Kevin Spacey: television has entered a new golden age
"He said Netflix ... had proved one thing: 'The audience wants control. They want freedom. If they want to binge–as they've been doing on House of Cards–then we should let them binge.
'We have learned the lesson that the music industry didn't learn: give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they'll more likely pay for it rather than steal it. Well, some will still steal it, but I believe this new model can take a bite out of piracy.'
But if the medium was to continue in this rich vein, TV executives would have to adapt to the way viewers want to binge on their favourite programmes on the internet or by watching DVD box sets, Spacey said.
Younger viewers no longer saw any difference between watching TV and online. 'For kids growing up, there's no difference between watching Avatar on an iPad or watching YouTube on a TV and watching Game of Thrones on their computer. It's all content. It's all story,' he said."
(John Plunkett and Jason Deans, 22 August 2013, The Guardian)
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Alex ShuttiSHARE
The mathematics of Hollywood blockbuster
HOLLYWOOD'S golden age may have ended in the 1950s, but it is only recently that Tinseltown appears to have hit upon a mathematical way to capitalise on our fickle attention spans.
"Film–makers have got better and better at constructing shots so that their lengths grab our attention," says James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He analysed 150 Hollywood movies and found that the more recent they were, the more closely their shot lengths tended to follow a mathematical pattern that also describes human attention spans.
In the 1990s, a team at the University of Texas, Austin, measured the attention spans of volunteers as they performed hundreds of consecutive trials. When they turned these measurements into a series of waves using a mathematical trick called a Fourier transform, the waves increased in magnitude as their frequency decreased.
(Ewen Callaway, 18 February 2010, New Scientist)
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Tessa SzwarnowskaSHARE
1001 Inventions
"1001 Inventions is a British based, award-winning science and cultural heritage organisation engaging over 200 million people around the world.
1001 Inventions uncovers a thousand years of scientific and cultural achievements from Muslim Civilisation from the 7th century onwards, and how those contributions helped create the foundations of our modern world."
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
