Immersion Tracks Oxytocin Levels to Improve Entertainment. Critics Fear It's Going Too Far.

Sam Blake

Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake

Immersion Tracks Oxytocin Levels to Improve Entertainment. Critics Fear It's Going Too Far.

Paul Zak spent over two decades developing the science beneath his company, Immersion. His tastemaker software aims to measure and predict how people respond to music, movies and other experiences by tracking their brain activity through a smartwatch or fitness tracker.

With a newly launched software-as-a-service platform, his mind-reading tool is now available to the masses for as little as $199 a month.


But the wide release of a technology that purports to know people better than they know themselves is worrying to some, who say it could limit artistic expression, perpetuate unconscious biases and, in the wrong hands, subject unwilling people to spying and manipulation.

Zak's tool measures emotional resonance, or what he calls "immersion." It uses sensors to track attention levels and infer brain levels of oxytocin, the so-called "love hormone" known for its association with bonding that works as a neurotransmitter. The sensors monitor how a person's brain responds to a given stimulus, moment by moment. Software generates a readout that provides real-time feedback potentially useful for everything from testing Hollywood audiences to understanding what resonates during a work presentation.

Through sensors Immersion measures someone's pulse, which Zak says is correlated with attention levels.

"Attention is the necessary condition; immersion is the sufficient condition," he added, noting that the latter is measured by oxytocin: a naturally occurring chemical in the brain that, he says, "is why people cry at movies when the boy kisses the girl."

\u200bPaul Zak

Paul Zak directs Claremont Graduate University's Center for Neuroeconomic Studies

Zak, who directs Claremont Graduate University's Center for Neuroeconomic Studies, researches how brain activity corresponds to decision-making. His papers have been cited by academic publications over 15,000 times. He is not without his critics, though, some of whom have argued that oxytocin, in addition to correlating with feelings like empathy and trust, can also correlate with envy and tribalism.

As wearable sensors improved over time, Zak says he became able to map the data gathered by noninvasive, everyday items like smartwatches back to the brain-activity readouts he's gathered for years in his lab from blood-draws and expensive medical equipment.

"We created the first democratized platform for neuroscience where anybody could measure what the brain loves in real time," he said. And with this week's release of his company's SaaS platform, just about anyone can use it.

After three years working in stealth, Immersion ramped up its marketing right around the onset of the pandemic. The company began as a service focused primarily on helping entertainment companies create better content.

It has worked with a handful of Hollywood studios, including Paramount and Warner Bros, to help produce movie trailers, determine slates for the upcoming fall TV lineup and ascertain whether during lockdown people preferred to watch new or familiar content.

Zak said Immersion can predict hits with over 80% accuracy. Music streamer Pandora has used the service to study which songs listeners would enjoy, he said.

The idea of using mind-interpreting software on the masses to shape what we experience offers intriguing possibilities, but some say it could also amplify biases and distort creative output by favoring content that scores well on brain-activity metrics.

Traditional focus groups rely on surveys to gather feedback. When people fill out questionnaires on what they liked and disliked about a given experience, they have time to counteract their subconscious biases that may instinctively cause them to recoil from certain concepts they find unappealing, such as homosexuality, said Patrick Lin, director of Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Relying on real-time brain activity, though, doesn't give people the opportunity to self-correct for those biases.

"You can hide that in a survey, but you might not be able to hide it from a technology like this," said Lin. That could skew productions away from edgier or more provocative fare that Lin says can be useful for dislodging society from its comfort zones.

But to Zak, being able to measure how people really feel offers tremendous potential for improving and even lengthening lives. He is in talks with smartwatch makers to include Immersion on their devices out of the box. The reason someone would want that, he said, is to learn from their data what frustrates them and what makes them happy.

"Then you can begin to curate people's lives for greater happiness," he said. "And we know that individuals who are happier live longer."

Immersion

When the world went remote, film production slowed down and face-to-face contact dwindled, and other kinds of businesses began looking to Immersion for help. Companies needed ways to monitor the effectiveness of their attempts to adapt to a distributed world where social cues like body language were no longer available and surveys were unreliable. Zak said he has signed on three of the five FAANG companies as clients to help them make meetings and employee trainings more engaging.

Immersion is designed so that, in these situations, employers can only match data to specific employees if they have consented to having their identities revealed. Zak said Immersion does not store any personally identifiable information online, and noted that his company has worked with European firms and was deemed compliant with the EU's strict data privacy-protection laws.

But going deeper into workers' minds not only raises privacy questions but could also make employees' lives more difficult.

One could easily imagine unscrupulous companies using the technology to squeeze out every last drop of employee productivity, said Michael Karanicolas, executive director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy. He pointed to news reports of Amazon employees struggling to find time to use the bathroom during their shifts as an example of the danger.

When asked about potential ethical concerns, Zak emphasized his company's policy of requiring consent before people's brain activity is tracked.

Zak has been a trailblazer in the field of neuroeconomics. He has received grants totaling over $1 million from the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence community to research what motivates people to make decisions and take action. His 2011 TED talk on oxytocin has nearly 2 million views. He was even once named one of the 10 sexiest geeks by WIRED Magazine.

Zak formed Immersion when the university where his lab is based grew uncomfortable with commercial applications of his research, he said.

In March this year, his company landed a $1.7 million seed investment led by Silicon Valley billionaire investor Tim Draper.

"The real arc of my professional life has been to create technologies to help people live more fulfilled and happier lives," he said. "And so this is really the culmination for me of 25 years of my life."

Yet with his company's lofty goals comes the possibility, as with any technology, of unintended consequences.

"These mindreading technologies are going to chip away at the last fig leaf we have," said Lin, "–the privacy inside our own head."

Editor's note: This story was updated to clarify role of oxytocin

https://twitter.com/hisamblake
samblake@dot.la

Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.

How Token and Tixr Plan to Take on Ticketmaster in L.A.

Andria Moore

Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.

How Token and Tixr Plan to Take on Ticketmaster in L.A.
Evan Xie

When Taylor Swift announced her ‘Eras’ tour back in November, all hell broke loose.

Hundreds of thousands of dedicated Swifties — many of whom were verified for the presale — were disappointed when Ticketmaster failed to secure them tickets, or even allow them to peruse ticketing options.

But the Taylor Swift fiasco is just one of the latest in a long line of complaints against the ticketing behemoth. Ticketmaster has dominated the event and concert space since its merger with Live Nation in 2010 with very few challengers — until now.

Adam Jones, founder and CEO of Token, a fan-first commerce platform for events, said he has the platform and the tech ready to take it on. First and foremost, with Token, Jones is creating a system where there are no queues. In other words, fans know immediately which events are sold out and where.

“We come in very fortunate to have a modern, scalable tech stack that's not going to have all these outages or things being down,” Jones said. “That's step one. The other thing is we’re being aggressively transparent about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. So with the Taylor Swift thing…you would know in real time if you actually have a chance of getting the tickets.”

Here’s how it works: Users register for Token’s app and then purchase tickets to either an in-person event, or an event in the metaverse through Animal Concerts. The purchased ticket automatically shows up in the form of a mintable NFT, which can then be used toward merchandise purchases, other ticketed events or, Adams’s hope for the future — external rewards like airline travel. The more active a user is on the site, the more valuable their NFT becomes.

Ticketmaster has dominated the music industry for so long because of its association with big name artists. To compete, Token is working on gaining access to their own slew of popular artists. They recently entered into a partnership with Animal Concerts, a live and non-live event experiences platform that houses artists like Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Robin Thicke, and has “access to Roc Nation.”

“You'll see they do all the metaverse side of the house,” Jones said. “And we're going to be the [real-life] web3 sides of the house.”

In addition, Token prides itself on working with the artists selling on their platform to set up the best system for their fanbase, devoid of hefty prices and additional fees — something Ticketmaster users have often complained about. Jones believes where Ticketmaster fails, Token thrives. The app incentivizes users to share more data about their interests, venues and artists by operating on a kind of points system in the form of mintable NFTs.

“We can actually take the dataset and say there’s 100 million people in the globe that love Taylor Swift, so imagine she’s going on tour and we ask [the user], ‘Would you go to see her in Detroit?’ And imagine this place has 30,000 seats, but 100,000 people clicked ‘yes,’” he explained. “So you can actually inform the user before anything even happens, right? About what their options are and where to get it.”

Tixr, a Santa-Monica based ticketing app, was founded on the idea that modern ticketing platforms were “living in the legacy of the past.” They plan to attract users by offering them exclusive access to ticketed events that aren’t in Ticketmaster’s registry.

“It melts commerce that's beyond ticketing…to allow fans to experience and purchase things that don't necessarily have to do with tickets,” said Tixr CEO and Founder Robert Davari. “So merchandise, and experiences, and hospitality and stuff like that are all elegantly melded into this one, content driven interface.”

Tixr sells tickets to exclusive concerts like a Tyga performance at a night club in Arizona, general in-person festivals like ComplexCon, and partners with local vendors like The Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach to sell tickets to the races. Plus, Davari said it’s equipped to handle high-demand, so customers aren’t spending hours waiting in digital queues.

Like Token, Tixr has also found success with a rewards program — in the form of fan marketing.

“There's nothing more powerful in the core of any event, brand, any live entertainment, [than] the community behind it,” Davari said. “So we build technology to empower those fans and to reward them for bringing their friends and spreading the word.”

Basically, if a user gets a friend to purchase tickets to an event, then the original user gets rewarded in the form of discounts or upgrades.

Robert Davari by Austin Neil

Coupled with their platforms’ ability to handle high-demand events, both Jones and Davari believe their platforms have what it takes to take on Ticketmaster. Expansion into the metaverse, they think, will also help even the playing field.

“So imagine you can't go to Taylor Swift,” Jones said. “What if you could purchase an exclusive to actually go to that exact same show over the metaverse? An artist’s whole world can expand past the stage itself.”

With the way ticketing for events works now, obviously not everyone always gets the exact price, venue or date they want. There are “winners and losers.” Jones’s hope is that by expanding beyond in-person events, there can be more winners.

“If there’s 100,000 people who want to go to one show and there's 37,000 seats, 70,000 are out,” he said. “You can't fight that. But what we can do is start to give them other opportunities to do things in a different way and actually still participate.”

Jones and Davari both teased that their platforms have some exciting developments in the works, but for now both Token and Tixr are set on making their own space within the industry.

“We simply want to advance this industry and make it more efficient and more pleasurable for fans to buy,” Davari said. “That's it.”

Here’s Why Streaming Looks More and More Like Cable

Lon Harris
Lon Harris is a contributor to dot.LA. His work has also appeared on ScreenJunkies, RottenTomatoes and Inside Streaming.
Here’s Why Streaming Looks More and More Like Cable
Evan Xie

The original dream of streaming was all of the content you love, easily accessible on your TV or computer at any time, at a reasonable price. Sadly, Hollywood and Silicon Valley have come together over the last decade or so to recognize that this isn’t really economically viable. Instead, the streaming marketplace is slowly transforming into something approximating Cable Television But Online.

It’s very expensive to make the kinds of shows that generate the kind of enthusiasm and excitement from global audiences that drives the growth of streaming platforms. For every international hit like “Squid Game” or “Money Heist,” Netflix produced dozens of other shows whose titles you have definitely forgotten about.

The marketplace for new TV has become so massively competitive, and the streaming landscape so oversaturated, even relatively popular shows with passionate fanbases that generate real enthusiasm and acclaim from critics often struggle to survive. Disney+ canceled Luscasfilm’s “Willow” after just one season this week, despite being based on a hit Ron Howard film and receiving an 83% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. Amazon dropped the mystery drama “Three Pines” after one season as well this week, which starred Alfred Molina, also received positive reviews, and is based on a popular series of detective novels.

Even the new season of “The Mandalorian” is off to a sluggish start compared to its previous two Disney+ seasons, and Pedro Pascal is basically the most popular person in America right now.

Now that major players like Netflix, Disney+, and WB Discovery’s HBO Max have entered most of the big international markets, and bombarded consumers there with marketing and promotional efforts, onboarding of new subscribers inevitably has slowed. Combine that with inflation and other economic concerns, and you have a recipe for austerity and belt-tightening among the big streamers that’s virtually guaranteed to turn the smorgasbord of Peak TV into a more conservative a la carte offering. Lots of stuff you like, sure, but in smaller portions.

While Netflix once made its famed billion-dollar mega-deals with top-name creators, now it balks when writer/director Nancy Meyers (“It’s Complicated,” “The Holiday”) asks for $150 million to pay her cast of A-list actors. Her latest romantic comedy will likely move over to Warner Bros., which can open the film in theaters and hopefully recoup Scarlett Johansson and Michael Fassbender’s salaries rather than just spending the money and hoping it lingers longer in the public consciousness than “The Gray Man.”

CNET did the math last month and determined that it’s still cheaper to choose a few subscription streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime over a conventional cable TV package by an average of about $30 per month (provided you don’t include the cost of internet service itself). But that means picking and choosing your favorite platforms, as once you start adding all the major offerings out there, the prices add up quickly. (And those are just the biggest services from major Hollywood studios and media companies, let alone smaller, more specialized offerings.) Any kind of cable replacement or live TV streaming platform makes the cost essentially comparable to an old-school cable TV package, around $100 a month or more.

So called FAST, or Free Ad-supported Streaming TV services, have become a popular alternative to paid streaming platforms, with Fox’s Tubi making its first-ever appearance on Nielsen’s monthly platform rankings just last month. (It’s now more popular than the first FAST service to appear on the chart, Paramount Global’s Pluto TV.) According to Nielsen, Tubi now accounts for around 1% of all TV viewing in the US, and its model of 24/7 themed channels supported by semi-frequent ad breaks couldn’t resemble cable television anymore if it tried.

Services like Tubi and Pluto stand to benefit significantly from the new streaming paradigm, and not just from fatigued consumers tired of paying for more content. Cast-off shows and films from bigger streamers like HBO Max often find their way to ad-supported platforms, where they can start bringing in revenue for their original studios and producers. The infamous HBO Max shows like “The Nevers” and “Westworld” that WBD controversially pulled from the HBO Max service can now be found on Tubi or The Roku Channel.

HBO Max’s recently-canceled reality dating series “FBoy Island” has also found a new home, but it’s not on any streaming platform. Season 3 will air on TV’s The CW, along with a new spinoff series called (wait for it) “FGirl Island.” So in at least some ways, “30 Rock” was right: technology really IS cyclical.

As TikTok Faces a Ban, Competitors Prepare to Woo Its User Base

Kristin Snyder

Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.

As TikTok Faces a Ban, Competitors Prepare to Woo Its User Base
Evan Xie

This is the web version of dot.LA’s daily newsletter. Sign up to get the latest news on Southern California’s tech, startup and venture capital scene.

Another day, another update in the unending saga that is the potential TikTok ban.

The latest: separate from the various bills proposing a ban, the Biden administration has been in talks with TikTok since September to try and find a solution. Now, having thrown its support behind Senator MarkWarner’s bill, the White House is demanding TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sell its stakes in the company to avoid a ban. This would be a major blow to the business, as TikTok alone is worth between $40 billion and $50 billion—a significant portion of ByteDance’s $220 billion value.

Clearly, TikTok faces an uphill battle as its CEO Shou Zi Chew prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee next week. But other social media companies are likely looking forward to seeing their primary competitor go—and are positioning themselves as the best replacement for migrating users.

Meta

Last year, The Washington Post reported that Meta paid a consulting firm to plant negative stories about TikTok. Now, Meta is reaping the benefits of TikTok’s downfall, with its shares rising 3% after the White House told TikTok to leave ByteDance. But this initial boost means nothing if the company can’t entice creators and viewers to Instagram and Facebook. And it doesn’t look promising in that regard.

Having waffled between pushing its short-form videos, called Reels, and de-prioritizing them in the algorithm, Instagram announced last week that it would no longer offer monetary bonuses to creators making Reels. This might be because of TikTok’s imminent ban. After all, the program was initially meant to convince TikTok creators to use Instagram—an issue that won’t be as pressing if TikTok users have no choice but to find another platform.

Snap

Alternatively, Snap is doing the opposite and luring creators with an ad revenue-sharing program. First launched in 2022, creators are now actively boasting about big earnings from the program, which provides 50% of ad revenue from videos. Snapchat is clearly still trying to win over users with new tech like its OpenAI chatbot, which it launched last month. But it's best bet to woo the TikTok crowd is through its new Sounds features, which suggest audio for different lenses and will match montage videos to a song’s rhythm. Audio clips are crucial to TikTok’s platform, so focusing on integrating songs into content will likely appeal to users looking to recreate that experience.

YouTube

With its short-form ad revenue-sharing program, YouTube Shorts has already lured over TikTok creators. It's even gotten major stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift to promote music on Shorts. This is likely where YouTube has the best bet of taking TikTok’s audience. Since TikTok has become deeply intertwined with the music industry, Shorts might be primed to take its spot. And with its new feature that creates compiles all the videos using a specific song, Shorts is likely hoping to capture musicians looking to promote their work.

Triller

The most blatant attempt at seducing TikTok users, however, comes from Triller, which launched a portal for people to move their videos from TikTok to its platform. It’s simple, but likely the most effective tactic—and one that other short-form video platforms should try to replicate. With TikTok users worried about losing their backlog of content, this not only lets users archive but also bolsters Triller’s content offerings. The problem, of course, is that Triller isn’t nearly as well known as the other platforms also trying to capture TikTok users. Still, those who are in the know will likely find this option easier than manually re-uploading content to other sites.

It's likely that many of these platforms will see a momentary boost if the TikTok ban goes through. But all of these companies need to ensure that users coming from TikTok actually stay on their platforms. Considering that they have already been upended by one newcomer when TikTok took over, there’s good reason to believe that a new app could come in and swoop up TikTok’s user base. As of right now, it's unclear who will come out on top. But the true loser is the user who has to adhere to the everyday whims of each of these platforms.

https://twitter.com/ksnyder_db
RELATEDEDITOR'S PICKS
LA TECH JOBS
interchangeLA
Trending