Prolog to the Section on Entertainment Technologies

It is impossible to be comprehensive in covering a topic such as entertainment technologies. Until quite recently, one could examine entertainment technologies in pockets such as stagecraft, postproduction, cinematic technology, home video technology, home theater technology, and so on. Just as easily, one could examine the development of television in categories such as studio technology, production network operation technology, transmission, signal distribution, and finally receiver technology. While these groupings made sense then, increasingly the development in one area impacts almost immediately many other areas, and the growing impact of the Internet has but exacerbated the analysis. Above all, the perfect storm brought on by rapid and widespread broadband penetration, ubiquitous connectivity, the emergence of cloud-based services, and the profusion of social networks and social media, has brought about profound changes in the way entertainment content reaches consumers. And so, we will go straight to the eye of the storm, and look at how content distribution may redefine the way we think of entertainment altogether. To help ground the readers, we first offer BA brief history of entertainment technologies,[ taking us through some ground-breaking innovations that eventually form the technological foundation for the entertainment industries. The paper draws attention to the symbiotic relationship between the creative artists who are the users of the technologies, and the technologists and innovators who came to offer solutions to the problems faced by the artists. It was relatively easier to create a story out of one’s imagination than to realize that story in whatever contemporary formats or media of choice. This theme will be revisited in our closing paper in a starkly interesting manner. We have three papers looking at the forefront in content distribution and the necessary supporting technologies: content security, cloud computing, and social media. We end this section with a delightful look into the far future, where things may be less and less familiar to us. The paper BThe future of cloud-based entertainment[ by Hughes extrapolates from several current technology trends, such as cloud storage, computation, and social identities, in combination with ubiquitous adaptive video services. User experiences are used to deconstruct some of the enabling technology, showing us the plausible evolutionary paths that lead to such a future for entertainment technology. The paper BSocial television: Enabling technologies and architectures[ by Montpetit and Médard takes us through recent developments that are taking social TV experiences from the lab into the real world. The paper depicts a future in which user-generated content is blended with entertainment content and socialized, securely, within one’s social network. Network coding is described in the context of not only increasing the efficiency of the network, but also as a means to provide added security to the layers of content in a typical social media. In their paper BMobile clouds: The new content distribution platform,[ Pedersen and Fitzek give us a glimpse at their pioneering work on mobile cloud. They point out the many benefits to key stakeholders in utilizing such a technology. Coupled with the social TV scenario, and a robust content security system, super-distribution, including mobile devices, may well be in our near future. If it is your children’s future that most interests you, then you must read the paper BEntertainment in the age of big data[ by Schlieski and Johnson. In it, they offer us a refreshingly new way of looking at stories, and go on to posit that stories are the ultimate enabler of our civilization, now and in the future. Provocatively, they assert that Bscience is easy; stories are hard.[ Their vision of the futureVfar into 2050Vis exciting, if not alluring. They explain why that future, in which stories, or as we call them elsewhere, content, are what it is all about all along. Rapid and widespread broadband penetration, ubiquitous connectivity, the emergence of cloud-based services, and the profusion of social networks and media have impacted how we receive entertainment content.