TEDxTransmedia, true to the spirit of the TED conference aims to inspire broadcasters, and in particular, public service broadcasters, to “DARE” more for creating innovative content and borderline strategies to connect with the audience of the future.
Television, although originally a one-way (broadcast) medium, has been trying to engage its audience in a two-way experience for several decades. A children’s television program called Winky Dink and You (CBS 1954) was the first attempt to drive the viewer from passive to active.
Since then content providers, despite numerous failures along the way, have been trying to develop programs which create and exploit possibilities to be engaged by and to interact with TV content.
TEDxTransmedia is designed to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences amongst creative professional in the ‘otherMedia’ sphere.
Nowadays the future of entertainment can’t be conceived without enhanced content and multiplatform distribution strategies, matching the media habits of the ‘Pokemon generation’, seamless consumers of games, books, Internet, film and television.
TV has lost its predominant role, and it is now mandatory for broadcasters to embed various forms of interactive technology in their programs and to focus on crossmedia content and transmedia strategies. As Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT and a foremost authority on today’s media environment says: “Media convergence makes the flow of content across multiple media inevitable”.
In order to be ready for the future of entertainment, broadcasters, content producers, media professionals and adults in general… should not be afraid to switch on a different mindset and try to push the boundaries!