MIT Panel on Media, Tech, and Entertainment

Moderated a panel earlier today on media, technology, and entertainment at the 11th annual MIT Venture Capital Conference. My panelists included:

Jeremy Allaire
CEO, Brightcove

John Lanza
IP Practice Group Leader, Choate Hall & Stewart, LLP

Lucy McQuilken
Investment Director, Intel Capital

Neil Sequeira
General Partner, General Catalyst

We talked about Facebook, Twitter, set-top boxes, Internet video, the Kindle, Blu-ray, iTunes, copyright, piracy, videogames, and the music industry.

The MP3 is about 50 minutes long. Some of the questions during the Q&A period are a bit quiet. The file is here.

MIT Announces 'Center for Future Storytelling'

MIT's Media Lab announced a new research group today, the Center for Future Storytelling. From the New York Times coverage:

Arguably, the movies are as entertaining as ever. With a little help from holiday comedies like “Yes Man” with Jim Carrey and “Bedtime Stories” with Adam Sandler, the domestic motion picture box office appears poised to match last year’s gross revenues of $9.7 billion, a record.

But [former Paramount executive David] Kirkpatrick and company are not alone in their belief that Hollywood’s ability to tell a meaningful story has been nibbled at by text messages, interrupted by cellphone calls and supplanted by everything from Twitter to Guitar Hero.

“I even saw a plasma screen above a urinal,” said Peter Guber, the longtime film producer and former chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment who contends that traditional narrative — the kind with unexpected twists and satisfying conclusions — has been drowned out by noise and visual clutter.

Oddly, the piece doesn't mention that the Media Lab has had similar initiatives in the past, like the Interactive Cinema group and the Media Fabrics group.

Here's the official press release from MIT. A snippet from that:

Research will range from on-set motion capture to accurately and unobtrusively merge human performers and digital character models; to next-generation synthetic performer technologies, such as richly interactive, highly expressive robotic or animated characters; to cameras that will spawn entirely new visual art forms; to morphable movie studios, where one studio can be turned into many through advanced visual imaging techniques; to holographic TV.

Funny that it the Center is launching without a Web page of its own...

Futures of Entertainment 3, at MIT

This gathering in Cambridge on November 21 and 22nd looks really cool.

From the description:

Topics for this year's panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia, franchising, digital extensions and world building, comics, convergence and commerce, social media and spreadability, as well as renewed discussion about how and why to measure audience value.