The whole world of Virtual Reality (VR) is very young but the seeds are being sowed which eventually will grow into a formidable alternative to the cinema experience.
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| Jaunt VR camera at Yosemite |
Jaunt is the latest, and best company thus far, that has laid down the VR gauntlet. A start-up, that recently got a big boost ($100 million) in funding from the likes of Disney, Sky, and Euro biggies: ProSieben Sat.1 and Axel Springer, has developed VR cameras and a cloud-based VR distribution platform and is eagerly awaiting the anticipated consumer explosion for VR entertainment.
Jaunt is now ready to scale-up content creation and awaits consumer purchase of VR headsets from the likes of HTC, Oculus, and PlayStation, among others. Jaunt will provide the "end-to-end pipeline" from camera creation to content development to end product (which will be formatted to specific platforms). So far Jaunt has released 20 VR "experiences" and with this latest round of funding plans on rapidly accelerating its content release schedule.
According to Jaunt CEO and Founder, Jens Christensen, "You'll experience Jaunt content through the Jaunt app that you will download to your device. Jaunt will service all platforms, it is device-agnostic."
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| Jans Christensen, CEO/Founder |
The most popular genre will first be music (short, 3-5 minutes productions) and full-length adventure/travel films. For example, Jaunt has two movies that were made for North Face (the outdoor clothing manufacturer) on BASE jumpers in Moab and Yosemite Parks.
Christensen figures that by year-end there will be many VR headsets available to consumers - HTC, Facebook Oculus, Rift, PlayStation, Google Cardboard, etc. With the headsets ready to go, content will be necessary for VR to go mainstream and this is where Jaunt comes in.
I believe that over the next 18 months you are going to see an adoption of VR both in terms of headsets sold and content consumption. Cinemas need to be on their best game and make the whole cinema experience just that, 'an experience' as they compete in the future.
Golden Globe Awards - My Take
Sunday's telecast of the 73rd Golden Globe Awards Show joined the Oscar, Grammy, Emmy and Tony Shows in posting a viewer ratings decline. This year the Globes' were down over 4% in viewership vs. 2015. At 18+ million viewers, the Globes got about as many viewers as one of the Republican Presidential debates, which is nothing to write home about, unless you compare it to a Democratic debate which gets about 8.5 million.
Actually, the Golden Globes have seen smaller declines in viewership than the other major award shows, in fact, the only big show that has seen viewer increases in the last several years is the Academy of Country Music Awards.
This year, the best and most deserved Globe went to Sly Stallone who was last nominated for a Globe in 1976 for the 'Rocky' screenplay, not as actor. The biggest snub of the night went to Netflix - not one recognition for all of its home-grown, stellar content.
We now await the other 'big' shows where the same Hollywood faces will appear - only the gowns, tuxs, and bling change.
Best
Jim
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