Category: studios

The 10 most innovative companies in media

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As the media industry was rocked by the pandemic in 2020, companies were forced to quickly come up with creative ways to make and distribute content, as well as keep audiences united during a socially divisive time. These companies led the way on those fronts and more. 1. SpringHill Company For marrying entertainment with social justice through Hollywood content LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s marketing and entertainment company has an unapologetic agenda: to make and distribute content that will give a voice to creators and consumers who have been pandered to, ignored, or underserved. Its commitment to this community hasn’t wavered as the company significantly scaled into a content creation powerhouse and raised $100 million in 2020. It was a producer of the Netflix limited series Self-Made , starring Octavia Spencer as Madam C.J. Walker, the Black creator of an early-20th-century beauty empire; and the documentary series The Playbook about legendary coaches, also on Netflix. SpringHill Company also backed James’ More than a Vote initiative to boost voter turnout, and created animated shorts and other digital media to educate and inspire people to get involved in the Presidential election. More content is on the way thanks to a blizzard of new deals with Amazon, Disney, Universal, CNN, Sirius, and more. 2 Read More …

Meet Moxie, the robot that could be your child’s or parent’s new best friend

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Consumer robots aren’t really a thing yet, but some specialized robots are starting to edge toward the mainstream. One of those is a big-eyed little robot named Moxie, which its maker, Pasadena, California-based Embodied, designed to be an emotionally intelligent friend to a child. Moxie uses a powerful natural language model to carry on conversation; in fact, it starts getting to know its child friend from the moment it’s turned on. Moxie uses computer vision AI to recognize the child (and others) and to detect eye contact and facial expressions. It’s also a serious child development tool: Moxie tells stories and plays games to inspire creativity. Embodied put Moxies in 100 households as a way of learning some lessons from experience. Some of those kids really needed a friend, as the pandemic kept them home from school and cut them off from their social circle. Embodied CEO Paolo Pirjanian says his company’s small team needed a special blend of IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence) to bring Moxie to life. Thanks to being located right next to Burbank, he says, Embodied was able to recruit people from animation studios to create Moxie’s cartoon-cute look and feel. AI specialists, engineers, and childhood development specialists worked alongside them to build the robot’s personality and skills. New Moxies will start shipping to new homes, and finding new friends, in April Read More …

The 10 most innovative companies in video

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In 2020, people’s reliance on video for communication and entertainment skyrocketed due to the pandemic. Companies from all areas of the spectrum—livestreaming, video communication, shopping, as well as TV and movie platforms—all found ways not only to exploit this growing demand, but lean into it in ways that improved its users quality of life in new and unexpected ways. 1. Apple For proving that the streaming race is a marathon not a sprint The company’s, $5.99-a-month streaming service, Apple TV Plus , was slow out of the gate when it launched in late 2019. But in 2020 it picked up speed, launching an aggressive, event film strategy with Greyhound , the Tom Hanks WWII film that it bought from Sony and turned into summer water-cooler chatter. On the TV side, the company got past its initial stage of shows with glossy sheens that didn’t ultimately deliver and moved into a much more satisfying era of truly original-feeling shows like Ted Lasso and the Israeli thriller Tehran . Strong word of mouth and critical acclaim for these and other titles helped the service reportedly grow to about 35 million subscribers and nab eight Emmy nominations. The streamer took home one for Billy Crudup’s performance in The Morning Show , the flagship series when Apple TV Plus launched, but now a footnote in the streamer’s well-stocked portfolio. 2. Tubi For giving viewers the Netflix experience for free In response to Black Lives Matter, Tubi created a vertical called United Against Inequality showcasing movies and TV shows from the free, ad-supported streaming service’s library of 23,000 titles. None of them were Tubi originals—there’s no such thing—but the move showed how Tubi cleverly curates content from its vast library in order to draw users, which now number 33 million. In 2020 the company was acquired by Fox Corp. for $440 million, giving Tubi access to yet more content and ammunition with advertisers. This combined fire power, along with Tubi’s new, Advanced Frequency Management tool, which lessens ad repetition and improves frequency management of commercials, solved one of the biggest problems with ad-supported streaming and has helped make Tubi the streaming service you most need. Read More …

How a tiny startup is reinventing the DVR for the cord-cutter era

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The rise of cord cutting and streaming video was supposed to render the digital video recorder (DVR) irrelevant. In theory, you shouldn’t need to record anything when services like Netflix and Amazon Prime make everything available on demand. But now that every big media company has its own streaming service, all that instant gratification has come at a cost. Watching TV now means bouncing between a dozen different apps, each with its own separate menu system, catalog, and watch list. Read More …

How this Russian director’s Screenlife films went from gimmick to gold in Hollywood

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When Kazakh-Russian director Timur Bekmambetov was producing the 2014 horror film Unfriended , a movie told entirely on Skype screens in which a group of high school kids are haunted by a friend who’d been bullied and—they thought—committed suicide, he was constantly asked the same question: Why didn’t any of the characters, who, one by one, are freakishly tortured by the former friend, shut down their computers and go into each other’s homes?   Back then, of course, the question was a natural one. Now, Bekmambetov says, “No one asks that.”   Thanks to COVID-19, leaving your house and going to visit someone else, even to save their life, is a potentially fatal risk. Indeed, today no one would ever wonder why characters in a film never physically interact with one another. After all, that’s essentially what life has looked like for almost a year now. But while the pandemic has been devastating to Hollywood—shutting down productions and causing major studios to shift many of their tentpole releases to digital distribution or punt them into the future—it has been a boon for Bekmambetov and his production company, Bazelevs Studio. The company, whose primary hubs are in Moscow and Los Angeles, pioneered and specializes in so-called Screenlife films that take place exclusively on computer and mobile screens and are shot using GoPros and other nontraditional cameras, often with actors and filmmakers in separate locations Read More …