The Infinity Festival Takes The Very Long View On Hollywood’s Future

Lots of people in the media and entertainment business are focused on the next three months, or maybe the next four years. But the Infinity Festival , which opens today in Hollywood, is taking a much longer view on where media and entertainment are headed, like decades from now, with tech like AI, spatial computing, personalization, and more reshaping how we create, distribute and entertain ourselves.

"The whole idea behind the festival was, I had produced many TV series and franchises, but when we saw the advent of immersive, I already knew things would change,." said festival founder Mark Lieber. "I wanted (conference programming) for people in our background. A lot of people understand the technology, but if they don't understand story, they're not going anywhere."

The festival is moving several blocks from its home of the past few years, to just north of storied intersection Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, at the Aster, the historic Avalon Theater, Dolby's Vine Screening Room and nearby Amoeba Music.

The Aster is a hotel and club where Lieber, Chief Creative Officer Adam Newman already have been sponsoring regular monthly gatherings built around some of the festival's big issues.

The festival is designed to take it to another level of engagement and exploration over four days through Saturday, where interactive artist Nancy Baker Cahill will be honored at the festival's Monolith Awards ceremony for her work. Nvidia will be honored for its contributions to extending entertainment tech, while producer/director Jon Favreau (The Mandalorian, Iron Man, etc.) will hand out other awards on the night.

The festival will include a display and Saturday live auction of more than 200 items of memorabilia for that original optimistic take on the future, Star Trek. The big ticket items include a very iPhone-like communicator device from the franchise's original 1966 series. Auctioneers expect that one to sell for $200,000 or more, said Infinity's Head of Programming Lori Schwartz.

"One thing Star Trek was great about was how science fiction becomes science fact," said Schwartz. "They're putting out ideas that become real technology. That's why we (the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, of which is Schwartz is a member of the board of governors) gave them an Emmy for that. "

Among the continued shifts has been an ongoing blurring of the lines between "entertainment" and video gaming, Schwartz said. Epic Games is at the heart of that, its Unreal Engine graphics tools used not just to create hundreds of games but also TV shows and films such as The Mandalorian. Now, Disney, the company behind The Mandalorian, has invested $1.5 billion into Epic and is collaborating on building a Disney-themed world in Epic's Fortnite game platform.

"As a curator, it's really hard to define sessions anymore," Schwartz said. "The technology sides of gaming, all the things happening with GPUs (graphics processing units such as Nvidia's spectacularly successful chips) and screens, but also the behavior modalities happening with audiences."

Indeed, when it comes to the biggest screen in a household, typically that huge smart panel in a living room or family room, is frequently also used for gaming and watching YouTube too, according to statistics released last month by Nielsen. The metrics company estimated that roughly 10 percent of view time on those screens goes to "other" uses than watching television from streaming, cable or broadcast. "Other," said Nielsen executive Brian Fuhrer, is mostly gaming, at least for the under-35 audiences that advertisers and media companies covet.

Artificial intelligence has been dominating headlines for nearly two years now, ever since ChatGPT launched a publicly available tool for its generative AI large language model. While lots of creatives in Hollywood and beyond are embracing, more or less confidently, the power and potential of AI augmentations of their work, some questions still hover.

"The only thing you may hear is concern about data, clean data" to train the AI models, said Schwartz. Mini-major film studio Lionsgate broke ground earlier this year in a deal with Runway, which creates film-like video clips from text prompts and still images. But other models have been trained with vast quantities of video of less certain and legally defensible provenance, scraped from across the internet.

"I think you'll hear from a lot of our folks how they're addressing that," Schwartz said. "Unique-flavored agencies are being formed with specialized data sets" that can specific kinds of advertising, marketing and creative content.

In a year when Meta ramped up spending on its Quest line of immersive headsets and Apple released its $3,499 Vision Pro headset, "spatial is going to be a big word you're going to hear," Schwartz said.

Spatial computing, as Apple likes to term its exquisitely capable and massively expensive headset, enables new kinds of live event experiences, with both physical and virtual audiences.

"It's going to get harder and harder to define (conference programming) tracks as we look at the behaviors of consumers," Schwartz said. "Unreal is a gaming engine, but it's literally the pipeline for a lot of what you'll see at the conference."

Another issue in an era of remix culture and instant-everywhere availability will be ownership. Who owns what, and what's that ownership look like when it gets chopped up, reassembled, re-envisioned and turned upside down.

It's a complicated time for tech in Hollywood. Companies are trying to innovate to save money and improve customer experiences and retention, but doing it a time of great financial distress among many organizations.

Even Netflix has pulled back in some ways, though, most recently by announcing it will mothball most of the interactive video content it commissioned over the past few years, leaving just four titles, including the celebrated Bandersnatch episode from anthology show Black Mirror that seemed to presage a new era of enhanced TV experiences.

A spokesperson told The Verge the interactive content had "served its purpose" and the company was planning to "focus on technological efforts in other areas." Netflix also recently shut down a game studio focused on developing a AAA title, and gave game chief Mike Verdu a new title: VP of Gen AI for games.