue-based metrics (such as ticket sales and total views) together with social-impact metrics (such as social media impressions) and quality metrics (such as awards). That will help create your own demand metric for current and future content.

Expansion

Content that can be expanded into sequels, spin-offs, and TV series tends to be more valuable than “one-and-done” shows and films. As PwC wittily observes, Titanic may have taken $2.2 billion at the box office but it hasn’t sold a lot of merch. Harry Potter on the other hand is a multi-billion dollar bonanza that keeps on giving.

“In an industry projected to spend $230 billion on content globally in 2022, megadeals have become routine salvos in the fight for streaming customers.”

Examples include: Netflix shelling out $450 million for the rights to Knives Out 2 and 3; Universal Pictures and NBCU’s $400 million purchase of the rights for a new franchise of The Exorcist, for Peacock; and ViacomCBS spending $900 million on another six seasons of South Park, as well as 14 movies set in the South Park universe.

IP like this can be mined for years and it pulls in the punters. PwC notes that 29% of Disney+ subscribers who signed up during the launch of The Mandalorian’s second season had previously subscribed to Disney+, concluding: these customers were joining back up to watch one particular show that held the promise of more to come.

Exclusivity

The third prong in the accountant’s formula is exclusivity. This continues to play a major role in helping companies attract customers to their streaming platforms. Disney, for instance, pulled Marvel content from Netflix in late 2019, which became a huge driver of customer acquisitions for Disney+.

Applying This Formula to the Streamers

PwC indicates that content will be valued by streamers differently according to their business model strategies. Some companies will offer content for free with the goal of increasing viewership and merchandising sales. Others, for example, will only want to increase subscriber revenue.

Taking just Netflix, which is still the streaming king with 222 million subscribers compared to Amazon Prime Video’s 175 million, followed by Disney+ with 120 million, and Peacock’s roughly 54 million. PwC is projecting Netflix to spend more than $17 billion on content in 2022, a 25% increase from 2021 and a 57% increase from 2020. Yet even with hit shows like Glee and The Office disappearing from the platform, Netflix still has the largest and most robust content library in the world.

The streaming giant’s strategy is to continue building that library with its own content, particularly shows tailored for international customers like Narcos: Mexico and Money Heist.

PwC’s free advice: “For every content investment made, Netflix must ask itself: Can this piece of content be expanded to realize its full value? Can it drive higher ARPU via other revenue streams such as merchandising and new experiences? In saturated markets like North America, where Netflix already has more than 75 million subscribers, expansion is the most important variable: Netflix must find new opportunities for growth beyond monthly subscriptions.”

Netflix recently launched an online shop for branded merchandise like Stranger Things hoodies. That could boost revenue in saturated markets. In markets where Netflix is still trying to add subscribers, the demand and exclusivity variables take on greater importance.

PwC brackets Disney+, HBO Max and Peacock into a group it calls “nostalgists.”

“Whether it’s Disney+ with Star Wars, HBO Max with The Sopranos, or Peacock with The Office, the formula revolves around the sure and familiar comfort of hit shows and movies. The nostalgic appeal of such content is also multigenerational: Star Wars pulls in older viewers who fondly remember the original 1977 film while simultaneously hooking younger fans with The Mandalorian.”

So, per PwC, while demand and exclusivity matter to this group, expansion is the most important variable: “Proven hits have established universes of fans ready to give up their time and money for spin-offs, sequels, and merchandise.”

A third group including Meta, Apple, Google and Amazon see content as a means to an end. They aren’t concerned with viewership as much as how that viewership translates to other outcomes, such as customer interaction on their platforms.

“The Ecosystem Techies are focused on a new phase of streaming growth — one that’s more centered on improving customer experience, building communities around universes of content, and retaining and creating value from their immense subscriber bases and troves of subscriber data. Demand is the most critical variable. More eyeballs translate to a larger ecosystem. Exclusivity is far less important.”

A New Equation

According to PwC, “Proper content valuation represents a fundamental strategic choice for the future.” The key, it insists, is not seeing this formula as the answer in and of itself, but rather as a tool in the arsenal. “When used effectively, the formula can help dictate and frame the considerations and the choices made about content acquisition and development.”

 

“Belle:” Making a Movie for and in the Metaverse

NAB

article here

“You can’t start over in reality, but you can start over in U,” a narrator promises at the start of Belle, a refreshing new take on the metaverse as a sanctuary for young people.

This is the Japanese animated feature from director Mamoru Hosoda about a lonely teenage girl who becomes a global singing star through her alter ego in the online world of ‘U’.

Belle does not gloss over the harmful aspects of digital life such as online abuse, viral gossip and doxing (publicly revealing personal information), writes Steve Rose in The Guardian, “But, rather than portraying the online world as a place of cruelty and corporate overreach, it suggests it could be one of sanctuary, even salvation, especially for young people.”

Vulture’s critic puts it succinctly: “Belle is an explicit attempt to wed the fairy tale with the high tech, retelling Beauty and the Beast by way of social media.”

In interview with The Verge, Hosoda explains his idea:

“In Beauty and the Beast, the beast obviously has this very vicious and violent-looking exterior, but what’s inside is quite different. In a similar way, with the invention of the internet, people have the version of ourselves that exists in reality and another projection that exists in the internet. So, there’s a similar duality happening, and I thought that would allow the narrative, and a lot of those themes, to come forward.”

The creator of Digimon (2000) and Summer Wars (2009) claims he had never heard the term ‘metaverse’ until after Belle’s release, he says. His inspiration was watching his five-year-old daughter growing up in a world where things like smartphones and social media have always existed.

He told The Guardian, “Grownups see the internet and we think, ‘This is reality, and that’s not reality,’ but for young people it’s more: ‘This is the real world and that’s another world.’ It’s just as real and just as valuable, and how you behave in that online world is also part of reality. This is the new world they find themselves in, and it’s all about how they create that world for themselves.”

Elaborating on this in interview with Polygon, Hosoda said he believes the internet has emerged as much more of as a reflection of our own reality now that every generation is using it.

“We have a lot of our own issues that we have in our present, real society that have been transferred into the internet, like the toxicity and fake news and a lot of these kind of negative aspects. 

“I feel, because of that, a lot of other films try to project the internet in a much more negative light. But I want to help younger generations come face to face with all these issues that we know exist in the internet and overcome them, to somehow still turn it into a much more positive space where they can do a lot of things.”

In thinking how to capture this visually he devised a world “that doesn’t necessarily have an up or a down, a left or a right,” he told The Verge. “It’s packed with these skyscraper-like structures. It feels a little more cramped. Not quite as open as it did in my previous films. It really feels like the center of this world, and it’s hard to tell where the horizon starts and where it ends. That was the visual translation of what I felt the internet has evolved into.”

To design Belle’s metaverse, Hosoda recruited British architect and illustrator Eric Wong after coming across some of Wong’s detailed fantasy cityscapes online.

“Belle’s U is a vast linear city made up of geometric skyscraper-like forms,” describes Rose. “Working in the evenings between his full-time job, Wong took inspiration from existing places such as New York City and Central Park, but also from movies such as Kubrick’s 2001.”

The director also collaborated with animator Jin Kim (Frozen, Tangled, Big Hero 6) and Cartoon Saloon’s Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart on the character design of Belle and background art of the film, respectively.

He told Polygon that they wanted to have an international background reflected in Belle’s designs.

“I think there’s not too many interactions between US-based animation studios and animation production culture and Japan or other overseas-based animation studios, so I wanted to help change that in some ways because entertainment is shifting to this much more global medium of ideas.”

Where Do You Stand on Web3? (In the Middle, Maybe.)

NAB

article here

Unbridled optimism about technology can be just as misleading as unbridled criticism. What then are we to make of Web3? Should we embrace or deride the suite of technologies it comprises? As ever, the sanest response is to sail between the two extremes.

The argument is familiar to the philosophical battles around the metaverse, a vision for the future of the internet. Those debates haven’t gone away but much of the focus has shifted to a set of tech trends said to underpin the nascent metaverse and unified under the banner Web3.

The debate has been galvanized by the resurfacing of a 1995 clip from an interview with Bill Gates on the Late Show with David Letterman. The Microsoft co-founder was expounding his vision for the internet with puppyish optimism and Letterman was playing the sceptic.

The recirculation of this clip signals that we’re once again in that peculiar FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) phase of a new technology push, notes Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic. “Some view Web3 with hope and promise. But others see it as a frothy hype cycle, full of VCs and tech folks bullying people into markets and ideas.”

Web3 backers argue that you can build anything online and put it on the blockchain, which means the information is hosted collectively instead of by one company or entity. When you use Facebook or host your content on any platform, you’re on their turf; they have your data and you’re subject to their rules. On Web3, the idea goes, you can help set the rules. And you can port your data anywhere, using a digital wallet.

Web3 skeptics counter that the cryptocurrencies that undergird this new version of the internet are at best a wasteful scam and at worst an ecological nightmare. The most vehement critics see Web3 as an elaborate Ponzi scheme orchestrated by the same greedy and immoral technology titans who built the social internet.Warzel sides with Elon Musk of all people in acknowledging that Web3 “seems more a marketing buzzword than reality right now,” but, “Given the almost unimaginable nature of the present, what will the future be?” he asks.

“Web3 does feel more like investors pumping a stock than it does an organic movement. Still, I worry about developing a mindset that goes beyond reflexive skepticism and into a kind of calcified naysaying,” says Warzel.

“Perhaps worst of all, I find so much of Web3 deeply inaccessible. When I took the time to set up a crypto wallet and participate in the new economy, the experience was devoid of thrill. I didn’t feel that sense of hope and potential that came when I first logged onto the internet, logged into Facebook, downloaded a song on Napster, or held a smartphone in my hand and checked my email away from a computer.”

This is similar to the experience of Vox’s Peter Kafka, who explains that he gave up trying to buy an NFT because of the complexity involved in buying crypto, setting up wallets and handing over money to essentially unknown organizations.

Nonetheless, Warzel insists that the Web3 ambitions must be taken seriously: “It has the money and the influence and sheer marketing power to make the dream a reality.”

Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that powers much of Web3, will be around for a good while, he thinks. Blockchain has established such a durable culture, that dismissing it out of hand ignores the reality on the ground, he adds. And, as the writer Robin Sloan argues, Web3 will likely influence the direction of the internet incompletely and unpredictably.

But, says Warzel, the FOMO-fueled marketing of this technology can still be deeply problematic: It strong-arms people into markets and ideas, attracting grifters, scammers, and the greedy while repelling those who want to build sustainable communities and products.”