The media-space will become more and more crowded with blurring boundaries between the several media and also due to lower barriers of entry (mainly impacting quantity not quality). In such a crowded space (to prevent using the word abundant) it will become harder and harder (meaning costing a lot more money) to build your story/ setting: will people take the time to invest in your storyworld/ the build up of your creative dilemma. That’s why there will be a fast amount of interest in cross/ transmedia since it leverages on one success to bridge it to another medium with more engagement from the user (meaning access to more disposable income) or to a medium with a higher pace of release/ production (to gain momentum).

To conclude, transmedia (including both digital and analog products) will be key for the future balance sheet and stories of the media-industrie, demanding inventions in both production, business-modelling and narratives, but it can only exist on top off the traditional media successes as we know them today. As in many cases cross/ transmedia is an additional ‘genre’ not replacement of film or tv or books as we now them today. I like to compare it to the promise that internet would create a paperless world while in fact the amount of paper used (in printers etc) has grown exponentially because of it.
The same will happen with transmedia, it will not replace or totally transform the traditional shapes of expression, it will be an addition. This doesn’t mean we should underestimate it, it will be extremely disruptive just not in the way we expect it to be.

A key issue for the media will be how to monetize Social Value into Economic Value. Films like Creation, Resident, Way-back create a storyworld for an audience which invested its time, effort and money to go to cinema (in Cinema you have a captive audience investing time, unlike TV or Web). That choice to invest time, effort and money will be extremely scarce in an attention-deficit-economy where advertising-models are replaced from interruption to engagement. If our movies are successful, its fantastic but key question for the future of the media-industry is how to leverage from that success even further. So how can one use the 90 minute and several dollar investment of the consumer to the max without over-exploiting the thin-line of suspense-of-disbelief (since in a crowded place risk will also be higher thus we must work on the reward part as well - for both the sake of the investor as well as the consumer (also an investor of time & money). Can you for example plant-a-prop in the stories to either horizontally (other media like books, sites, games) or vertically (like sequals or prequals) create more entry-points into the storyworld you created.

The only thing I would like to contribute to the debate is that making a good movie is hard enough (as is often stated an extremely difficult combination of art/show and business), but with the digital world blurring boundaries and barriers of entry we need to continuously innovate (not Re-Invent) on how to leverage this success which in the total media-mix will become more and more unique (and thus create more value for libraries if crossed with newly gained skills). Each story needs a meta-story to be exploited in the fat-head, not just the long-tail.

Maybe a movie like Avatar (3D) is an excellent example where I made a huge investment (20 euro’s, having uneasy glasses on and a three hour sit), the love-story between the tow main-characters and the story of the army ruining the planet was marginal compared to the deep-mythology introduced with this well thought through Pandora-world. But I’m sure that my investment will be worthwhile once I start using other media entrypoints to this story. So was Avatar a great movie, to my opinion not if you look at it as a traditional story but its an excellent movie if you regard it as the entrypoint for a great new entertainment-world. The one billon dollar treshhold surpassed this weekend is great but is a wrong measurement of the succes from the point of view of the other investor, not the movie-mogul but moreover the consumer.