Information Systems and Management in Media and Entertainment Industries

Making music is a very personal endeavour, where artistic bias can impact artistic collaboration, software development and the commercialisation of software generated through the creative process. This investigation provides an understanding of the behavioural characteristics, artistic and technical knowledge and application, and industry contexts, of two groups of electronic musicians using a shared software platform. Under investigation are the commercialisation and collaborative opportunities within in the Max/MSP and Ableton Live! artistic and economic communities (ecosystems), of which, Max for Live! is a shared sub-ecosystem. This investigation presents two frameworks: “The Five Cs” framework and the “ARTISAN” framework, designed to reflectively reduce the effects of artistic, technical, and psychological biases, that can serve as a barrier to driving innovation, commercialisation opportunities and collaboration.

In recent years, the number and range of screens used to watch audiovisual contents has risen, from the traditional television set to interactive Internet-enabled devices. This fact has profoundly changed audiovisual consumption habits in Spain. Firstly, viewing-times have increased across every platform. For example, in the case of conventional television, the average Spanish person watches four hours per day. Secondly, at the same time, younger audiences in particular are increasingly likely to use connected screens. The aim of this article is to analyze which screens are preferred by Spanish Internet users, as well as their reasons for doing so when watching different types of TV contents online, such as fiction series, entertainment shows, films, news and sports. In order to carry out this research, the following screens have been taken into account: smart TV, mobile phones, tablets, computers and video consoles. Of the main findings, two in particular may be highlighted in advance: almost half of Internet users watch TV online, and the most frequently used device to do so is the computer—including laptops and netbooks. A further clear conclusion is that users choose different program genres depending on the screen. The results of this study, based on an original survey carried out online, may prove especially significant in order to discover new audiovisual consumption habits of the Spanish population on the Internet.

Much has been written about the application of the new digital media to government within a growing stream of literature on ICT for development, generating countervailing perspectives where optimistic, technocratic approaches are countered by far more sceptical standpoints on technological innovation. This chapter seeks to, through the use of a case study, unravel the social dynamics shaping e-government projects used to reform public sector institutions. In particular, the research analyses actor behaviour, motivations, and interactions surrounding the conception and maintenance of software platforms facilitating these transformations. The value of such an approach is based on a review of existing ICT and software development literature which tends to be overly systems-rational in its approach and, as a consequence, often fails to recognise the degree to which project failure (viz. the general inability of the project design to meet stated goals and resolve both predicted and emerging problems) is symptomatic of a broader, much more complex set of interrelated inequalities, unresolved problems, and lopsided power-relationships both within the adopting organisation and in the surrounding environmental context.

Standards setting has gone from being a technical concern for individual companies to being a factor with important strategic implications for cooperation and competition among market players. The strategic issues raised by this development include the formation of competitive advantages by promoting standards or preventing their diffusion. In Sect. 1 of this chapter, we discuss the economic interpretation of standards from a descriptive perspective by drawing on the closely related issue of positive network effects, which induce a self-enhancing cycle and lead to a widespread adoption of the standard. In Sect. 2, we highlight standards setting as a competitive weapon for media companies. Standards act not only as a precondition for compatibility across technologies and systems, but can also be used to generate incompatibility and customer lock-in effects. Thus, we examine standardization strategies and tactics for horizontal competitors in the digital media industry. In Sect. 3, we view standards as a strategic instrument for cost reduction in media companies by describing a normative decision model for the economic selection of standards, referred to as the standardization problem.

The focal idea of this paper is to use the Activity table in order to increase the efficiency of the intellectual property protection by individual businesses inside the creative industries. The creative businesses—generally being identified as businesses with activities which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property—are especially susceptible to the issues of IP management and IP processes. This is also coupled with the fact that they operate in a world of fast adaptations and short innovation cycles. Generally, the aim of the activity table technique is to select specific business processes within the organization and tabularly show only those that are considered to be the basis for business processes improvement; here focusing on the intellectual property processes. The idea is hence putting the focus on the IP creation and IP management enhancing the concept of “own-it” in regards to the intellectual property and trough that enriching the possibilities of increased revenues from intellectual property.

Advanced information systems enable digital media and creative industries to use collaborative networks to boost creative co-production not only across organizational boundaries, but also across geographies. The initial success of crowdsourcing and other open-innovation strategies encourages these industries to consider creative co-production as a viable option for future development. This chapter suggests a general theoretical framework for the implementation of co-production in creative industries based on three components: co-creation environment, network coordination, and experiential communication. The proposed framework is sufficiently general yet grounded in the phenomenon to guide future research and development.

This chapter ties together media and human computer interaction (HCI) theories to work toward an understanding of how people interpret, gain meaning, and engage with interactive media. The concepts of media richness, social influence, and media genre proliferate the information systems literature, and in HCI a parallel can be found in the theory of affordance as it relates to the perception of material and computer ‘objects’. However, little has been done to make connections between these theory sets. In this discussion, a theory developed by Marshall McLuhan is described that can be used as an explanation to make connections between these media theories and the culture to context continuum of affordance, and can help us understand how this then affects cognitive processes. Interactive media can then be thought of as having properties of materiality, beyond; representational, temporality, conceptual, and episodal. Further elaboration around the cultural and contextual aspects, of interactivity allow for a deeper exploration of the framework and the implications for ambiguity, equivocality, and emotional engagement with interactive media.

Advances in multimedia and information systems have shifted the focus from general content repositories towards personalized systems. Much effort has been put into modeling and integration of affective states with the purpose of improving overall user experience and functionality of the system. In this chapter, we present a multi-modal dataset of users’ emotional and visual (color) responses to music, with accompanying personal and demographic profiles, which may serve as the knowledge basis for such improvement. Results show that emotional mediation of users’ perceptive states can significantly improve user experience in terms of context-dependent personalization in multimedia and information systems.

Increasingly, organizations are aware that the knowledge generated in the organization over time is a primary factor to remain competitive in the market. This leads organizations to seek strategies that preserve this knowledge generated over time and create mechanisms to encourage its employees to use part of this accumulated knowledge, in the generation of innovative products and strategies, on solving problems as well as in decision-making. In this potentiating process, the Organizational Memory (OM) comes in the interim as a way of conceptualizing how is this process of creation, storage and dissemination of knowledge in the organization over time and how the knowledge accumulated by members of an organization can influence the actions and decisions, both in the present and the future of the organization. For this development of OM to be effective and harmonious, it is necessary that the attention of individuals to be targeted and aligned, noticing the stimuli from the environment, and directing organizational time and cognitive effort towards the decisions to be made in the organization. In this scenario, in an attempt to improve our understanding of theoretical concepts taking into account the influence of Social Media in organizations, we raise the following question: How Social Media can be used to guide the attention of decision makers towards better creation, storage, dissemination and application of knowledge in the organization? Therefore this research is an important first step to understand the potential of Social Media in the organizational setting as a means of focusing the attention of policy makers on the development of OM. Adopting an interpretative approach to the literature review, the paper provides a discussion of 22 case studies found in the literature that were analyzed using the Attention-Based View of the Firm as a guiding lens. This analysis shows some evidence and relevant implications of the use of Social Media in the organizational context as well as a first theoretical description of how the focus of attention of decision makers influence the development of OM.

Systems analysis is the basis for decisions relating to the design and implementation of information technologies in companies. However, in many companies in the media industry systems analysis and modelling of functional and non-functional requirements are not very widespread. No domain-specific reference model exists which could help to conceptualise basic structures and processes. For this reason, objective recommendations for action and development cannot be made, and sustainable and feasible infrastructures cannot be established. The objective of this paper is to determine the current state of research regarding designing IT in the media industry and to introduce a theoretical overview of the instrument of systems analysis based on an example from the publishing industry.

Preserving the past within the collective memories of people is one of the ultimate goals of creative industries. Virtual cultural heritage applications recreate history by inviting users to travel back in time. One of the more popular approaches for enhancing the immersion of time-travellers within virtual environments is interactive digital story-telling, which enables users to learn while exploring. While the process of developing interactive digital story-telling applications is still complex, involving professionals from various artistic and scientific disciplines, significant technological advances have recently been made towards improving content production. Namely, advanced Earth observation systems are capable of capturing hundreds of thousands of points within a second, thus creating extremely accurate representations of artefacts such as cultural sites. Usually mounted on mobile and airborne platforms, they produce high-resolution point-clouds with densities ranging up to several hundred points per square meter. However, the lack of topology, huge data sizes, and the contained noise, requires new data processing, storage, and management approaches before these data can be successfully utilized. This chapter introduces an advanced pipeline for creating virtual worlds as environments for interactive digital story-telling applications. By considering the challenges and issues arising during this process, recent developments in content creation, warehousing, editing, and postproduction will be demonstrated through the usage scenario of the implemented end-user application.

The widespread diffusion of mobile technologies enables to reach a multitude of virtual contents, which crowd the infinite space of the internet: a huge extension that could not be transferred into a paper-based medium. Nowadays, traditional print media must face the growing diffusion of internet-based media. An opportunity to face the decreasing trade of paper-based media is provided by Augmented Reality (AR). The creation of Mixed Reality (MR) environments seems to offer the possibility to build a bridge between real and virtual, between print media and internet-based media. However, the integration of AR and print media still needs to deal with the issue of the automated content creation. In this paper we bring into focus the problem of the lack of automation in hybrid media and we propose a different paradigm, which results useful to design new editorial models. Furthermore, the system that we defined enables the creation of individualized reading experiences through the integration of a recommender system. By means of the definition of the domain ontology of the system, we have been able to define a prototypical implementation of the described automated AR content creation process, in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Globalisation of media industries in regards to sourcing and casting of artists, content, locations for filming, image, video and audio treatment has brought geo-graphically and culturally diverse teams together in projects ranging from video games and ads to major studio live-action and animated features. This new concept of teams however presents several issues as well as advantages and new opportunities. This chapter aims to present a holistic view on the issues present in e-collaboration. We introduce the field of e-collaboration and virtual teams. We propose a new categorization of e-collaboration tools. Further we examine the issues regarding culture, trust, human-computer interaction, social systems and management associated with e-collaboration and virtual teams. The perspective of knowledge management is discussed in the final section. In order to achieve optimal results from e-collaboration, companies should acknowledge and address the discussed issues in addition to organizational and technical issues.

Establishing a technology transfer office (TTO) is no trivial matter. The goal is to fulfil the gap between research and innovation by involving different kinds of organizational structures aiming to assist public research organizations in managing their intellectual properties that facilitate their transformation into benefits for society. Taking into account the specifics of the transfer of technology as an innovative process described by appropriate business model, the information system is the right choice to help make the appropriate decisions. This article describes an approach to develop of a new e-media based on the proposed business model of TTO. The described model is used for development of an information system. The proposed virtual agents are used as fundamental element of developed e-media to describe some information processing functions which are performed usually by some of media users. The design of described e-media is driven by constructed business model of the office of technology transfer.

This chapter introduces “fluid publishing” as a paradigm for journalistic publishing. It identifies and explains the four trends of data-driven journalism, journalism as a process, 24/7 publishing and service personalization as core drivers of fluid publishing. It will give rise to new online publishing formats and require organizational change processes, which in turn create the need for new holistic information systems. Such information systems will have to reconcile the strategic-rational function with a rewarding-emotional aspect, as well as define new journalism-centric metrics embracing high-level concepts of quality in journalism.

Searching for “Windsor knot” on YouTube provides 71.300 alternatives to choose from for those in need of instruction. Learning from a video tutorial in an online portal has become a natural procedure in households. As businesses are starting to realize, video offers a broad spectrum of use cases to foster internal and external knowledge transfer and collaboration. In general, modern media applications are designed to empower the user to choose from a structured compilation of information at will. Harnessing these properties in business settings, interactive video as an example should lead to a beneficiary outcome for its user. To validate this intuition we developed a new software suite to build, manage and view interactive videos and introduced it to a realistic application scenario. In this article we present results of an exploratory factor analysis validating a new measurement instrument designed specifically for the benefit of interactive videos. Data was gathered in a field experiment, in which the interactive videos were used for physiotherapy. We analysed the validity and reliability of the constructs and items. The results show some weaknesses demanding further improvement and adaption of the measurement model, yet also yielding insight into the generation of benefit from such knowledge media on an individual level.