And the situation is even worse in the case of horror movies, with about 80% being basically the same movie, except for changing the name of the psychokiller/monster.

I will now show you three ways the Internet can help you to stay awake during those long exam periods, basically by giving you nightmares.

This is an oldie, but every time I play it, it manages to make me feel uncomfortable. This online game puts you in the place of a hotel guest, who is awoken in the middle of the night by weird noises coming from the corridor.

This online game knows how to create the right atmosphere to make the player feel immersed in the situation. It is only available after 6pm, (when it´s dark and creepy outside), and the game suggests that you to turn the lights off in your house, turn the volume up on the speakers and start playing. You know, the scarier the better. 

You can play the game here. Webcam is recommended!. 

It started in 2009. A Youtube user called Jay started posting some videos a friend of his made about a short movie called Marble Hornets. As Jay keeps checking all the tapes, he realized that his friend was not ok, and that weird things happened to him. As Jay keeps uploading new videos, abnormal events take place: people disappearing, creatures chasing not only Jay´s friend, but also Jay himself, all kinds of things that leave you wanting to click next to view the next entry. Here goes the first entry, I strongly suggest that you to view them all...if you dare. Just click here to see Marble hornets´s Youtube channel.

Which leads us to...

Just watch this.

It´s a documentary about a mithologycal creature called "The slender man". There have been rumours about it for a long time. A man with no face, wearing what seems to be a suit, and having long arms with long claws. It seems that this creature likes to stalk kids and to drain the life out of them.

It´s at a point where it has become well-known, like ghosts. But the cool thing is, it´s just an Internet creation.

Everything started with a post in the Something awful forum, when users were encouraged to create a mythical creature. After one user proposed this horrible creature, the other users got really excited about it, and started to develop a myth around this creepy concept.

That´s all folks, good night.... and sweet dreams!.

Impressive, uh?. So I can´t see graphics as the main competitive advantage for the next generation, but a required user specification.

-Games. This is one of the actual drivers for the customers to favor one console rather than other. Proprietary games are specific to one platform, and attractive games are what gamers look for in the end. But nowadays, just a bunch of titles are of this kind, with the vast majority being multi-platform. So, even if this key driver will still be used by platforms to leverage their investments in game development (hardcore gamers like franchises after all), I think this will not be enough.

-Interaction. And this is the final driver I can see. New generations are only starting to change the way we play, or with who we play. From single player, to MMOG, and from a single controller pad, to the Blue ocean strategy of Nintendo Wii, offering new ways the players can interact with the games. 

IMHO, this driver will be the next thing. Im going to list here a few ways that next generation of consoles could use to INNOVATE, with capital letters:

-3D. Probably a must have in the next generation. Being so strongly pushed by Film industry, content providers just hope that everyone adopts this technology for screens as the standard. No matter that the technology is not perfected yet, with some users feeling what is called "3D motion sickness" when watching 3D movies. 

-New haptic devices. As Nintendo Wii showed us, controllers are not the only way to interact. Microsoft Kinect could be the next standard (reducing the lag issues of course). Your body as a controller. Just that.

These two were easy. But I think that these are not breakthrough, so there must be something else. Lets see.

-IMMERZ. Im not pretty sure about this devices, which are capable of  "providing the user with a directional full sensory immersive experience and a heightened emotional, sensory response to whatever entertainment they are enjoying" According to them, of course. Basically, Immerz offers stereo audio speakers, connected to the user´s chest, who will tremble and feel the sounds as if they were real.

You can find a more technical foresight of the videogame industry in Gamasutra.

Good news, Apple loyal fanboys!. Your beloved leader, CEO Steve Jobs is expected to unveil iCloud Apple´s cloud music service at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on 6 June.

It is thought iCloud will scan users’ hard drives for tracks and allow them to store their music in the cloud so that it can be accessed even when they are not at the same computer. One could say that this movement is a reaction to Google  launch of Google´s Music, the same concept, but by the doodle company, which is available now, only in the States and with an invitation.

As you may be aware of, Google and Apple have been battling for the past year, to conquer the most promising field in this time of digital convergence we are living in, that is, the smartphone segment. Two companies investing in R&D like crazy, one with an open point of view for innovation, the other  with the opposite, paranoid culture. Both companies deploying the weapons for the final clash, trying to build their ecosystems as if they were webs to choke the enemy.



People that know me know that I am not precisely an Apple lover. Paying more for a shinny wrapping its not for me. Moreover, I´m of the opinion that an open ecosystem, where many players play with the games you provide them, is a better strategy than just being obsessed with control, and having a word in everything. Especially when time to market and being the first mover can be decisive to gain the consumers love.

But with this, there is an issue that moves the balance in favour of the white apple. Google´s approach for their Google´s Music app, at least in the beginning, is to provide a platform where users can upload their music, to listen to it on the device of their choice. That means, the user has to own physically the music in his hard drive. Probably in his desktop/laptop.

On the other hand,” Apple has secured deals with the four major record labels to run their music on the service”, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Google and Amazon have yet to agree terms with record labels. Some people say that the main succeed of the Ipod, was that users could upload their own music, which then lead to the users to buy the Iphone and discovering the Itunes store, getting more and more inside of the platform, which of course guarantees compatibility among the devices. With this Icloud, Apple launch the definitive move in the battle for music. Listen to whichever kind of music you own, or you bought, in whichever device you have. Maybe even in a Chromebook? .

And what´s for the Music Labels, you may ask?. Well, obviously, this is not a cost for them, with Apple  in charge of or the logistics of the new channel. But it could be an extra revenue. I dont know the details, but I can imagine that labels will get some benefit depending on how many times each song is played in the new service. And the songs in that service have already been bought by the user, but Apple is paying the labels again for upload them in the cloud. So for each song that the labels sold once through Itunes, they are automatically selling it twice, with no cost for them. Apple charges a fee to the user, and the user can listen to the music he/she had already pay for. In one word, Nice!.

Good news for the fans of the wizards, rings, and small people! Yesterday, Peter Jackson, director of the masterpiece The Lord of the Rings movies, announced the titles and release dates of the long time announced “The Hobbit” movies. The first one, called “The Hobbit: An unexpected Journey” (as a wink to the book´s first chapter, An unexpected party), to be released in Dec. 14 2012, and the second, called “The Hobbit: There and Back again” (as the book written by the main character Bilbo Baggins), to be released in Dec 13, 2013.



My first reaction when I knew that Peter Jackson convinced MGM to divide the adaptation of the book in two movies I felt just the opposite as when I knew the LOTR books would be adapted in three books. At that time I was excited, willing to see a lengthy adaptation to an epic history, with plenty of room to create a film as much as accurate as the book. On the other hand,one of the reasons The Hobbit is a really good book,  it´s because is an small book, full of action. LOTR, even if an epic book, it´s sometimes too long.

So I started to crunch some data to see how this 320 pages book could be spread in two movies.





As you can see, there is an average of 850 words per minute of filming in the three LOTR movies. The Hobbit has 95k words, so assuming a duration of the new movies of an hour and 40 minutes (100 minutes), these are the results:





It seems that Jackson will need to be “creative” in order to deliver an acceptable movie. Some people say, that there are many things in the Tolkien´s universe that do not form part of the main books, and that those parts could be added as parallel plot lines, exploring the life of Aragorn before LOTR for example (he does not appear in The Hobbit).

As a big fan of LOTR as I am, my opinion is, this is bullshit. There is no way Jackson can make an accurate adaptation of TH in two movies. More over, if LOTR movies had the support and the boost these movies achieved, it was not because of grandma and grandpa going to the theater to check what people is talking about, it was because of the many fans that recognized a great, faithful adaptation made by a big fan of the books.



But of course, Hollywood lives by two words, blockbusters and franchises. So what would be better than a movie with an established base of fans, a sure bet in a world threatened by piracy and in constant change? The answer of course, it´s two movies. But will this strategy work?. According to Box Office Mojo, in the next chart you can read the budget and revenues of every LOTR movies (values in blue are assumptions).




With revenues 10 times as high as their budgets, these movies were great blockbusters. New Line Cinema was satisfied for sure. But Hollywood producers are greedy, and there is nothing they like the most than getting a successful and good movie, and squish it to get as much as money from it, by releasing sequels,prequels, and other equels. If The Return of the King had a budget of 93 million $, each of The Hobbit movies will have a budget of 250 million $. If MGM want to obtain as much as profit, let´s say 10 times, each one of the new movies should get 2500 million $ in revenues. The biggest blockbuster of all times, James Cameron Avatar, got 2700 million $. Even if not impossible, it is a difficult task to achieve.

A game of thrones is the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire cycle, an epic fantasy saga compared with Tolkien´s LOTR, with every new release being a best seller.

HBO is a US based television network,owned by Time Warner, focus in providing content to an adult audience, from boxing shows, to PG-13 tv series. HBO is most known now for its original series, most of them being received with great success by critic and public. With TV blockbusters from The Sopranos to Rome, HBO created a new format in TV, based in 1-hour dramatic series with explicit content, with higher budgets than its competitors. As an example, as of 2005 ,  the award winning Rome tv show costs were about 8.75 million dollars per episode, with an average of the industry of 4 million in 2005.

HBO moved one step further late in 2010 by announcing the release of a tv show based in a Game of thrones. This movement was, in my opinion, a perfect alignment for the company. First, because these books have already a loyal base of fans, that would be excited to see how their imagined universe became real.Second, because these novels are as explicit as a book can be, and HBO fans really like the image of “we censor nothing” that this channel shows. Third, because those loyal readers and those HBO fans are probably the same people.

Lets talk a little about money. One could say, “hey, but those people who like epic fantasy books and action tv shows, are not the ones downloading illegally movies and stuff?” Well, that is partially true. But Internet users are not yet the main revenue source for HBO.  The core business for HBO its still being a cable TV channel, offered in bundle with other channels as a part of the offer of telecom operators selling entertainment packages with Internet, Cable TV, and landline. Then it comes license sales for other tv channels (generally outside US). After those revenue sources, HBO realized that video on demand, online streaming sales are also important, specially once you have an established channel (HBO GO, a VOD online platform). More over, there even exists an iphone/android app, so smartphone users can watch their favorite tv shows on their devices. And finally, once the tv show is not a novelty, here it comes the DVD/Blue ray sales, collector´s edition and so on.

By looking at the numbers, A Game of thrones has been successful with the tv viewers and it helped it mother company to boost its benefits in Q1 2011. So how to capitalize the production costs (around 4,5 million $ per episode) of a popular product.

Of course, the easiest way is to keep broadcasting it as long as there are people interested in watching it. HBO showed the premiere of AGOT about 4 times the first week, in different time ranges, and in every HBO channel(like HBO latino for example).

And the second way of course, is to keep going with a successful franchise. And that is the reason why, even only after the first episode, HBO started the pre-production of the second season. Hopefully they will continue doing as good as they are doing now.