Inscript goes back to its roots

´Foodfight´ an upcoming animation of Threshold Animation Studios and Lions Gate Family Entertainment are making supermarktproducts into regular TV Stars. Inscript sponsoring goes back to its roots.

Charlie Sheen, Eva Longoria, Wayne Brady, Chris Kattan, Christopher Lloyd, and Hilary and Haylie Duff have all signed up for the film, which takes viewers inside a supermarket after the lights go out and the staff have gone home. It shows real products, ranging from food to cleaning items, and their respective character traits and relationships.

Imagine your soapbar falling hopelessly in love with your detergent? An intriguing way to give story to your products!!

http://www.c21media.net/news/detail.asp?area=79&article=27210

SBS's Sloan pops up at MGM

Veteran media exec Harry Evans Sloan, who last week completed the sale of SBS Broadcasting for about $2.6bn to private equity firms Permira and KKR, has popped up at MGM.Sloan has been named chairman and chief executive of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Sloan has served on MGM's board since June.Providence Equity Partners, one of MGM's biggest equity investors along with Texas Pacific Group and media companies Sony Corp and Comcast, have had a long-standing relationship with Sloan and approached him about assuming the MGM chairmanship shortly after the SBS sale was announced in August.Sloan, who is making a "substantial investment" in MGM, could, through potential stock option earnings, end up with as much as a 5% interest in the company.Last year, MGM was purchased for nearly $5bn and, although technically an independent company, operates as a label of Sony Pictures, which now releases MGM's movies in theatres and on DVD. MGM executives, however, oversee the licensing of the company's library of 4,000 films and 10,000 TV episodes.Over the past two decades, Sloan invested in and helped build three publicly traded media companies: Lions Gate Entertainment; New World Entertainment, which he bought from director Roger Corman in 1983 and sold six years later to investor Ronald Perelman; and European media company SBS Broadcasting, which he founded in 1990.In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sloan said he planned to return MGM to its former status as one of Hollywood's major movie suppliers by tapping his expertise in independent film financing and enlisting the kind of low- to moderate-budget movie strategy that he applied at Lions Gate and New World."MGM is the best movie brand in the world," he said. "In five years, there will be 400m new digital homes in the world, and given my experience internationally, I think MGM is the perfect asset to develop to that end."

Kris Sofley 27 Oct 2005 © C21 Media 2005

Sloan has been a very successfull and powerfull man in media, with a very sharp insight in where to go to next. His move away from the Broadcast Channels in favour of the pure content industry may very well signify an upcoming devaluation of Broadcast Channels in general.

Shakira's Oral Fixation Large Scale Crossmedia Campaign

In a bid to offer multi-platform support to new releases and to provide music fans with exclusive content, MTV is teaming with Sony BMG and Epic Records to launch MTV 5 Star.The project, which kicks off by supporting Latin singer Shakira's upcoming release Oral Fixation Vol. 2, is MTV's first-ever new music initiative that taps into its television, internet and mobile platforms in Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and Russia.MTV 5 Star will see MTV International's channels air four exclusive 30-minute shows, offer fans a once-in-a-lifetime Shakira competition later this year, provide online users with full-length streams of songs from Oral Fixation one week prior to release and debut a series of exclusive 'mobisodes' over the next few months.The initiative will also include additional local marketing activities in which MTV, Sony, BMG and Epic will team with local print, radio and retail partners.Specifically, the initial 5 Star foray will be comprised of a two-hour programming block airing on MTV channels from the end of November.This block will include a 30-minute MTV Live performance show; All Eyes on Shakira, in which other artists ask her questions; Making of the Video, for her first English single Don't Bother; and Diary of Shakira, charting the performer's MTV appearances, including the MTV Music Awards in Portugal next week.On the interactive side, MTV will produce a series of mobisodes featuring interviews and performances related to the new album, which will be distributed via existing MTV mobile and on-demand partnerships. MTV will also create a dedicated Shakira WAP site enabling users to enter the competition, and access graphics and on-air promos. In addition, the site will include an exclusive, full-length stream of songs from Oral Fixation Vol. 2 as part of the First Listen series one week prior to the album's street date.

Jo Anne Kenny 27 Oct 2005 © C21 Media 2005

http://www.c21media.net/news/detail.asp?area=1&article=27234

Viviane's 'light touch' to Europe's IST and Media industry

Viviane Reding is the European commissioner on Information Society Technology and Media. She is the first commissioner with a combined post for IST and media. Because the EC is convinced that information society and media fields are converging. Offcourse they are right. In this difficult field Reding has to set up a new regulatory framework to update the Television without Frontiers Directive of 1995. The new 'Audio Visual Content without Border Directive' already in its', this title already shows the new approach, no longer is television the main field, but it is defined in a broader sense. Reding says:Convergence is closely coupled with cultural, economic and network issues which form an integral part of the Information Society:

• From a cultural perspective, it challenges the traditional relationship between content creation, the media and the consumer.
• From an economic perspective, we are confronted by a high pace of development of new actors in the value chain, the "creative destruction" of established positions and changing consumption modes.
• From a networking perspective, the emergence of the Internet as one of the major vehicles of converged services has the capacity to challenge the sustainability of traditional business models in the sector.

It is the Commission's task to ensure that the right framework for the digital convergence and for investment in ICT is in place. This is Europe's best bet for delivering sustained growth and skilled jobs.

Reding approaches this with a 'light touch' Light but Europe wide rules offering one single basic framework instead of 25 different legal regimes. With the 'light touch' a lot is left to strong user control, but with a task for protection of minors and fight against the incitement of racial hatred. This needs to cross national regulatory borders an fill in a regulatory 'gap'. At the same time there needs to be minimal harmonization so that the country-of-origin of content stays identifiable, this is imperative for a legal framework to develop new audiovisual content services. Not to build 'chinese walls' but to identify the content work in the legal framework it has to oblige to the regulation of its' country's origin.

The light touch is also ment not to strangle new nascent audiovisual content services giving them maximum freedom to develop.

SAGAS.. exhausting and very very rewarding

My munich week at the SAGAS future TV workshop was very intens and extremely rewarding. I feel an overflow of creative and inspired ideas. I need to do this more ande more.
Reimo Lang, who gave the workshop has the ability to bring working structure to my crossmedia ideas, which evidently helps them grow stronger.

I will tell smoe more about the workshop later. Our final group had a concept that we are going to work out more, beause it is a strong basic idea that needs a lot of hard work to become something interesting, but it may very well be...

Keep you informed

Inspiring crossmedia students at HvA

Today I had a very inspiring afternoon with students of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam talking about crossmedia. These guys and girls already get it, but they are just not so aware of that. They ARE the new generation of crossmedia project makers and here is where you will find the new talents of the future. Talking about crossmedia they may not be summing up definitions or theory, they can clearly imagine how they will use media in the future and understand the implications of that immediately. We discussed the concept of Google TV, will this be the next model. Well yes and no, it will be a mix of googeling for the information you want AND letting yourself be entertained. Hope I will get the chance to discuss some more aspects, because I like to see this new emerging talent come to bloom!

we media Gaining momentum...

Gloria Pan the famous director of the mediacenter in Reston is excited for the mediacenters next upcoming event. And she is probably right, there is a momentum coming for crossmedia, participatpory journalism and wemedia as the mediacenter tags developments. If you cannot be there, you can tune in at.. http://mediacenter.blogs.com/morph/tmc_event_we_media_05_ap/index.html
to get the feed live..AND react. Now if that isn't crossmedia!

I will be in Munich this week attending a SAGAS workshop and I am extremely looking forward to letting all that creativity flow..

I will keep you posted as much as possible!