Until then, here are FanTrust’s picks and pans for screens large and small. The rationale not so much to answer: “can we cross-purpose our content?” (yes we can) or “does anyone really want to watch long shows on small screens?” (yes they do). But rather to respond to the question: “can we create ideal content for a specific viewing experience?”

On an iTouch there is nothing more compelling than a close-up of a human face. The tone and texture of the skin seems real and the eyes appear to connect with our own. The screen’s lush colors and soaring resolution bring the device to life in our hands. Couple that with a direct gaze and an intimate conversational delivery and you have tiny screen magic. As an example, take Aubrey’s Make-up Tips.  Downloaded from the Poptiq mobile app onto your smartphone, they are strangely addictive. By comparison, the same Aubrey videos on Youtube seem lost, floating in a sea of background pink and streaming choppily from frame to frame. Anecdotally, you can even mesmerize a 6 year old boy with Aubrey’s show on the iTouch, getting him to shriek for “more make-up tips” – although why you’d do this is another matter.

On the other hand, Hot for Words would be outré for my hand held (and obviously for my little boy) but rocks on Youtube, pulling in 10.5M channel views and counting. Content this in-your-face needs a little distance. So viewing this combination of titillating-accented philology, bustiers, and body bling is best done at arms length, making the laptop screen perfect for the experience.

Moving up the food chain, from Web to TV, Barely Political’s Obama Girl would be an excellent crossover candidate. First launched on Youtube in 2007 when Obama himself was polling 11 percent, the skits have achieved 75M views on computers around the world. Featuring the alluring Amber Lee Ettinger, snappy music and sardonic wit, it makes sense that this type of sketch comedy jumped to living room screens on a Saturday Night Live sketch.  (Check out FanTrust’s live interview with Obama Girl!)

For major motion pictures, nothing beats sweeping landscapes and epic themes. That’s why it’s always sad when movies like Kung Fu Panda inevitably get downsized to DVD and Blu-ray. Animation this good begs for the silver screen and goes down best with a tub of popcorn in a crowded theater. Physicists have a great term for it: “action at a distance,” which is just what I love from a breathtaking cinematic experience.

Long or short, there are some things I’d watch on any size screen. I’ve been rapt over The Tudors on television, laptop and iPod. And I’ve loved HBO’s John Adams on all of my home multiplatforms. Great content is still great content. And large or small, we’ll be hitting that forever.

“It has become second nature for television producers and networks to use the Internet as a marketing tool – a way to promote their schedules, offer after-broadcast downloads, create online fan communities. But a new Canadian science-fiction series is moving the other way: After originating on the Web, Sanctuary is making the leap from desktop to small screen, premiering on television with a two-hour episode tomorrow night.”

Read the entire article at Globeandmail.com

This fan activity may be your own, for example, if you have a website with respectable traffic stats; but you can also get great, relevant stats by pilfering fan data from show, film or game properties similar to your own.

I recently introduced 42 Entertainment’s executive team at VIDFEST 2008 (read VIDFEST’s “liveblog” of the session here). 42 Entertainment bills itself as an original content production company – media agnostic, focused on “monetized entertainment experiences” for distribution partners of all stripes – including broadcasters, broadband, telcos and publishers. Their work is legend, earning them a feature in a recent issue of Wired magazine for their ARG for Nine Inch Nails.

42 Entertainment lives (and pitches) by the mantra: “Experience is King”, “Content is Queen”, and “All the world is our stage”. With this resonating, content producers will hold court when pitching to a broadcaster, studio or game publisher.

Above: The Nine Inch Nails Resistance Meeting, part of the experience created by 42 Entertainment on the request of band frontman Trent Reznor, outlined at length in the December 2007 Wired article.

Think of digital fan communities as focus groups waiting to be mined.

• Count your fans
• Use fan reviews
• Cite fan forums
• Use fan art/fan productions

Package this up in a colourful pitch that demonstrates your depth of knowledge about your key audience, its demographics and psychographics. Show your buyer that you are ahead of the game when it comes to supporting publicity, promotion and sales efforts.

Ultimately, many buyers such as broadcasters and publishers, want to see your whole multiplatform plan built into your pitch. If your fan data and your multiplatform thinking does nothing more than help you land that traditional TV or game deal, then it proved to be your competitive advantage.

(Toronto, Canada) W Network, Canada’s #1 specialty channel for women, adds a smart new series designed to improve the bank balances of Canadian women and families, with the premiere of Smart Cookies Wednesday, March 12 at 9:30 p.m.

The Canadian original series, Smart Cookies, is a new money show that serves up recipes for smart saving habits that give your buying power a capital boost and teaches you how to live luxe for less.

SERIES DESCRIPTION

For most people, money – how much we spend, how much we make and how much debt we have – is a taboo topic. The Smart Cookies are five Vancouver women who formed the first Smart Cookies club so they could openly discuss their cash crises. The idea spread and after being featured on Oprah’s Debt Diet series, in The New York Times and on ET Canada, they decided to encourage women everywhere to start sharing both their money woes and dreams. From online shopping to investing in stocks, Smart Cookies shows the sensible yet sassy way to handle your dough, without feeling ashamed or deprived. Smart Cookies is produced by Omni Lifestyle in association with W Network. Catch Smart Cookies when it premieres Wednesday, March 12 at 9:30 p.m.

Read the full Corus Entertainment press release

Visit the Smart Cookies website

Visit Omni Lifestyle

To kick off the FanTrust blog, “where fans and entertainment meet”, it had to be The Simpsons. There is no better example of multiplatform success, gigantic demographic appeal and a Mobius strip of life-imitating-art-imitating-life in licensing deals.

The characters got their start as video shorts in the Tracy Ullman show (I breast-fed those little devils,” she once said), wound up as the longest-running American sitcom, sold record-breaking numbers of DVDs , spawned a billion dollar merchandising industry and will soon appear on the big screen with the launch of The Simpsons movie.

Bart, Lisa, Homer and Marge, and their mind-bogglingly big community, have inspired legions of fans the world over. Fansites such as Snpp generate 8.5 million monthly hits.

The relationship between the fans and Fox hasn’t always been any easy one – more mutually assured destruction than comfortable symbiosis. But in forcing Fox to test its limits for fan tolerance, The Simpson fan base is also partially responsible for the conglomerate’s other digital advances, including American Idol and 24.

From my vantage as a Monday morning quarterback (I have worked with FOX, but not on this series), The Simpsons is a case study in multimedia excellence: great writing and original animation led to a franchise way beyond TV, with games, comics, home entertainment, the movie and even an amusement park ride in the works.

The bar for creators is getting ever-higher, with everything from Web 2.0 to 360-degree content strategies influencing production orders. Today’s aspiring Matt Groening’s have the added challenge of interactive development and positioning from the get-go. But without story, everything else is a non-starter.

During this twenty year run, fortunes have been made by Rupert Murdoch, Matt Groening, writers, voice actors, merchandising artists, and eBay traders. Now 7-11 convenience stores are cashing in, with some outlets transforming to Kwik-E- Marts, Springfield’s fictitious corner store. This latest hall of mirrors for The Simpsons franchise is part of a campaign to hype the July 27 movie premiere. A dozen of the stores and most of the 6,000-plus others in North America will sell goodies, reports the LA Times, which until now existed only on TV: Buzz Cola, KrustyO’s cereal and the Squishee, itself a knock-off of the 7-11 mainstay Slurpee.

The Simpsons Movie will premiere in a real Springfield, picked from among 30 eponymous American towns. Fox has challenged Springfields across the country to prove how they typify the cartoon landscape and culture. The LA Times reports that various Springfields are weighing in with bona fides that include doughnut factories, proximity to Matt Groening’s birthplace and even a home-grown bald-headed, beaked-nosed power plant executive.

Everyone who has seen The Simpsons has a favorite character. The inconvenient truth is that mine oversees Springfield’s nuclear power plant and is the leader from hell. I live for his keyword “eeeeexcellllent” and the mesmeric tenting of his fingertips. Charles Montgomery Burns represents everything reprehensible about corporate management. And I love him BECAUSE I KNOW I CAN FIX HIM. (It’s a consultant thing.)

What does all of this success have to do with fandom and digital fans in particular? For that we turn to Chris Turner, author of Planet Simpson, who said on a panel that I moderated at VIDFEST that the interplay between TV, the VCR and the Internet allowed for a new kind of storytelling, and a new level of fan engagement. From the beginning Matt Groening built layers of pop culture, politics and in-jokes into every episode, making them rich viewing for video playback. Eventually, at the end of one episode, a fictitious news program broadcasts a list of dozens of corrections that scroll by in a couple of seconds. In no time, loyal fans trolled through the show in slow motion, transcribed all 34 jokes and posted them online.

The current Springfield contest takes fan community to new heights and may not have even been conceived, let alone possible, before the web. The series recently celebrated its 400th episode. In an era where no one can seem to feed the hungry maw of broadband, this, my friend, is a lot of valuable digital content.

Twenty years ago, when The Simpsons first went from their couch into our zeitgeist, there weren’t enough friends with modems to propel them along. Today, a quick Google search reveals 31.8 million results for the show name alone. If your idea promises to be the next Simpsons, you now have the hat-trick: connectivity, culture and fan community.

The movie, which will probably be bootlegged in real time, may unleash more digital firsts and fuel the next generation of digital fans. We do know it includes cartoon nudity (full frontal Bart), and claims a PG-13 rating for “irreverent humor”. Would that we were all known so well.