Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable to say to entertainment professionals that audiences were turning the entertainment business model on its head. Sure there was a lot of talk about technology, piracy and convergence; but surprisingly little about consumers. Television, film and even games had a tradition of keeping people at a distance– at the far end of a screen. Nielsen ratings, retail units sold and other metrics treated audiences like blobs. Blogs hadn’t been invented. There was no YouTube. And in the entertainment business, there was no grand tradition of “the customer is always right.” Today, the line ...

Online Video Watch did a nice job of explaining the value of widgets in a recent blog post. ...You want a portable rich media unit that plays video and drives traffic back to your main site to sign up for newsletters or podcasts. And you want to measure total embeds, total minutes of video delivered across each distribution platform, sign-ups for the newsletters and downloads of podcasts. You’d like to look at the average abandonment point where people are dropping off so you can trim the video segments to deliver ...

The relationship between games and storytelling is usually more "hook-up" than "marriage". But it's a match that audiences crave and that FanTrust has counseled for years. Storytelling is critical to compelling entertainment, videogames included. So with the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, I was psyched to see a game that Gamespot praises for its "superb" storyline and characters. The key to the franchise's success is storytelling, GTA IV writer/director Lazlow ...

In a recent FanTrust blog entry, we profiled ICE Cubes - a series of podcasts that examines current trends and news stories in interactive entertainment. FanTrust President Catherine Warren's podcast - in which she share her thoughts about digital audiences, business trends and more - can be heard below. ice-cubes-2008-catherine-warren.mp3

I’m fascinated by the way some people become fiercely loyal to certain entertainment properties. Their dedication is cult-like. The marketing guru Douglas Atkin, in his book The Culting of Brands, has a similar fascination with brand loyalists. He thought, why not study real cults? It turns out that people become addicted to cult brands for more or less the same reasons that people become committed to cults like the Moonies. And that companies cultivate unshakable allegiance through the same basic techniques as those used by, say, Hare Krishna. Asks The ...