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This chapter is the first of two taking a micro view encompassing three creative industries — publishing, music, and video games — to detail the pattern of invention/creation, embodiment and diffusion of soft innovations. At the micro level, industry-specific indicators relating to the numbers of new product variants introduced are used with certain advantages relating to the identification of the rate of significant innovation being claimed for a specific measure that tracks the share of the sales of bestsellers that were recently introduced onto the market. In the creative sector, the indicated rates of innovation are high, with very considerable numbers of new products or titles being launched and rates of market churn of the bestsellers in the studied markets being very fast. This reflects a pattern quite different to the usual suggestion that innovation occurs at a rate of about 2.5% per annum (a measure usually based upon indicators of labour productivity growth).

The Commission promotes a competitive technology and related industrial policy through its coordination Framework Programmes. Commission funding is concentrated on a variety of Information Society Technologies. This chapter examines its role through two case studies of advanced television broadcasting technologies projects: High Definition Television (HDTV) and Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB). Competing leadership candidates with the Commission for HDTV included the French and Dutch national governments and major firms based on government-industry collusion in the service of competitiveness. The HDTV flagship project to meet the Japanese and American challenge, supported by the Commission and Council of Ministers with subsidies, was a failure of European technology policy. The DVB firm-led consortium has by contrast been market-driven and successful without public subsidy.

This chapter offers a brief summary of implications for parents and for future public policy debates in this area. At one level, it is obvious that one way to reduce the harmful effects of violent video games is to reduce exposure to this risk factor. There are both politically controversial (e.g. laws prohibiting the sale, rental, or distribution of violent games to children) and non-controversial (e.g. leave it entirely up to parents) ways to accomplish this. Unfortunately, no serious efforts have been made in the U.S. to educate parents about the known harmful effects. Some other countries have taken legislative actions.

This chapter examines the film and music combination in violent motion pictures. Some examples of these films include Cannibal Holocaust, The Beyond and The Cannibal Apocalypse. This chapter describes how these films overlay a barrage of unflinchingly violent imagery with often smooth, mellifluous synthesizer scoring that refuses to comment negatively on the visual track. These films were banned in Great Britain under the 1984 Video Recordings Act and they were called “video nasties”.

New technology in the form of video, GPS trackers, and other equipment has opened up the observation of behaviour in ways that were unimaginable before. It is now possible to follow animals continuously for days or months, and to know where and what they are doing even when they have disappeared from view. There is now the possibility of collecting large quantities of data and the problem is how best to analyze it. ‘Observation’ has taken on a whole new meaning and assumed a whole new significance. It is no longer the poor relation of experiment but a major research tool in its own right. The book concludes with a checklist of all the different stages of an observational study: (i) the type of question (about adaptation, causation, development, or evolution) being asked; (ii) what hypothesis is being tested; (iii) what the predictions from this hypothesis are and what would count as evidence both for and against it; (iv) how the observations will be designed to achieve independence, not confounding variables and removing unwanted variation; (v) how the level, units, and type of sampling will be selected and what sort of records will be taken; (vi) how behaviour is to be recorded (paper, video, computer, etc.); (vii) the completeness of the protocol, including sample size, choice of animals; (viii) the ethics of the study; (ix) permissions and agreements with other people involved; (x) the carrying out of a pilot study; (xi) analysis of data; and (xii) presentation of results.

The worldview espoused in Apocalyptic AI pop science plays a role in massively multiplayer online games, as shown by the presence of transhumanist religious groups (such as the Order of Cosmic Engineers) in Second Life but also by the interest shown by that world’s inhabitants who frequently desire a permanent shift to life online even when they are not explicitly transhumanists. Virtual reality has become sacred space for many online gamers, who acquire powerful communities, meaning and purpose through their online activities. Such religiosity inclines many toward transhumanist goals of transcending the human condition, especially through the possibility of uploading consciousness into virtual reality.

Event modeling systems provide a semantic interpretation of sequences of pixels that are captured by a video camera. The design of a practical system has to take into account the following three main factors: low-level preprocessing limitations, computational and storage complexity of the event model, and user interaction. The hidden Markov model (HMM) and its variants have been widely used to model both speech and video signals. Computational efficiency of the Baum-Welch and the Viterbi algorithms has been a leading reason for the popularity of the HMM. Since the objective is to detect events in video sequences that are meaningful to humans, one might want to provide space in the design loop for a user who can specify events of interest. This chapter explores this using semantic approaches that not only use features extracted from raw video streams but also incorporate metadata and ontologies of activities. It presents three approaches for applications such as event recognition: anomaly detection, temporal segmentation, and ontology evaluation. The three approaches discussed are statistical methods based on HMMs, formal grammars, and ontologies. The effectiveness of these approaches is illustrated using video sequences captured both indoors and outdoors: the indoor UCF human action dataset, the TSA airport tarmac surveillance dataset, and the bank monitoring dataset.

This chapter examines the “off-site” and mobile distribution of MSNBC video, including the development of functionality that allowed the video player to be embedded on users' personal websites and various technical solutions developed or purchased by MSNBC.com for piping its video to phones and tablets. It discusses the involvement of a range of “business-to-business” distribution firms whose goal is to develop and sell video players, search functionality, and other white-label products that bear the brand of the content provider rather than the manufacturer. It also considers the role of these “business-to-business” companies, dubbed “transparent intermediaries,” in creating the business models used by media companies in the online video marketplace. The chapter concludes by showing how MSNBC.com tailored many of the features of its video player to the demands of the conversation economy.

This chapter deals with the images of young female artists prevalent in music video compact disks (VCDs) of national and regional music genres in Indonesia and what they reflect about youth lifestyles, Islamic morality, and generational shifts. The music videos of these young female artists reflect a variety of cross-cultural influences that are imported, adapted, recreated, and blended. These influences do not always correspond with prevailing norms about proper behavior and clothing styles for young Muslim women in Indonesia. The three music genres highlighted are pop Indonesia, dangdut, and pop Minang, in addition to western pop and rock. VCDs in these music genres are often directly aimed at teenagers and young adults; the artists portrayed promote not only their music, but a lifestyle. Even though the appropriation of trends and influences from abroad is not new, these VCDs are breaking new ground by combining images of global youth culture in a distinctive Indonesian context, thus adding a visual dimension to the music that previously was not there.

This chapter focuses on the construction of MSNBC.com's web video player, the primary means by which NBC's cable news and broadcast news programs were made available to users and audiences online. More specifically, it examines the video player's interface and other features in order to elucidate the complex relationships, interests, and motivations devoted to the design of the everyday objects used in online distribution. It also considers the importance of syndication to MSNBC's web presence and how MSNBC.com was able to dramatically expand the reach of its online video by pushing clips to other web properties in Microsoft's online services division, including Bing and MSN.

This chapter reviews approaches to the empirical documentation of music as found in comparative musicology, folklore studies, and through the fifty-year history of ethnomusicology. Means of gathering and measuring research data are shown to be linked to available technology as well as to prevailing intellectual paradigms. The central part of the chapter focuses on empirical aspects of participant-observation, including the keeping of field notes, interviewing, photography, and audio- and video-recording. Good practice conventions for data preservation are explained and illustrated. The chapter's coda emphasizes the importance of ethics in research that documents the voices of live people.

This chapter discusses the collaboration between Michael Jackson and Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the music video “Moonwalker”. In comparing Jackson's dance style with that of the South Africans, certain parallels in black body styles become apparent and how these intersect with the aesthetics of MTV, black dance, and popular music in articulating racial difference.

Overview of the musical years and trends to follow — the standardization of the genre, the more ambitious works of later years, the bloated Broadway incursions, the moratorium of the later 20th century, the resurgence of the genre in a new century. Television, the internet, home video, and some lingering memories and influences all form part of the tapestry of this odd, compelling heritage.

Educational technology, such as radio, television, and the Internet, can dramatically increase the number of people reached with conservation messages. These media also allow audiences to experience vicariously natural events and places they might never see in person. Videos, websites, computer simulations, and distance learning allow conservation agencies and organizations to go beyond traditional face-to-face programming and consider ways to effectively reach their audience. The success of these technologies depends in part on the degree to which they incorporate relevant learning theories. Strategies for evaluating websites, videos, and distance learning courses help ensure quality programs.