Media & Entertainment

Nielsen has been part of the answer to most of these questions for as long as anyone can remember. Yesterday, the Media Rating Council (MRC), a third-party industry watchdog, officially suspended its accreditation of Nielsen. Said differently, the MRC no longer trusts some of Nielsen's numbers. Can you? Continue Reading →

Twitch streamers are planning to step away from the platform today for a day of protest. The goal of #DayOffTwitch is to bring attention to a recent burst of harassment in the form of "hate raids" directed toward marginalized creators. Continue Reading →

CES will return to Las Vegas in January 2022, and we've got big plans (in-person and online) for the show. “We’re thrilled to return to Las Vegas – home to CES for more than 40 years – and look forward to seeing many new and returning faces,” said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, Consumer Technology Association (CTA). “The pace of innovation has accelerated over the last 18 months, and attendees will see these advancements at CES.” Continue Reading →

The idea of using a blockchain (distributed ledger) to fight piracy is not new, but a new paper from Microsoft describes how our friends in Redmond might implement such a system. Continue Reading →

Argentine soccer superstar Lionel Messi, regarded as one of the game’s greatest players of all-time, has reportedly made crypto fan tokens a part of the payment deal in his financial package with French club Paris Saint-Germain. Continue Reading →

AMC Entertainment chairman-CEO Adam Aron said the chain will be technologically equipped to start accepting Bitcoin payments for U.S. movie tickets and concessions ordered online by the end of the year, which raises a very personal question: How do I feel about buying a slice of pizza and a Diet Coke with four (4) bitcoins back in April 2011? Continue Reading →

Technology is meaningless unless it changes the way we behave. As many of you have pointed out, my writing is increasingly focused on blockchain, cryptocurrency, smart contracts and NFTs, decentralized finance (DeFi), Web 3.0, and the role AI and other nascent computational tools may play in the future. There's a simple reason. They are all behavior-changing technologies. At one end of the spectrum, there's the potential of an alternative, decentralized system for value exchange that challenges our understanding about the role of central governance. At the other end of the spectrum, this is nothing more than a fad which can be easily ignored. In my experience, no technology is ever "either, or." As you know, almost $8 trillion of wealth vaporized when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000. Those speculative losses didn't have anything to do with the underlying technology; it was all about the hype. With that in mind, think about this... Continue Reading →

The first time I saw the word "Metaverse" was in Neal Stephenson's 1992 sci-fi novel "Snow Crash." The word has evolved over the years to describe immersive virtual worlds. These environments can be experienced on your computer on a 2D screen, but are best experienced using technology such as VR, AR, XR, MR, etc. This is where Facebook believes we/they are headed, and they are assembling a high-powered product team to get us/them there. Continue Reading →

You have a hidden talent I’d like to call your attention to. By the time you were 18 years old, you had watched more than 20,000 hours of video (TV, movies, online, etc.). That’s more than twice the number of hours most people need to become an expert at any skill. So while you may not know all the technical jargon, when it comes to judging content, creativity, and execution, you are truly a video production expert. This is going to come in handy, because today, every major corporate meeting and event needs to be reimagined and staged to work for both in-person and online audiences. Continue Reading →

Over the past few months, people have started using the term "NFT" interchangeably with the term "digital collectible." This is unfortunate, because while most of the digital collectibles in the news are NFTs, the technology can be used to create value in many additional ways. When thinking about fan development, which we will define (just for this article) as a collection of purpose-built tools designed to grow communities of interest, perhaps the most obvious use for an NFT is as a ticket to an event. Let’s review some of the benefits you might expect from combining a ticket, some unique digital assets, and a smart contract. Continue Reading →