Smart entertainment, privacy and the media industry

If you are looking forward to a future where you will be able to choose what the main character does next in a movie or TV series, that future has now arrived. In fact, some video on demand (VOD) platforms are pioneering a new form of immersive entertainment called “interactive entertainment”.This is how it works in practice: viewers’ choices at specific points in time influence the narrative of the plot of what they are watching and lead to different personalized endings. From what music to play, to career decisions, from “killing” certain characters to travel destinations: viewers can choose everything.All such interactions generate huge amounts of data processed through sophisticated technologies and analytics techniques for various purposes (targeted advertising, customer profiling, geo-location, parental blocks).To achieve such purposes, broadcasters and VOD platforms need to comply with several pieces of law (privacy, audiovisual regulatory, minors’ protection, copyright enforcement: in this respect, see our general overview of the new EU Copyright Directive), some of which we will address in this post.