{"id":1939,"date":"2014-01-07T08:18:19","date_gmt":"2014-01-07T16:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/?p=1939"},"modified":"2014-01-07T08:34:11","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T16:34:11","slug":"bangbanghammerhammer2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geoffreylong.com\/wordpress\/archives\/1939","title":{"rendered":"Bang bang hammer hammer (2014 edition)."},"content":{"rendered":"

Rabbit rabbit!<\/a><\/p>\n

Happy New Year, everyone! It’s been a few months since I’ve posted an update about what all I’ve been up to. The short answer is, a lot.<\/i> As for a long answer…<\/p>\n

Life at USC has been wonderfully, delightfully<\/i> hectic this past semester. As I said back in September<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I believe that there is a place in the future of transmedia entertainment for big businesses (obviously), but there is also a sustainable future for independent creators. There is a sustainable future for people who want to teach in this space, for people who want to tinker in this space, for people who want to keep pushing things forward. The transmedia storyteller of 2023 is going to have a really interesting set of narrative tools in their toolbox. 3D printers, wearable devices, virtual reality and augmented reality and so on, those are the new tools of 2013 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and my new lab gives me the opportunity to explore those, to play with those, and, to some extent, to learn and play and create in public.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A lot of this philosophy is reflected in the lab’s Edison Project, which was unveiled at the end of September. As David Bloom described it in Deadline Hollywood:<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

USC will launch a three-year research effort called the Edison Project to figure out key issues of the emerging entertainment economy surrounding new creators of content, new platforms and distributors of that content, new business models to finance their work and new metrics to measure success. <\/p>\n

…The entertainment business is showing signs of trouble, from the long-staggering music industry to a movie business that launched numerous bombs this past summer, to an ad business that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s consolidating and automating. These problems are happening even as the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s entertainment-consuming middle class is booming, and creation of digital media has jumped nine times. Traditional entertainment, meanwhile, is seeing revenue growth barely keep pace with inflation. [And] new ways of thinking about entertainment are needed to deal with such issues as piracy.<\/p>\n

[Annenberg Innovation Lab director Jonathan] Taplin said the time has come to see the challenges of an Internet-driven economy as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153signposts of opportunity,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d beginning with a new way of thinking about traditional distribution windows as more online-video distributors and creators such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Intel come into the market. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think you should just regard these guys as stores,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Taplin said. Current exclusive deals are \u00e2\u20ac\u0153silly. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just storefronts. Everybody should just have access to every movie. This whole (distribution) windowing thing has got to go out the window. If you do that, you can reach the 3 billion (entertainment consumers worldwide) that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s growing to 4 billion and will become 5 billion.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Researchers will focus on four areas:<\/p>\n