CIS Focal Issue

The rich have grown afraid of screens. They want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are booming. Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them.

classes have been replaced by software, much of the academic day now spent in silence on a laptop. In Utah, thousands of children do a brief, state-provided preschool program at home via laptop.

And children who spent more than two hours a day looking at a screen got lower scores on thinking and language tests,

The service will let you play all manner of computer games streamed from Google‘s data centers to your devices running the Chrome browser or ChromeOS platform, or even your TV with a Chromecast Ultra plugged in. You won’t need any additional hardware to run Stadia, and you won’t need to install anything to play games. As Google VP Phil Harrison noted in an interview with Eurogamer, “Anywhere where YouTube runs well, Stadia can run.”

Rather than treat Stadia as an entirely standalone service, Google sees people using it from and with YouTube. That means your starting point with Stadia could be a game trailer on the video platform, or a live stream of a tournament; you could simply hit Play on either video stream and start playing – solo or with others – within a few seconds.

Consumers have more digital media options than ever, and most are finding what they want. But many are becoming frustrated by the complexity and effort piecing together their entertainment experience requires.

While consumers appreciate the freedom to customize their entertainment experiences, they don’t enjoy the friction—the hassles, responsibilities, and even vulnerabilities—that can result from choosing options à la carte.

“will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.

There are all these different kinds of utilities for basically all the different things that you would want to do with everyone you know. And we basically built this whole platform around the town square

If you want to message someone on Instagram, you have to use Direct, if you want to message someone on WhatsApp you have to use WhatsApp. But I think people tend to have one of the messaging apps that they prefer the most. So giving people the choice to say, “Hey, I want to use WhatsApp because I prefer that as my service where I can not only message people on WhatsApp but I can message people on Facebook or Instagram as well and have those services connect …” I think that that will unlock a lot more convenient and seamless experiences. So connecting the services in that way I think will be valuable.

The average American driver spends 51 minutes a day in the car

On future screens, local restaurants, doctors’ offices and other services could target ads based on typical driving routes

“We see this as the battle for the fourth screen,”

The team used 140,000 horror stories from the subreddit r/nosleep to teach the AI how to tell a horror story that a human would find intelligible, compelling and scary. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Shelley, though, is her reliance on human interaction to facilitate her storytelling.

AI can write surprisingly scary and creative horror stories

ay you’re a time-starved man with a hankering to dress better. Just sign up on Trunk Club, one of whose style experts will call or email you shortly after to talk about your vision for your wardrobe. A few days later, a bemused FedEx employee shows up at your door bearing a trademark "trunk" (made of cardboard), which contains 10 or so items of clothing.

Finding someone who knows style is less important than finding someone who understands sales and relationship management

We have between 40 and 50 now, and 90% are women. They tend to have a background that includes sales, but rarely retail.

MoviePass, which opens up to 75,000 wait-listed users today, is an invite-only subscription-based service that lets you pay between $19.99 and $34.99 a month to watch up to one in-theater movie per day

Unlike Netflix viewership, theatrical attendance tends to heavily peak twice a year, during Oscars season and the summer blockbusters.

Spikes says this demographic is also more likely to drive post-theater purchases, such as DVDs, soundtracks, and branded merchandise. To that end, he says MoviePass will be exploring options to offer these items through its service in the future

distributors are usually loathe to discuss VOD specifics publicly. When consumers are used to seeing $60 to $100 million opening weekends for major blockbusters in wide release, VOD numbers, no matter how “good,” look miniscule in comparison. Add on the fact that Snowpiercer is the widest multi-platform release ever, and the tricky exercise of figuring out how to combine theatrical earnings with weekend estimates from digital and cable providers, and the territory gets even more unfamiliar.

Snowpiercer earning an estimated $1.1 million from VOD this past weekend, nearly twice as much as the $635,000 it earned in theaters. “From a layman’s perspective these numbers are possibly not that interesting,” admits RADiUS-TWC co-president Tom Quinn. “But from an industry perspective, it’s a game changer.”

VOD is both cheaper and more profitable. “That $1.1 million gross is actually worth almost double to me in terms of how it nets out in our bottom line,”

“copyright extremism” – a term he used to describe extended delays in content distribution, which often result in content reaching foreign markets months after it is released in the United States.

Essentially, “extremism” is another way of saying that piracy is more a business model problem than a policy problem. 

The strategy of windowing has long been practiced because it is believed to maximize revenue opportunities for a given film.  By giving successive distribution channels exclusive rights to the work, a film distributor aims to extract maximum revenues from licensees in each channel.

Given Imax receipts typically account for about 10 percent of the average tentpole's box office, studios and top filmmakers frequently shift their release dates to land a big-screen berth

Looking forward, the company is making a big push into virtual reality, partnering with Google on a camera, and will launch its first VR space in Los Angeles this year. On the content front, Michael Bay is in talks to create original VR content for Imax

Any regrets about partnering with Netflix to release the low-grossing Crouching Tiger 2? I have no regrets about experimenting because, especially with the windows changing distribution patterns, with digital distribution and over‑the‑top alternatives evolving quickly, the industry is going to have to experiment and learn.

a new generation of even more ambitious theaters — possibly even including cinema's first holodeck — is waiting in the wings.

The first Escape theaters — which will include the Cinemark 18 & XD at the Promenade at the Howard Hughes Center in Los Angeles — will open Sept. 19, showing a special edition of Fox's new young adult thriller The Maze Runner

Escape theaters showing The Maze Runner will project the live-action movie on to the center screen, and the side screens will feature additional visual effects

Merging SEGA technology and BBC Earth content, the new attraction takes visitors on a multi-sensory journey to explore animals and nature through sight, smell, touch and sound.

The venue includes one of Japan’s largest screens (131 ft W x 26 ft H) with remarkable visual and sonic resolution and 12 separate walk-through entertainment zones

evolve into large-scale public attractions becoming urban theme parks, where cinema is only part of the experience

AMC Theaters issued a statement on Twitter saying that due to the negative response, it will not proceed with the plan to allow cellphones inside its theaters: "With your advice in hand, there will be NO TEXTING ALLOWED in any of the auditoriums at AMC Theaters. Not today, not tomorrow and not in the foreseeable future."

"When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don't ruin the movie, they hear 'please cut off your left arm above the elbow,'" Aron told Variety. "You can't tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That's not how they live their life ...

and one way would be taking "specific auditoriums and make them more texting friendly." 

Non-intrusiveness aside, another reason why the idea of not having to wear special 3D movie glasses is so welcomed is because we want to see images in 3D with our naked eyes (or with our glasses or contacts) where we just don’t feel “artificial”.

we would naturally be more intrigued by otherworldly universes which we don’t encounter in our daily lives, and thus crave to experience them in their fullest glory (i.e. in 3D or 4D).

“Otherworldly” here applies to the many computer-animated, Sci-Fi and any other movies where their settings are not what you see every day (e.g. Titanic and Avatar

Unlike films made for the silver screen, an internet film doesn’t need to contain something for everyone

But the internet is different. As viewers are watching alone, films can be made exclusively for certain fanbases and still be confident of finding an audience.

in the eyes of a conservative family, the company should stand for wholesome entertainment, but to a 20-year-old city-dwelling college graduate, it should be more edgy. It’s unlikely these two demographics would go to the cinema together, while they almost certainly won’t be streaming the same content.

According to the National Association of Theatre Owners, US movie attendance peaked in 2002 and has been steadily declining ever since. To compensate, theatres have rolled out new technologies such as 3D, Imax and premium large-format cinemas, raising their ticket prices and thus keeping the box office at record-breaking levels

The majority of us are increasingly staying home.

At Cannes this year, the studio with the most films in competition

The technology has changed but the basics of the job haven’t. It is still about storytelling, about juxtaposing images, about creating a feeling with images and music. Only the technical details have changed

I think there will be movie thea­ters in 1,000 years. People want the group experience, the sense of going out and participating in a film together

I think it will be standard in 4 years, not 40. We will have a glasses-free technology in five years at home and three years for laptops. The limiting factor is going to be content. You can’t rely on a few films a year for this. It is going to have to be 3-D broadcast sports, scripted television, non-scripted television and reality television