What?
What do I mean when I say cross-media entertainment, and is it the same as transmedia? This is how I use these terms:
The Age of Cross-Media Production
Cross-Media is a term that has different meanings for different sectors: Marketing, Audience research, Technology, Business and Content. I look at all, but in particular the latter.
CME is the overarching umbrella term I use to describe all the options for entertainment in the age of cross-media production. It includes:
- Repurposing: putting the same content on different platforms;
- Adaptation: changing content for a particular art form;
- Transmedia: distributing across platforms…
Transmedia Entertainment
Transmedia Entertainment is a subset of Cross-Media, including all the different ways a storyworld is distributed across paltforms.
- Transmedia Series: self-contained episodes on different platforms;
- Transmedia Serial: dependent episodes delivered over multiple platforms;
- Transmedia EventRealm: a single story or game (what I call an EventRealm) that is multi-platform (most games are this type).
The most commonly referred to form, transmedia series, is described in many ways:
- 360 Content (BBC)
- Convergence
- Convergent Storytelling
- Cross-Channel
- Cross-Media Entertainment
- Cross-Media Reality Show (Mark Burnett)
- Cross-Sited Narrative (Marc Ruppel)
- Distributed Narrative (Jill Walker)
- Entertainment Everywhere (Mark Burnett & others)
- Franchise
- Integrated Marketing
- Media Neutral
- Synergistic Storytelling (Ivan Askwith)
- Tie-in
- Transmedia Storytelling (Henry Jenkins)
- Multiplatform Entertainment (David Bilson)
- Xmedia
- XME
Whether you use ‘cross-media’, ‘transmedia’, ‘multi-platform’, ‘cross-channel’ etc I don’t mind. What I do want to make clear, however, is that there are many options for using multiple media platforms (much more than I’ve outlined here). And, I believe that there are times when it is best to repurpose, adapt and extend…this is the art of it.
Here are a couple of articles for a series I’m writing that outline some of the approaches I’m talking about:
