There was a faux-PSA posted last year that was enjoyable to watch but that rang a truth within its contents. Vertical videos, most often created on smartphones when the user captures video holding the camera vertically rather than horizontally, have continued to spread on YouTube and across the internet. The wonders of mobile technology have helped to increase the number of videos being recorded every day by a mile and the expansion of YouTube and other video services makes distributing these videos as easy as pressing a couple of buttons. Unfortunately, the quality of the videos are diminished…

An unwillingness to “sleep with the enemy” may be behind cable companies’ reluctance to deal with Apple, but that isn’t stopping the Cupertino tech firm from trying. Their latest round of talks with various entertainment brokers would give their set top box the ability to integrate traditional cable feeds. It’s a matter of compromise. Apple has been trying for years to break into the television industry, even contemplating licensing content directly and competing with cable operators. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em… The walled-garden of the television industry has long been reluctant…

The science of entertainment is getting more complicated. Disney Research in Zurich and Walt Disney Imagineering at Cornell are working on Physical Face Cloning to be able to create animatronics characters that behave with the precision of a human face. First, they are designing a synthetic skin that can mimic the movements and tendencies of human skin. How the skin on a face reacts to motions such as talking has been problematic, but the Disney team hopes that a silicon based solution guided by computer simulations will be the answer. Here are two videos that they recently released showing the…

Social media has clearly permeated out lives so much that it is now influencing the other media that we consume. This is extremely clear in the world of music. I see the songs popping up on my Facebook news ticker and it seems like my entire friends list is listening to the same songs. For the most part people have always listened to very similar music, but more and more I am seeing an increasing trend of the “ironic” hit. I don’t know if this is a new phenomenon, but I first noticed it with the rise in popularity of Rebecca Black’s song Friday. We all know and love (or hate) it. The song features timeless…

On March 21st, Netflix announced plans to create their own show called Hemlock Grove.As someone who spends the majority of her nights watching too much Netflix as it is, I’m always on the hunt for a good series to get invested in. Most nights I am left disappointed and cursing at my television set for a lack of a good series to watch. Netflix, an Internet-streaming media, has been looking to develop original material for their viewers. However, rather than doing a completely original series, they will be doing an adaptation of Brian McGreevy’s forthcoming novel Hemlock Grove. The book is set…

It’s hard to make us speechless. We are often overly-verbose rather than sitting dumbfounded by anything, particularly as unimportant as a movie. The Dark Knight Rises trailer dropped our jaw and made nothing but guttural noises come out of our mouths. Simply stated… enjoy. …

It has been speculated that home entertainment would meld with online and app-based engagement more and more over time. Today, Nielsen revealed that 40% of tablet and/or smartphone owners use them while watching television. As people continue to Tweet or post to Facebook when watching TV while others explore and research information about the shows they’re watching, a growing number of people are using television time as email time. For most activities like email and surfing unrelated information, the gender gap is slim. The notable exceptions are visits to social networks (which women…

HBO is out and Netflix is in. With a bid of approximately $30 million per movie, Netflix put together the deal with DreamWorks Animation to send its movies and television specials through the streaming-video company. There was no mention of Qwikster, the company that Netflix is splitting off to handle its DVD-by-mail business, but speculation is that the new company will indeed be included in the DreamWorks content package. The timing couldn’t be better for Netflix as they continue to struggle with several public relations snafus. “This is one of the few family entertainment brands that…

There are only two viable scenarios that will come to pass in the near future when it comes to home entertainment. Either Netflix and its 20 million users will force a paradigm shift in the way Big Telecom delivers entertainment or they will be hit so hard by regulations, increased licensing fees, and pay-per-gig throttling of broadband that they’ll have to change almost every aspect of the way they do business. This happy world that we live in now where an affordable Netflix service co-exists with Big Telecom is not sustainable. Something has to give. A recent article on the Washington Post speculates…

After failing miserably and discontinuing their attempt at “going social” last year, Netflix is giving it another run. This time, they’re getting help from a company that has experience in social media. Their integration will be with Facebook. You may have heard of them. Wednesday, Netflix announced what they described as “an extensive Facebook integration” in a shareholders’ letter that accompanied their quarterly earnings report. While integration with Facebook is becoming more and more common, this particular move is striking because they are planning to change much of the way…