AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The Los Angeles Times

The entertainment industry has been pressuring colleges directly and indirectly to teach students the do’s and don’ts of copyrights, hoping such lessons will help abate online piracy. But at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center, students often are the ones giving lessons to Hollywood and the high-tech world about the right way to deliver movies and TV shows to consumers who are increasingly mobile and digital.

The ETC, a 15-year-old branch of the university’s School of Cinematic Arts, was established as a forum for tech companies and studios to collaborate — a good example being the center’s work on digital cinema. A more recent project is the Anytime/Anywhere Content Lab, a place for ETC staff to put a variety of cutting edge (or even bleeding edge) entertainment equipment and services together to see how they work. Or don’t, as the case may be.

David Wertheimer, the ETC’s executive director and a former digital guru at Paramount, said that while studios focus on their product, the lab concentrates on the user. The hope, he said, is that its work will show studios and tech companies how to “meet in the middle and provide new kinds of products” that appeal to the next generation of consumers. In addition to interviewing USC students on campus every week about their media consumption habits and attitudes, the ETC brings about 20 students into the lab to talk to its board and try out some of the gear it has assembled. It’s not a scientific sampling, but the ETC does try to draw specimens participants from a range of backgrounds and fields of study.

The lab takes up a portion of the ETC’s office, which is planted in an industrial strip between the USC campus and the 110. The current configuration includes a home theater, a conference area and a room for testing and experimentation (i.e., a place to answer questions like “Can I make it do this?”). The centerpiece, though, is an 18′ x 20′ demo room with eight flat-panel screens hung on the walls at eye level. Below the screens sit black metal boxes of various shapes and sizes — amplifiers, disc players, computers, hard drives, iPods, cell phones, networking gear and the like. It’s a bit like an electronics retailer’s showroom, designed to make it easy for the staff to add, subtract and connect things. “It could end up looking like NORAD and be totally stressful to people,” Wertheimer cracked. The intended vibe, though, is more like the living room you wish you had at home. If you were me, that is.

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