Regulating in the face of digital disruption

Having studied policy and regulation at university, Zeitgeist is often compelled to look at many issues facing companies today through a regulatory lens. But even the most dispassionate fan of rules and laws would have to concede that as digital innovation disrupts multiple sectors around the world, the way these new innovations and businesses are governed is an important consideration. In this piece we’ll be looking at regulatory concerns for disruptors like Uber and Netflix, as well as how regulation effects legacy companies like Microsoft and Comcast. As with many of our articles on this blog, we’ll be taking a particular look at the TMT sector. (Bitcoin will have to wait for another article).

Regulators often find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Should the emphasis be placed ex-ante, to ensure compliance, or ex-post to apply punitive measures and fix problems once they have become apparent? The former seems wise as it sets initial goals for companies. But it also risks opening loopholes, as well as being overly prescriptive and thus failing to adapt. It can also lead to the development of overly-familiar relations between regulator and industry, leading to what is known as ‘capture’. Currently, the US favours an ex-ante approach, but as Edward Luce detailed recently in the Financial Times, this has led to a “creeping impulse to micro-regulate“. The FDA’s recent announcement that they would regulate e-cigarettes, despite no proof it encourages the take-up of smoking tobacco, is such an example. Ex-post – regulating after an event – seems just as bad, mostly because the damage has already been done at that point. While it means that all problems addressed are real-world and practical, they can also be applied with too much emphasis. Above all, regulation ultimately risks stifling innovation; Edison moved to the West coast because he was fed up of the stringent regulations in the East. A recent lead article in The Economist asserted that, far from too little regulation, the global recession was caused by too much state involvement in the wrong places. Too little oversight though, and companies can be allowed to run wild.

Earlier this month, The New York Times featured an op-ed on regulating the online world. It is written by New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman. As might be expected, he quickly attacks online start-ups saying it is “amazing” that they think just because their business is online, that “somehow makes them immune from regulation”. This is all well and good, but it masks the fact that clear regulations have not been established. Schneiderman is right to point out that just because a business now has an app instead of a high street store doesn’t mean its responsibilities to the law have changed. It is an apt analogy. But in practice the story is different. As with most innovations, from film to Napster and Airbnb, regulators must constantly be playing catch-up. The complaints of new businesses are not that they should be subject to regulation, rather that those rules are onerous or outdated, applying to a different time. The sharing economy works because it has found cheaper, more efficient ways of offering services that hitherto were more restricted; regulations need to be appropriately dispensed. Sadly, many cities in the US have simply blocked allowing such services to operate. Uber – a car pickup service – is probably not wholly repulsed by the thought of regulation, but they are resistant to rules put in place by entrenched interests and unions. Airbnb might violate the letter of the law, but not the spirit surely. People have always let out their living space to others. The only thing that has changed is scale. Why does scale suddenly make something legally problematic? Schneiderman points out that some lettings are so large, with multiple rooms let at once, that they are essentially hotels. True enough, perhaps, but Zeitgeist has certainly never come across such a property, and they are certainly small in number, and no more represent Airbnb’s ethos than any hotel violating its own (regulated) terms. A recent article in The Economist argued for “adaptation, not prohibition“. Schneiderman’s sentiment is that these start-ups need to work more closely and proactively with regulators, but this fails to recognise that regulators need to also fundamentally change their approach.

East and West shook up a regulatory framework with the recent release of “300: Rise of an Empire” via China’s Tencent website

Regulation in China has been a hot topic for a while now. This is principally because the region has a low tolerance of free speech. But it extends to cultural concerns as well; the Google Play store, Twitter, and most of Hollywood’s annual product do not make it onto Chinese shores (legally, anyway). What this creates is a secondary tier of companies who take Western business models and run with it. That’s why there are multiple Chinese Android app stores, why Sina Weibo is a fantastically successful service, and why many poor remakes of US films flood the Chinese market. It has been pleasing then to see two recent developments in the way China regulates the TMT sector that should be good news for consumers and Western companies. Today saw the announcement that Microsoft’s Xbox One is to be sold in China. It will be the first foreign games console to go on sale in the country, lifting a fourteen year ban. This would open up the company to the half billion active gamers in China. Additionally, as Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Securities pointed out,

“The middle class in China is pretty large, and positioning the box as an over-the-top TV receiver gives it a lot of appeal to wealthier Chinese.”

Earlier this week, Warner Bros was the latest film studio to partner with Chinese site Tencent. The film 300: Rise of an Empire, is available to rent through the site, while it is still in cinemas in territories like the US. The points of the deal were very interesting. Zeitgeist has for a number of years now advocated an increased flexibility to film platform release windows. Such a rigid structure as the industry has in the US is not as apparent in China. This could help alleviate piracy in the country and separately could pave the way for a relaxing of the quota of US films that are let into the Chinese market every year. Hopefully this will be a precursor to more such moves in Western markets. As someone commented on the news when it was published on the Financial Times website,

“Maybe they can do the same in the rest of the world as well?
Or I could wait 2 months for something to come out on Bluray in the UK compared to the US. Or just pirate it when the US version is available since they won’t let me buy it in my country, but will let other people buy it in other countries.”

While China is taking steps forward, the US seems to be faltering in its regulatory approach. We mentioned the impending restrictions on e-cigarettes earlier, and let’s not even go into then-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s crusade against sugar. We’ve written about net neutrality before. The issue has been of interest to Zeitgeist since university days. It was thrust into the spotlight this year when a US court ruled that the FCC had “overstepped its authority” after a legal challenge from Verizon. Last week, new rules were proposed that will undermine the original purpose of the policy of treating all traffic the same, allowing ISPs to charge companies like Netflix more in order to reach consumer with greater quantity or quality, but only on “commercially reasonable” terms. These terms have yet to be defined. These moves touch on a related matter that has also been greeted with consternation by those who favour fairness. This is Comcast‘s proposed merger with Time Warner Cable. Netflix recently publicly came out against the move. It is easy to see why. As The Economist recently elaborated, such a deal would limit competition and reduce any incentive to innovate. It is also one more example of the assumption companies have that their problems can be solved with size. Comcast have admitted they will raise prices for the end user, while as much as conceding there will no be no discernible benefit to them. One might argue there is little more for such companies to do, but average internet speeds in Tokyo and Singapore are ten times as fast on average as in the US. Even the Financial Times, which can often be counted on to be a bastion of support for capitalists, compared Comcast to the Railway Barons of the past.

The sharing economy is creating difficulty for many sectors, and regulatory agencies have not escaped this. Such forces have been to slow to adapt to fundamental changes in the TMT sector, particularly in print, music and film industries. There certainly seems to be a tendency for over-regulation today, particularly in the US. Returning to an article we mentioned at the beginning of our piece, Edward Luce laments that America “no longer feels unusually free”. Perhaps this is part of a cyclical trend. Like the causes of the recession, perhaps the problem is a stifling caused by over-regulation in the wrong places, coupled with a lack of innovation in areas where sensible rules that do not cater to the established are in dire need. It is good to see rules and regulations around consoles and release windows are being relaxed in China, but the furore around regulating the sharing economy needs a similar dose of innovative thinking.

UPDATE (17/9/14): We’ve included some nice examples in this post of innovative thinking paired with light touch regulation going on in China’s entertainment sector. Sadly the pendulum swings both ways; though shows like BBC’s ‘Sherlock’ were made available with authorised translations mere hours after their original broadcast in Blighty, the state is cracking down hard in other ways. The Economist reports that last week, China’s TV regulator said that, from April, any foreign series or film would need approval before being shown online. It is looking for “health, well-made works” that “showcase good values”. This sounds like a vague excuse to arbitrarily censor content it doesn’t like. Explicitly, banned subject matter includes, according to The Economist, “superstition, espionage and—bizarrely—time travel”.

Up in smoke: Trends in buying movies and content ownership

Like the main protagonist in The Artist, film audiences are increasingly falling out of love with physical film. A recent IHS Screen Digest webinar presented some interesting notes on home entertainment trends around the world. Most of it was far from good news for media companies.

Emerging markets are where a lot of industries are currently looking to for growth, from WPP to the Catholic church. The film industry is seeing growth here, too. China, which last year relaxed its quota on the number of foreign films it allows into the market every year, has seen record box office takings of late, with the release of Titanic being a major highlight. Russia, too, is seeing a new audience for film. On a macro level, countries like India and Brazil are seeing a significant growth in the middle classes. In other words, a group of consumers that has a larger amount of discretionary spending. Some of this spending will be allocated to home entertainment, in the form of video players, be they DVD or Blu-ray. However, this jars with the global decline in physical media spend, as viewers switch in droves to streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon’s Lovefilm. Data from the IHS webinar revealed that the global growth in video players will not serve to offset the decline of spend on physical media.

As well as shifting from hard copy to soft copy products, consumers are also beginning to show a marked preference for renting over owning. This trend extends far beyond the film industry of course. Companies like Spotify spearheaded the idea in the music industry, the phrase “access trumps ownership” has long been a mantra there. The philosophy is affecting many lifestyle aspects, as demonstrated by The Economist’s recent front cover article. In Western Europe, rental is now the transactional consumption choice for digital movies. IHS data reported that the average US citizen rented 5.3 films last year. The company predicted that revenue from rentals will go up, returning to where they were in 2009, but in large part only because rental prices will go up. Dovetailing with the increasing consumer reluctance to buy physical discs is that the medium also appears “less and less attractive” for retailers. Blu-ray, which was supposed to revive the disc format, has not taken off in the way that was hoped; IHS data showed most Blu-ray owners still purchase a lot of movies on DVD rather than paying a premium for the HD version.

The move from physical to digital formats is troubling to media companies because, IHS report, “transactional online movie spending will not reach levels of physical spend” anytime soon. Indeed, theatrical is predicted to take up an ever larger slice of the pie (see above). This is without considering relative externalities, such as piracy, which remains a huge problem in Asia. And while consumer spending on online movies will almost double in AsPac, the share in wider consumer spending on movies in the region will not move beyond the current share before 2016.

One solace could be found in cinemas, a special haven for a medium without distractions, providing ample opportunity to leverage some of the more irrational desires and behaviours of consumers. We wrote briefly about various opportunities recently, and it’s reassuring to see the news earlier this month that Digital Cinema Media in the UK, an advertising sales house jointly owned by Odeon and Cineworld, will “in the coming months” launch a mobile app that will attempt to track cinema visits in order to feed data back to advertisers. In return, audiences will get exclusive content, vouchers or free ice cream. Given that the cinema is surely one of the few areas where you can pretty much guarantee a captive audience, this sounds like a great idea. How much it will offset lost revenues from home entertainment though remains an open question.

UPDATE (30/4/13): Data gathered can sometimes be misleading of course because it fails to report things that are not being measured. Such is the case with the current trend, recently reported by The New York Times, of sharing multi-platform viewing accounts for products like HBO Go among friends and even strangers. This trend represents a threat to revenue, but also an opportunity to create further loyalty, if used wisely. Forbes questioned the legality of such activity in a follow-up article.

On movie release windows – I love the sound of breaking glass

It’s fair to say that in the past ten years, the pace of technology has evolved at an ever-increasing rate. The way in which devices have changed, and with it our use of them, was humourously summed up in the above cartoon from The New Yorker. Digital trends have affected the way we communicate, the way we consume media, and indeed the way we consume goods and services, i.e. shop.

So it is a little surprising to many – your humble correspondent included – that we still have to put up with a film being released in one country one day, and in another months later. That we still have to wait a certain number of months for a film to amble its way from the cinema screens to our home, whether on Blu-ray / DVD or on VOD. It’s interesting to note that vertical integration isn’t a key issue; Disney recently launched the second subscription video on demand (SVOD) service in Europe, with a library of constantly refreshed titles that can be viewed on platforms ranging from TVs to Xbox to iPads. Indeed, Disney’s CEO Bob Iger announced way back in 2005 in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that he foresaw a day of collapsed release windows, when a film came out the same day at the cinema as it was available to watch in the home:

We’d be better off as a company and an industry if we compressed that window. We could spend less money pushing the box office and get to the next window sooner where a movie has more perceived value to the consumer because it’s more fresh.

So there is money to be saved in such an exercise. Yet seven years later, such a situation is still mostly a fantasy for major films. Studios have undoubtedly dipped their toe in the water, and some moderate success has been seen on the indie scene, specifically with recent films like Margin Call, Melancholia and Arbitrage. The former film was released simultaneously in the cinema and on VOD (seemingly only in the US, however), eventually recording strong results, months after its initial release at Sundance Film Festival. Again, what is the justification for such a change in platform release timings? Not meeting consumer desires and addressing piracy, but simple cost savings. Variety reports:

“We’re a star-driven culture, and on a crowded (VOD) menu, what are you going to be drawn to?” posits WME Global head Graham Taylor, who adds that with marketing budgets skyrocketing, the ability to use a single campaign across closely spaced bows on multiple platforms is an important cost savings.

The whole situation is quite frustrating for any fan of film or television. It is a frustration shared by Frederic Filloux, co-author of the excellent blog Monday Note, which Zeitgeist strongly recommends to anyone with an interest in insightful thoughts and reasoning on media industry goings-on.

Their most recent post also happened to detail the author’s frustrations with such seemingly arbitrary release windows. One of the most pertinent charts displays the achingly slow rate of change in platform release changes, that is so at odds with the pace of change in other media (above). The content of the post has rational recommendations, which at first glance seem eminently appropriate and overdue for implementation. Some of the recommendations though fail to account for the fact that the film industry and its machinations are often governed by winds of irrationality.

To summarise, Filloux recommends a global day-and date, shorter, more flexible window of time between cinema and home release. There are a number of obstacles to these ideas though. Firstly, exhibitors must be placated. They hold such a sway over studios that they cannot easily be ignored. Bob Iger, in the interview mentioned earlier, mentions exhibitors as being a key obstacle. Think about it, why on earth would a cinema want their film to be available in the comfort of their audience’s home any sooner than it already is? It wants to enforce scarcity, so that when the film’s marketing machine is at its height, the cinema is the only place you can see it. As already mentioned, indie films have had some success with multi-platform releases, but even these have met with consternation from exhibitors, as a recent example in Canada shows. The consternation becomes outright war for larger films. Zetigeist reported when, in 2010, many exhibitors refused to show Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland when the studio, Disney, flirted with releasing the film to home release less than four months after its theatrical debut. After much back and forth, exhibitors eventually relented, and the film went on to gross over a billion dollars at the global box office. Exhibitors are not going to be convinced about flat release windows anytime soon. They are perhaps the largest roadblock to such a move, and the largest point of advocating a return to vertical integration of production, distribution and exhibition that was the case until the Paramount Decree in 1948.

Studios can only flatter exhibitors for so long

Moreover, while the argument about having flexible, shifting window releases depending upon a film’s success is logical, it does not acknowledge the existence of sleeper hits, films which do not open to huge returns but gradually accrue it over months of release (as illustrated by Margin Call, mentioned earlier). It would also be hard to define when a movie “succeeds” or “bombs”. You could use box office as a figure, but would this be without context, as a ratio of the film’s budget, or against its current peers? Using box office fails to take awards – principally Oscar – coverage into consideration, which invariably adds its own box office bump to a movie when it is nominated or wins.

The recommendation for simultaneous worldwide release is also a valid point. Zeitgeist has written before on the ridiculous prices pirated films go for in markets that have no access to the official product. To their credit, studios are moving further toward a “day and date” system. However, doing so exclusively would be dangerous. Releasing some films market by market allows the studio to gauge audience reaction, and if necessary tinker with the marketing or the film itself. Staggering release dates is also necessary for cultural events, such as the World Cup, which may be more relevant to some countries than others.

It is the last point made in the article, that of making TV shows “universally available from the day when they are aired on TV” that Zeitgeist could not agree more with. Apart from audience frustration – and recent technological development such as DVR show how the opportunity can shape viewer habits – such a move would also surely divert people from resorting to illegal downloading.

To conclude, while there are caveats and significant roadbumps to be addressed, and some progress has been made over the years, the film industry has a long way to go in a short time if it wants to catch up with consumer habits. Flat release windows should be an inevitability, and a priority. Moreover, they should not be seen purely as cost-saving measure, but as an important way of keeping an increasingly technologically and globally savvy customer base happy.

Hollywood and China

We have reported before on the quota China imposes on Hollywood films coming into the country.

Zeitgeist remembers being in a meeting while doing at stint at 20th Century Fox back in 2004, when presentations were optimistically suffixed with the potential for China to drop said limit. It was always an inevitability, and when last month DreamWorks Animation announced a pact with Shanghai Media Group and China Media Capital, it was clear something bigger was on the cards. This has been the case for a while though, as US production companies have sought to get into China’s goodbooks with relevant films (witness Kung Fu Panda and the most recent iteration of The Mummy franchise).

Good news finally came to studio heads and cinema exhibitors. While the quota hasn’t been dropped, it has been dramatically extended to allow another 14 films into the market each year (from the current 20). This can only be good news for Hollywood, coming at a time when DVD and Blu-Ray revenue is slowing; Bloomberg recently reported that more films will be streamed than watched on disc this year. In China, however, views are mixed. Variety summarises,

“Theater owners are very upbeat, filmmakers are split — will this mean unnecessary competition, or a boost to moviegoing habits? — and Hong Kong industryites are watching things closely.”

The country already means big business for Hollywood, with the piece of rubbish that was Transformers 3taking in  $170mn, and Avatar making $210mn. Year on year, the number of screens in the country increased 33%. 803 cinemas opened in the past 12 months there. So the supply-demand ratio is currently extremely favourable (with Hong Kong hopefully not being a harbinger). One would have to be very naiive however not to consider the political landscape of China, which is inscrutable to say the least. Whether dealing with the electoral process in Hong Kong, or the media landscape – from TV to social media – it can be difficult to know where you sit at any time. Variety again,

“Filmmakers face… rigid – and opaque – standards of control and censorship [in China]… [I]f a filmmaker doesn’t meet those sometimes abstruse rules, it won’t be admitted.”

What the Chinese government will have some difficulty in regulating though is the black market, which should hopefully see film piracy diminish as a source of revenue. With an assumed lowering of cost per purchase of pirated film, it should mean even more Chinese get to see Hollywood product (though admittedly without compensating the studios for it, at least initially).

As well as receiving net net more money from China from its films, the deal made also allows Hollywood to receive 25% of the Chinese box office back on imported films, previously at 13%. What should be a lucrative influx of revenue for the film studios comes at a welcome time. Not only is the business shifting from discs to digital delivery – which currently is proving harder to monetise – it is also under increasing pressure to collapse its sacred windows – the time period between when a film is released in cinema, DVD, POV, TV, etc. A few weeks ago, Netflix, an increasingly powerful player in the mix as it broadens its availability to the UK, and becomes a content creator, called the windows structure “pretty archaic”.

While releasing films on multiple platforms simulataneously might produce a spike in opening weekend returns, it comes at the cost of angering a lot of cinema owners, who would not take kindly to the idea of their film being available to watch at home at the same time they are trying to charge you £12 to watch it in a big dark room with a bunch of strangers. Zeitgeist’s radical solution is to allow the windows to collapse, and then for the government to allow the film studios to vertically integrate with the exhibitors again, like in the old days. But that’s another article…

Media and Entertainment – Revenue vs Cost

“Old-media guys are always asking, ‘When will revenues rise to meet our cost structure?’ The answer, I say, is when hell freezes over.”

 – Clay Shirky, author, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

This quotation appeared in an article by Michael Wolff published last year in Vanity Fair. The article, on internet predictions, touched on how advertising rates are often 10% of what you might get from TV or print. Studio executives are waiting nervously for the time when Blu-ray and digital sales will make up for the increasingly lean profits from DVDs. But perhaps this just won’t happen. What then for the sector?

Last week, Zeitgeist was privileged to hear from Marc Ventresca, lecturer in Strategic Management at Oxford University’s MBA program at Saïd Business School. Where supply meets demand, price emerges, hence the market dictates the price. The economist Schumpeter, though, posited the issue of “disequilibrium”. The key question then being not “how capitalism administers exisiting structures, … [but] how it creates and destroys them.”

What does creative destruction – of which Alan Greenspan was a key exponent – mean then for the media and entertainment sector? No one seems to be daring to look this far into the future currently and guess how we re-combine, re-purpose and reposition the sector. Is the answer to be found in Sony’s new Blue Violet format, or is something more radical needed? Also in the works from the same company is “Ultraviolet”, an aggregate service that “will help identify content, devices and services from a spectrum of familiar entities – including studios, retailers, consumer electronics manufacturers, cable companies, ISPs and other service providers – that will work together”. Something of this nature might reduce regulatory arbitrage, as well as consumer confusion. As Mr. Ventresca pointed out last week after the lecture, it is the platform that is now of paramount importance for consumers, even over the content itself.

A sense of ownership

In an increasingly homogenous and globalised world, how important is craft?

In some industries, the concept of owning something tangibly has become redundant; an antiquated thought that occupies old minds and outdated marketing and sales strategies. Netflix, the online video rental service, is a prime example of this. Recently the service reported record quarterly profits, with revenue up 31%, adding just under 2m subscribers in the last three months. The service, which started as a way to rent DVDs online, eventually introduced a streaming service, which, as of this month, is now more popular than the DVD part of its offering. This has not been a sudden shift, but rather one that has been happening gradually, helped independently by DVD’s gradual decline since its heyday. Blu-ray is a temporary panacea and will not combat the inexorable shift toward a medium that someday may not exist in hardcopy form. The challenge will be in how to maintain a sense of ownership for the consumer when all their films (as well, of course, as all their books and music), are only visible through an electronic device, rather than being stacked on shelves. Having physical media on your shelves is a statement of sorts, and not merely a tool to show off your intellect. Though by turns irritating and immature, Taleb’s book Black Swan does make a great point about the purpose of a library of books, a metaphor which can be extended to music and film as well. Anecdotally, Zeitgeist doesn’t know a single person who favours the practicality of an electronic book over the unique feeling of owning something tangible. Creating desire for such software [i.e. books, film, music] will be another challenge, one that at the moment is being countered by creating desire for the hardware [i.e. the platform: iPad, Kindle, etc.].

At the same time, other industries, where individuality and provenance are of greater advantage than practicality or cutting-edge convenience, are experiencing a different problem. The Economist this week reports on the problems facing the industrious knitters on Fair Isle, part of the Shetland islands. The distinctive prints they create for their knitwear, which the magazine describes as “in vogue”, has also tapped in to an increasing post-recession desire for “garments that look chunkily lasting and homemade”. In this case, provenance is a hugely significant part of why people would choose to buy this particular product. Ownership of the product is not for the mere intellectual consumption of the product, it is also about wearing something that means something, in the sense of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. This importance, The Economist maintains, is being diluted as neighbouring knitwear manufacturers unfairly play off the Fair Isle’s name. Following in the footsteps of Harris Tweed and champagne, the cottage industry, like Cornish pasties and Yorkshire pudding, is seeking special protection for exclusive use of it’s name.

So there’s clearly a push and pull going on as to the importance – the essence – of ownership. Perhaps what is needed is a total reappraisal of what ownership means when the content you are talking about is not something tangible that you carry around with you and are free to do with as you wish, but rather something floating in the Cloud, that you merely have access to.

App Store celebrates first birthday

From the August Zeitgeist…

Apple’s App Store recently celebrated its first anniversary, and not long afterwards crossed a similarly momentous watershed of recording 1.5 billion downloads. With a little calculator work, this turns out to be over 4 million applications every single day, and just under 50 downloaded every second worldwide, for iPhone and iPod touch models, “creating an ecosystem that any technology company would envy” says eConsultancy.

The immense popularity of the App Store is evidence of the current industry shift from focusing on hardware to software. The iPhone, somewhat unexpectedly, became about much more than Apple’s sleek design and functionality, instead incorporating a user generated aspect, allowing the phone to do anything you want it to. In other words, this was customisation as personalisation, making your product bespoke. It has led to the development of some extraordinary applications, from picking a restaurant – perhaps you could look up your nearest Pizza Hut? – to organising your whole night out.

Just as the Internet in its youth has been compared to a Wild West, so it is now with the app store; Apple has to individually approve or deny every app that passes its way, often on a very ad hoc basis (witness recent deliberation over the first pornographic application). This should serve as a warning for any clients that wish to make apps that are controversial or risk making Apple functionality redundant.

Two recent iPhone applications do a great job of illustrating the potential use brands can make of the handset. The first makes use of augmented reality to embed the app’s own graphics onto real-world imagery displayed through the camera. Click here for a video. As VentureBeat explains, “When a user holds the iPhone flat, it shows all 13 lines of the London Underground. Then as you tilt the phone up, the application shows what direction the stops are in and their distance.” The possibilities for combining the iPhone camera with augmented reality could lead to some very engaging campaigns for clients. To see how augmented reality can literally alter the way we see advertising, click here.

Another recently released app is the first to be  integrated with a Blu-ray disc, for the latest incarnation of that bastion of mediocrity, The Fast and the Furious franchise. There is a “Virtual Car Garage” you can control, and integration with Facebook and Twitter that will appear on future films as well (i.e. “Jordi is watching Balto III: Wings of Change”).

Embracing such synthesis of product over multiple platforms offers brands who can provide engaging content the opportunity to increase interaction with consumers.