The Entertainment Technology Center at The University of Southern California (ETC) will produce “vETC  | The Grand Convergence 2019: Innovation and Integration,” its 5th annual virtual conference, August 27-28, 2019, in Los Angeles, highlighting significant presentations of emerging technologies and their impact on the M&E industry. The 25-minute presentations will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel. The Initial Expression of Interest seeking speakers and topics is open through Friday, August 9. Specific areas of concentration include 5G, AI, machine learning, adaptive production, blockchain, immersive media, virtual beings, and streaming. We Read More

This past spring, the Entertainment Technology Center at USC invited students and recent grads to participate in our Immersive Media Challenge, organized by ETC’s Director of Immersive Media Phil Lelyveld and funded by NBCUniversal and Cisco. The competition required students to ideate an engaging experience that should be buildable in 3-5 years and explain what needs to happen to make its construction possible. Judging took place May 29th, and here are the four amazing entries that were selected: Viewfinder An emotion-reactive first-person creature-based exploration puzzle game.   placeLA Read More

Original article and reporting by Debra Kaufman, ETCentric. The Entertainment Technology Center @ the University of Southern California held its 8th annual Studio Technology Leaders Dinner on June 26th, coinciding with the 26th anniversary of ETC’s founding. The event, underwritten by supporting sponsor Equinix and contributing sponsor WekaIO, honored industry leader Leon Silverman with the Bob Lambert Technology Leadership Award and featured a panel on some of the industry’s most pressing issues in “Media Fundamentals in Flex: Conflict, Chaos or Collaboration.” Executive director & CEO Ken Williams (below) Read More

At our June 20th All Members Meeting, ETC invited students from the University of Southern California to participate in a panel where they voiced their observations of current youth media consumption and to speculate the future of interactive media. The panel was moderated by ETC’s Immersive Media Initiative Director Phil Lelyveld. In order to engage with industry leaders on these topics, the students drew from observations of their families, analysis of their own personal preferences, and consideration of their academic studies.   Our participating panelists included:  Anil Ramakrishna Read More

Adaptive Production and AI were front and center for The Entertainment Technology Center@USC at this year’s NAB Show on April 10th.  Under the NXT Tech Symposium, 3 sessions programmed by our Adaptive Production director, Seth Levenson, discussed current state, findings, and perspectives. Preservation in the Cloud 9:00 AM – 10:20 AM The cloud allows for revolutionary gains in speed, flexibility, and collaboration, but the supposed benefit of “weightless” and “floating” data poses a challenge of preservation. When the infrastructure is no longer under your control, how can you Read More

The Entertainment Technology Center at USC hosted a half-day forum on 5G as the next wave of media transformation on March 28, 2019, 1:00 PM – 5:30 PM, in Downtown Los Angeles. The advent of 5G technologies is poised to transform entertainment supply chain, workflows, Hollywood enterprise relationships, and the very nature of the content itself. The agenda included explorative talks, panels, and presentations to define the 5G system of technologies, its transformative prospects for content creation, distribution, and consumption, raise discussion over the technology’s allowance of Read More