Transmedia: Storytelling for the Digital Age

Sam Thielman:  "What looks like an entertainment company, spends like an entertainment company and programs like an entertainment company? It's Hasbro, a toymaker. Hasbro makes not just toys but also hugely popular intellectual property, which for decades has been key to its bottom line."

Adrian Covert:  "Think Star Wars made most its money off the films? Think again!"

Klint Finley:  "The world's first publicly traded person and Kanye West's former technical consultant want to help you IPO anything."

Rob Wile:  "An unidentified individual or group responsible for uploading videos that simply show a woman opening Disney toys made an estimated $4.9 million last year, more than any other channel for 2014, according to OpenSlate, a video analytics platform that analyzes ad-supported content on YouTube."

Tobi Bauckhage:  "There has been a sea change in the way content today is being created, distributed and consumed. The distinction between publishers and platforms online has never been more uncertain."

Geek's Guide To The Galaxy:  " The Star Wars universe now comprises a vast array of products, from movies and TV shows to videogames and toys. But it all started with one movie, Star Wars (later Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope), whose modest $11 million budget was less than the average studio comedy at the time."

Nicole Laporte:  "UberFacts founder Kris Sanchez has turned his addictive Twitter feed into a wildly lucrative business. But not everyone's buying it."

Jonathan Salem Baskin:  "Definitions and labels get confused when we describe technologies that enable social experience, and it’s particularly evident in the way we’re talking about Microsoft’s $2.5 billion purchase of Minecraft."

Jake Rossen:  "How Omni Consumer Products used True Blood and Ghostbusters to create a thriving business selling real versions of fake stuff."

Nick Dorra:  "Kids love the world-famous user-generated video game. Rovio/Angry Birds' Dorra explains how Minecraft can inspire TV too"

Nick Wingfield:  "Twitch, a hugely popular streaming video service, has helped turn gaming into a spectator event as much as a participatory activity."

Fiona Milburn journeys into Transmedia 2.0 and finds that it's platform agnostic and mirrors the studio system of old Hollywood.

Marcus Wohlsen:  "The half-hour sitcom? The hour-long drama? These are conventions that came into existence for reasons that don’t matter anymore."

Stuart Dredge:  "As developers try to make money by creating Candy Crush clones, free-to-play mobile games are in danger of creative stagnation" ...

Todd Allen:  "The business side of the comics business is something that doesn’t get discussed nearly as much as it should and that can cause some stumbling blocks — particularly for creators striking out on their own."

Nicole LaPorte:  "Everyone from Facebook to Vessel is chasing YouTube. But can any of them actually take on the online video behemoth?"

Hank Green:  "YouTube is a significant piece of Google’s bottom line, Disney has paid some crazy amount of money for MAKER and people want to be YouTube stars. They see it as a thing that you can become, rather than a thing that just happens to you."

Aaron Hutchins:  "Can the SVOD service drive ancillary revenues for content studios? Analysts and execs from DreamWorks and Scholastic Media weigh in."

Frank Rose:  "Summer is now officially over, and for Hollywood the results were not good. No, the industry didn't suffer a repeat of the string of debacles that hit last year, when one mega-budget picture after an­other—White House Down, The Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim, Turbo, R.I.P.D.—unceremoniously tanked. In fact, the news was actually worse."

Natalia Kucirkova:  "Transmedia may become a sound business model in addition to a noble cause, but it needs to place the child at the centre, follow the general principles of good transmedia storytelling and not fall into being just a marketing tool."

"What is the true value of content? A thought-provoking post from beActive's CEO [Nuno Bernardo]"

Ben Reeves:  "Many game theorists and economists are beginning to realize that video games have something more significant to teach us about our societies."

Michael Schein:  "The key to coming up with great content is creating a system for producing it, and then sticking to that system every time."