by Nicolas Bry, published on 18.07.2011

Created in July, Transmedia Lab is celebrating its two years anniversary. A transmedia projects catalyst, an explorative and audacious place, The Lab aspires to reunite the actors issued from different universes: TV, cinema, video game or Internet… and follows three priorities: training in the transmedia culture and know-how, advice and projects accompanying and development of new technological tools for the multiplatform broadcast: the transmedia apps.

 

 

These last two years were intense and we are proud of the work we’ve done.  We evolved through some key stages:

 

• We helped creating the debate around the transmedia concept and new writing models, through our blog Transmedialab.org and through a series of events: the Barcamps on August 2009 et May 2011 ;
• The « call for projects »: out of 69 transmedia scenarios, 11 creations got through to the final: some of them became a transmedia reference.
• The thorough development work we conducted with the 5 winning projects, by alternating conception workshops and conferences with experts, opened for the entire transmedia community, by discussing subjects like the audience: its engagement and interactivity, Internet communities and viral buzz, multiplatform technologies and branded content.
• The creation of the first transmedia applications at the service of enhanced content value.

 

We are grateful to Xavier Couture for his active support to each of these stages, for his empathy with the subject and for his belief that the link between the technology and the creativity is unbreakable, meeting the audience’s needs: « creating by breaking the old borderlines! ».

This accomplishment could not have been achieved without the help of the Orange teams : (Orange Vallée – Jean-Lous Constanza, Studio 37 – Frédérique Dumas, Content Direction – Morgan Bouchet, Stéphane Adamiak, Boris Duchesnay, Frank Guillouard, Sebastien Goales, Jean-françois Rodriguez, Stephan Jost, Programming and Broadcast – David Lacombled, Carol Cuneo, Orange Lab – Christophe Aguiton, Dominique Cardon et Fabien Granjon) and the broadcasters, so important to our work: TF1 (Eleanor Coleman & Damien Rety), France Télévisions (Harold Valentin, Jean-Marc Merriaux, François Guilbeau) , M6 (Philippe Bony), Arte (with the special support of Michel Reilhac, so remarkable by his mixture of intelligence and energy), Dailymotion (Martin Rogard), as well as the multi-screens pioneer in UK: Liz Rosenthal, Power to the Pixel. At the end of this article we mentioned the others actors that helped build this experience.

 

Many projects emerged in 2011, especially under the impulsion of the Orange’s Content Direction that accompanied creations like Detective Avenue, Fanfan 2, The Prodigies and the Cross Video Days event.

Generally the transmedia conception methods are spreading; the physical and virtual places are accompanying the professionals’ community development and the technological applications emerge.  Transmedia aims to satisfy its audience; nevertheless it still has a beautiful challenge: establishing its business model.

While acknowledging this positive context, Transmedialb.org undergoes its transformation. Here we take a few minutes to discuss the technological innovations we’ve been working on for the past few months.

 

A new design for Transmedialab.org

Our blog changes skin, but not only! We have improved the structure of the website, in order to better help you find the transmedia references, by giving a themed structure to our articles and case studies. We created a glossary of all the transmedia scientific terms.

The Transmedia Lab blog opens up to you! This becomes your blog, with an intern community opened to all transmedia professionals, in order to help you connect and share your transmedia info with your followers. You can directly contact any member of the community and find the missing know-how to your project.

The transmedia apps

The transmedia projects accompaniment helped us imagine some applications and tools to help the multiplatform broadcast of transmedia content. By tapping into our know-how of innovation management and into the Orange’s Lab, we created a selection of transmedia app that provide an easier broadcast of the story’s universe through different media, by allowing a broader audience access and by offering new interactive experiences even more immersive for the viewer.

 

iPhone and iPad video playlist generator

Allows a producer to generate rapidly and at a low cost his own iPhone and iPad app able to reflect his production company or his content universe. This application allows the mobile owner to create and manage his playlists, to search and buy a certain video, as well as highlight premium content.

The video content is available « anytime anywhere ». The mobile owner can be « connected » to the content; he can share the videos with his friends by using Facebook or Twitter, just as he can receive some informational “pushes”.

 

This instrument was conceived for:

• Adaptability to all kinds of production: for the big catalogue owners, just as for those proposing a small video offer.
• Allowing an easy content management, helping producers develop and update their catalogue, highlighting the premium content by using the already created app

 

A transmedia video player that offers multiples « augmented » paths inside a certain content universe

The transmedia player offers a new navigation experience inside the universe of contents all throughout the Internet.

Two main axes are proposed:

• The player associates in real time new content related to the played video: multimedia content (texts, images, sounds, maps, commercial links…) extracted from databases like Wikipedia or Amazon and semantically linked to the content of the video proposed by the broadcaster or the author.
• The player proposes other videos related to the one being watched, by using tags inside the video: this feature allows the bouncing on a new content starting from the 3^rd minute on to another video segment, en thus following the imagined narrative.

The cybernaut can navigate in the player from content to content, using semantically interpreted links. The player associates rich content to its display: multimedia content (texts, images, sounds, maps and commercial links) directly linked by semantics to the users’ profiles (social recommendations).

 

 

These tags can be enriched by the cybernauts and off course, the player can offer ratings and Facebook/Twitter sharing functions.

This augmented navigation finds its first applications in the games created in a fictional universe, in documentaries needing associated information (Travelling for example), news reporting and news feeds, the creation of video playlists on a certain theme. The platform is conceived as a toolbox: available when you need it and able to adapt to your creative ideas.

 

Blended TV, a service crossing TV/Video content with social networks

Blended TV helps you find and choose faster a TV program, and then to simply participate: by transforming the social buzz around TV programs and video content into an intelligible flow of information in order to help you better choose a program and enrich the experience in a playful manner.

Blended TV « scrolls » the social networks, especially Tweeter, in order to enhance the Buzz on these contents: TV, movies, VOD, web video…  It can organize the programs by their “buzz” levels; it can personalize the recommendations and associates the online social discussion to each program by using a filter that facilitates the participation and the reading (tweet, iTag, iVote): the best tweets, the experts’ tweets, the most recent tweets, my network’s opinion…

Blended TV it’s an “enabler”: available on API form (meaning that it can be research enabled and formatted to respond to questions: What programs are buzzing? What people say about my channels? What are the comments on this movie? Etc), the answers to these searches can be integrated to an “end-user” service, created for the viewer.

 

Transmedia Lab is a project that we build together, a collective adventure, a community gatherer around our passion: the transmedia, the digital writing and the multiple screens. We count on you for your contributions in creating the reference transmedia community. It is your turn to play!

 

Credits

 

This series of actors helped us on our evolution, involved themselves in the new formats development or they just simply opened their door and their ear to our transmedia ideas!

While the founding team of  Transmedia Lab remains more than important, we are canalizing our thoughts to:

Seize the media (Lance Weiler et Anita Ondine), Starlight Runner (Jeff Gomez), Pierre Lescure et Alex Berger, Tim Kring, Christy Dena, Générale de Production (Jérémy Pouilloux), Mascaret (Bénédicte Lesage), Making Prod (Matthieu Viala), Bridges (Eric Pellegrin), Faismoi jouer (Julien Aubert), Caroline Gerdolle, Honkytonk (Arnaud Dressen, Guillaume Urjewicz), Happy Fannie (Mathieu Chereau et Sandrine Girbal), Mutation Narrative (Simon Kansara), Enfin Bref (Jeremy Sahel), Trajectoire Givrée (Brigitte Coquelle), Darjeeling (Marc Lustigman, Noam Roubah) et Brèves de Trottoir , Endemol (Frédérique Micouleau, Axel de Charentenay), Citymoviz (Laurent Guerin), Silex (Elisa Larrière, Judith Nora), Story Factory (Dan Benzakein et Sandra Albertolli), Upian (Alexandre Brachet), In Prod We Trust (Cyril Pennec), Les Raconteurs (Sarah Hemar), BBC (John Denton), Idao (Franck Perrier), Google Creative Lab (Ed Sanders), IMCA (Pascal Josephe), Club Galilée (Philippe Chazal), Médiamétrie, Emery Doligé, Vivaki (Gaël Solignac)

CNC (Laurent Cormier, Guillaume Blanchot), SACD (Pascal Rogard), SPI, La Femis (Marc Nicolas), Les Gobelins, National Film and Television School of London (David Croft), l’ONF (Office national du film du Canada, Tom Perlmutter, Monique Simard, Hugues Sweeney), France Culture (Xavier Delaporte), Forum d’Avignon (Laure Kaltenbach), Ministère de la Culture, EBU Eurovision (Nicoletta Lacobacci, Nicolas Jeanrenaud), Forum des Images (Laurence Herszberg), EU Media (Nathalie Chesnel, Arnaud Pasquali), Media Club (Jérôme Chouraqui, Florence Sandis), Paris Sorbonne University, Cap Digital (Jeremy Sahel à nouveau), Paris 2.0, Paris Science, Festival 4 écrans (Claire Leproust again), SNPTV (Aude Tremedet), Buzz the brand, EGTA (Anne-Laure Dreyfus), Cinéma Tous Ecrans (Gaetano Stucchi), INA (Ana Vinuela et Dominique Gratiot), Stratégies, …