The game and show have been pitched as groundbreaking transmedia, thanks to how they have been designed to complement each other and build out the world of its characters. And digging into the way both elements have been created to co-exist, it’s hard to deny the potential in the approach.

Syfy and game company Trion Worlds began collaborating on Defiance in 2008, when parent company NBC Universal made an investment in Trion and the two sides began discussing how they might work together.

“We definitely knew that we wanted to create something that would live beyond the television screen, something that would live in different platforms,” Syfy head of original content Mark Stern said, adding:

“But the pilots we were showing them were’t helpful to them from a game perspective, so we really had to start with the ground up. We started trading ideas back and forth until we came up with the concept for this world that was really interesting to both of us, and went from there.”

The biggest challenge, according to Nick Beliaeff, senior VP of development at Trion Worlds, was Trion and Syfy learning to work outside of their normal pattern. For example, he said, “We needed to know in 2010 who they cast because we needed to be able to build playable characters. But at that time they had just one writer on, no production staff — not even the people who would do makeup and costume design.”

The collaboration came together, though: Five years later, the result is a sprawling game universe populated by at least a half dozen alien races, and a series headlined by a cast including Grant Bowler, Julie Benz, Mia Kirshner and Fionnula Flanagan.

“There’s no question that having this very rich, diverse and deep world and mythology, part of the requisite for the game in particular, was really helpful for the series,” Stern said. “There are details that have been worked out that you would never have had the chance to do with a normal show.”

A few examples of how the show and game work together (it’s hard to detail exactly how the game and show work together without some minor spoilers, so apologies): In the opening minutes of the pilot, we meet Nolan (Bowler) and Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas), who have obtained a strange gem — a gem you helped them acquire in the game, as one of the very first missions.

Also, one episode of the show will end with a virus outbreak — over the following week, players of the game will be able to create a vaccine. And one character will be first introduced on the show, then will escape to the game world mid-way through the season.

Plot points like these, plus details like wardrobe, character design and music (the latter of which was created for both experiences by Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary) are meant to blend the two experiences together, rewarding viewers who participate in both: “We’ll alter the game every single time an episode is on the air,” Beliaeff said.

It also, in an interesting twist, rewards those who don’t time-shift their viewing of the show, as game elements are timed to the airing of episodes. “We want to incentivize people — not force them. But if you watch it live while playing the game, you’re going to get more out of it,” Stern said.

Key to keeping the two components separate but collaborative is geography: The show takes place in what was once St. Louis, while players of the game roam around a post-apocalyptic San Francisco.

“We first started out thinking it would be awesome if they took place in the same city — we thought the whole Defiance universe would take place in the Bay Area. But as we developed that idea further, it became problematic,” Beliaeff said. “So we placed them close enough that communication is easy, but travel is difficult.”

Another interesting difference between the game and the show is its rating — while the televised Defiance is in line with Syfy’s other programming (which rarely exceeds a TV-14), the game has been rated Mature for “Blood, Drug Reference, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, and Violence.”

That difference, according to Stern, is by design. “[The show] is going for a broader, older demo, but [the game] is going for a younger and more male-skewed audience,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to pull more of that younger demo into our channel and push older audience into the game.”

That’s the real hope of Defiance — while all of these elements are interesting, the only ones who will really get to enjoy them are those who participate in both parts of the story.

Trion did not provide sales numbers for the game, but Beliaeff did say that they received replenishment orders from Wal-Mart and GameSpot in the first week, and sold out of their Xbox inventory. “We’re smiling,” he added.

It’s now down to Monday night’s television premiere, but either way, Defiance has been a learning experience for both teams. “It’s just been fascinating to see these creative elements cross over and learn what it takes to build an successful interactive MMO. That’s been educational on all sorts of levels,” Stern said. “Not only are we going to be able to use all these elements to launch a potential season two, but we’ll also hopefully be able to apply it to new properties.”

Right now, the writing staff for the show is breaking stories for a potential (not-yet-greenlit) season two, while Trion works to create more content for after the show’s season finale. “We’ll certainly be lighter on our feet with season two than we were with season one. It won’t take us five years,” Stern added.

It’ll take a while to see whether this level of cross-platform storytelling makes Defiance better than your average sci-fi drama. But it definitely makes it bigger.

Disclaimer: I was previously employed by G4, a division of NBC Universal, but had no interaction with Syfy.

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“The functionality will work by taking a cable box signal and passing it through to the Xbox via HDMI, allowing Microsoft’s console to overlay a UI and features on top of an existing TV channel or set-top box.”

Sounds familiar? That’s because the same kind of HDMI daisy-chaining has been used by Google TV devices ever since the launch of that platform in 2010. Microsoft’s approach supposedly goes a bit further, thanks to a cooperation with pay TV operators. The Verge article doesn’t go into details on what this exactly means, but one possible scenario could be that the Xbox controls basic set-top box functionality via Internet Protocol, meaning that the device will be able to switch the channels without the need for an IR blaster.

Having that kind of overlay functionality can be neat, at least when it works. Consumers won’t have to switch inputs on their TVs anymore to switch from an Xbox game or a movie on Netflix to live television. And at this point, I’d take anything that Microsoft designs over the traditional cable guide.

But let’s not fool ourselves: Plugging your cable box into your Xbox, and then connecting that box to your TV? That’s just a crummy hack, which points to all of what’s wrong with TV today.

Cable boxes need to die, not another lifeline

Everyone hates cable boxes. They’re hard to use, outdated pieces of technology. Heck, at this point, even cable TV operators would love to get rid of them and instead deliver video over IP. Oh, and by the way, your cable box can consume more electricity than your fridge.

Microsoft would have been in a great position to replace the cable box. Get rid of that old, humming, power-hungry fridge and replace it with something leaner, to stay with the metaphor. Instead, its answer is to get you a second fridge. The next-generation Xbox is reported to be another always-on device, not only adding to your power bill but also making you wonder: why do you need two devices to watch the same content you used to watch with just one?

This won’t work for cord cutters

Yeah I know, cord cutters are a small minority, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. But if there’s a lesson to be learned from the struggles of Google TV, it’s that people don’t buy these kinds of devices to make cable look more fun. They want to replace cable with these devices.

HDMI pass-through is the ultimate admission of defeat

Just a few years ago, Microsoft had grand ambitions for the future of television. The company was looking to start its own virtual cable service which would have competed squarely with Comcast & Co., much in the same way Intel is looking to do now. There were even discussions to kickstart these efforts with some high-profile exclusive content. Apparently, Microsoft was considering A DEAL to bring Conan O’Brien exclusively to the Xbox.

Fast forward to 2013, and Microsoft’s big idea for the future of television is an HDMI cable? It’s the ultimate admission of defeat, and it comes with a heavy price: Microsoft puts its integration of live TV feeds into its Xbox  at the mercy of cable operators, which could at any point in time break the integration and make your picture go black thanks to a sneaky little piece of copy-protection technology called HDCP.

That means that Microsoft likely won’t dare to display ads on the second screen that don’t come with the blessing of your cable company. And don’t expect an Aereo app to come to Xbox any time soon either.

Ultimately, Microsoft’s vision for TV is to make the TV devices and services you have today look better, and it’s using a cumbersome work-around to do so. Call that what you will, but it’s not innovation.

Image courtesy of Flickr user digitpedia.

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The report quotes unnamed “people with knowledge of the matter” as saying the two companies are in talks over the potential sale. Neither company would comment on the report when I asked them today, but the idea of the sale is perfectly plausible.

Mediaroom is a customizable platform that is mostly bundled by telcos, who want to take on more traditional TV service providers with their broadband services — customers include AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Telus. As it also comes with DVR capabilities, Mediaroom is in some ways a competitor to TiVo .

According to Bloomberg’s source, Microsoft wants to focus more on delivering IPTV through its Xbox consoles. Swedish networking equipment vendor Ericsson, meanwhile, is all about servicing its telco customers, so the addition of Mediaroom to its lineup would make a lot of sense. The company could integrate the software with its existing IPTV managed services and systems integration portfolio – in February, Ericsson said it had signed 240 IPTV contracts with various service providers.

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Redbox Instant offers subscribers four Redbox DVD rentals as well as unlimited streaming access to around 4,600 movies for $8 a month. An additional 4,000 newer titles are offered as streaming rentals or purchases. After a limited-time free introductory offer, Redbox Instant customers will need an Xbox Live Gold subscription to use the service on Microsoft’s game console, which will set them back another $5 a month.

The company launched its closed beta test at the end of December, and opened up to the public mid-March after convincing tens of thousands of testers to become paying customers, according to Redbox Instant CEO Shawn Strickland.

Strickland told me last week that the launch on Xbox Live would also kick off the company’s first real marketing efforts, and that Redbox Instant would start to specifically target Verizon and Redbox customers soon after. Apps for LG, Google TV and Vizio devices would follow in the next few weeks, he added.

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In an earlier post, I explained how the company is betting on its investment in machine learning and the webscale infrastructure that powers its Bing search engine to fuel its future devices and services. When you consider that any sort of gesture, speech or handwriting-recognition technology incorporates machine learning in order to decipher what human beings are actually doing, saying or writing, it’s easy to see how busy Microsoft has been.

Some of the technology was downright impressive if not occasionally mind-blowing (in theory, at least), while other parts — particularly some of the futuristic tableaus involving hyper-interactivity — seem, frankly, a little annoying. (You can see some examples in the gallery below.)

Showing off: Consumer tech

Microsoft used its TechForum media event to show everything from a speech-recognizing, dual-screen Xbox Live interface (and to hint at forthcoming original, possibly interactive programming from Microsoft) to a research project that allows Kinect to recognize hand gestures in addition to broad movements. The latter would allow for new ways of controlling Kinect-connected devices without controllers or specialized gear (e.g., fake guns) because a gripping (and releasing) motion would replace the press of a button.

Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, said the company used Kinect to teach an elevator in one building when people are planning to board or just standing in front of it conversing. If the elevator senses that someone wants to get on, the door opens automatically without requiring the person to press a button.

And, of course, pretty much all of Bing is the result of machine learning and big data technologies. Qi Lu, president of the Online Services Division, showed off all sorts of Bing capabilities, including one that surfaces reviews or other information from respected voices in the specific fields about which a user is searching. He said that capability requires searching “trillions of pieces of web data” to determine who’s influential and whether their content is of high quality.

The whole event took place in Microsoft’s new Envisioning Center, which tries to simulate what our work and home lives will be like a decade or more out. What’s Microsoft’s vision? Everything — from the LED bulbs to the omnipresent screens to the stove burners — is digital, connected and equipped with sensors, and 3-D printers sit on every desk. It’s everything the 8 million apps we have today are trying to be, only, well, convenient.

Showing off: Enterprise tech

For the business users, Microsoft demonstrated the machine-learning-based Flash Fill feature in Excel 2013, as well as a research project for indexing structured data sets available on Bing and then having Excel automatically recommend them based on the data someone is already working with. PowerPivot, a BI extension for Excel, can now handle 100 million rows of data in-memory versus its old limit of 1 million rows — allowing users to prove models before deploying on a larger scale using SQL Server and new performance-boosting in-memory, columnar store and compression capabilities.

Microsoft is also working on a workspace environment called DataLab that lets users share data, models, experiments and workflows. Technical Fellow Dave Campbell said the goal is to reduce the need for armies of skilled data experts by letting them publish their work for broader consumption — just like what happened with applications years ago. Some of these — such as Microsoft’s own Synonyms Search tool for figuring out what search terms are often associated with each other — will eventually make their way into the Windows Azure Data Marketplace.

We also saw research projects focused on using machine learning to identify in real time faulty microchip wafers (or, in theory, anything) as they traverse the production line and an application that analyzes petabytes of web data in order to determine how viral content spreads across the web. At Microsoft TechFest event the following day (which I didn’t attend), the company apparently showed off even more research projects in this same vein of fancy visualization and interfaces belying some serious data processing.

On the collaboration front, Microsoft trotted out its Lync video-conferencing platform that also lets users collaborate on documents use virtual ink to write messages. The latter appears particularly useful for creating virtual whiteboards, especially when Perceptive Pixel screens are involved. When the meeting is done, Office Division President Kurt DelBene said, everything saves to the cloud and can be shared with whoever needs it.

If I had one takeaway from TechForum, it’s that I wouldn’t want to be any legacy technology company right now — be it HP, IBM, Sony, Dell or even Apple — trying to ride a skyrocketing innovation curve while also having to maintain a multibillion-dollar collection of legacy businesses. Gun to my head, though, Microsoft wouldn’t be a bad choice.

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Microsoft made a significant showing in the area of internet VOD, which is industry slang for those 24 or 48 hour video rentals you can get from iTunes, Vudu and others. That segment currently accounts for just 12 percent of total video-on-demand revenue, with 72 percent of the money coming from rentals through pay TV operators. But it’s an interesting segment, in part because it’s not dominated by just one or two players.

Apple’s iTunes does have a strong lead with 45 percent of all internet VOD revenue, according to NPD, but there’s a fierce competition going on for second place: Amazon Instant Video generated 18 percent of the industry’s revenue in this segment in 2012, followed by Walmart’s Vudu with 15 percent and Xbox video with 14 percent.

That’s a pretty strong showing for Microsoft, considering that the company has just begun to put some more muscle behind its own video rental offering. Microsoft just recently unified all of its entertainment offerings under the Xbox brand and is now beginning to promote it as its home entertainment property across all of its Windows 8 platforms, as well as the Xbox 360. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Microsoft surpassed Vudu and maybe even Amazon by the end of this year for internet VOD rentals.

Of course, one has to look at these numbers with a grain of salt: NPD’s home video data focuses entirely on transactional spending, meaning that Netflix and competing subscription offerings don’t show up at all. That’s despite the fact that Netflix now has some 27 million subscribers in the U.S. alone. But subscriptions generally don’t offer access to movies right after they were in the theaters — and that’s an area in which Microsoft, with a pretty big installed device base, is starting to move a lot of media.

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