Webcasts of Futures of Entertainment Conference Now Online
/Many of you have asked over the past month whether we were going to be webcasting the Futures of Entertainment conference panels. We had hoped to be able to stream these live through Second Life and ran into surprising legal obstacles in doing so. We have had to strong with the technical challenges of mixing this footage -- shot on multiple cameras, digitize it, and index it so that you could get much easier access to the material you want to hear. Keep in mind that we ran two and a half hour long sessions at the conference. Keep in mind as well that getting this material up required permission from each of the companies represented on the program. Special thanks goes to Rik Eberhardt, CMS's resourceful and hardworking technologist in residence, and to Joshua Green, the research manager for the Convergence Culture Consortium for their herculian efforts to make sure you guys had access to this content. We also want to thank the sponsors of the Convergence Culture Consortium for their continued support of our efforts to understand the changes that are occuring in our media landscape and to bring that understanding to a larger public -- MTV Networks, Turner Broadcasting, GSD&M, Fidelity, and Yahoo.
Posted so far are:
My opening remarks on the first day
The panel on Television Futures.
The panel on User-Generated Content.
The panel on Transmedia Storytelling
Josh Green's opening comments on the second day of the conference.
The panel on Fan Cultures
The panel on virtual worlds
I am going to be updating these links over the next few days as the material becomes available so book mark this post for your one-stop shopping needs.
There's so much material here that might be relevent to regular readers of this blog that it is hard to know where to start. Our students produced some very good summaries of key ideas from each session, more or less in real time, during the event:
Opening Comments by Henry Jenkins (that's me!)
Joshua Green's Opening Remarks for Day 2
Given our recent discussions here, I would especially flag for you:
the discussions of transmedia storytelling which involved DC comics Paul Levitz, Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, and [ICE]3 Studios's Alex Chisholm. There was lots here about Lost, Heroes, and superhero comics, all popular topics here.
the discussion of fan culture which involved Warner Brothers' Diane Nelson (who plays a prominant role in the Harry Potter chapter of Convergence Culture), Cartoon Network's Molly Chase, and social network research danah boyd.
But you won't want to miss Flickr's Caterina Flake's views on user-generated content, Ji Lee on the controversial Bubble Project, a lively discussion of virtual worlds with representatives from Second Life, Multiverse, and MTV's Lagoona Beach project, and some challenging comments from C3 advisor Josh Green on the metaphors driving the marketing of mobile technologies. And much much more.
For a list of blogger responses to the conference, check here.
Jesse Walker covered the event in depth in an article published in Reason magazine's online edition.
Spellcast offered special coverage of the event, including behind the scenes interviews with some of the folks who attended.
And here's the coverage of the event which was issued by the MIT News Office.
People keep asking me whether there will be a Futures of Entertainment 2 conference -- and the answer is we don't know for sure but we are definitely considering it given the enormous success of this event. If we do decide, readers of this blog will be among the very first to know.
