Jon Stewart is working with a company that has a bunch of tech and Hollywood bigshots as advisors
Instead, Stewart will be collaborating with the company to develop "a new technology" designed to help him create short-form digital content, which will be pumped to HBO's HBO Now streaming service throughout the day.
He'll be working with a company OTOY on that part of the deal.
You've probably never heard of OTOY, but the LA company has an advisory board full of tech superstars, including:
- Eric Schmidt, Google's Chairman and former CEO.
- Sam Palmisano, former IBM CEO.
- Ari Emanuel, one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood.
- Brendan Eich, the inventor of computer technology JavaScript, which powers a ton of web sites today, and who was ousted as CEO of Mozilla last year after being criticized for donating to an anti-gay-marriage initiative in California.
OTOY is known for technology that can give you "cinematic quality" 3D rendering through your browser, according to VentureBeat. Cofounder and CEO Jules Urbach built the world's first 3D video game platform before starting OTOY in 2008. Urbach's gaming technology was licensed by giants like Macromedia, Disney, Warner Brothers, Nickelodeon, Microsoft, Hasbro and AT&T. It also won an Academy Award in 2010 for its Lightstage technology, which is used to create computer models of faces, and was used in movies like Spider Man 2.
We don't know what kind of technology Stewart and OTOY will be developing together, but Urbach and company are deep into the emerging virtual reality market. The company has been working working on next-level technology that allows you to move around in virtual reality streams, according to Engadget.
We don't know whether the tools OTOY is working on with Stewart will be quite that revolutionary, but they confirmed the partnership in this tweet: