Click to EnlargeBy way of the New York Times, Denise Caruso reports on the American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab, which is doing some pretty remarkable work around the media/tech/entertainment convergence space, with an even more remarkable business model:

While some go it alone, many of the best-known media brands turn to the institute’s Digital Content Lab for help. For nearly 10 years, the lab (once called the Enhanced Television Workshop) has provided companies with an opportunity to participate in a powerful research and development process that uses their own creative assets.

To date, participants include Animal Planet, America Online, Bravo, the Cartoon Network, the Disney Channel, MTV, NBC, National Geographic, Nickelodeon, PBS, Showtime and Turner Broadcasting System, as well as several small interactive and independent media production companies.

To begin, a company picks one of its media properties and applies to the lab, describing a problem it would like to solve. If selected, that property becomes the focus of a six-month, intensive collaboration. The institute chooses a group of consultants from the most innovative design, technology and production firms in the digital media industry, and teams them with professionals from television, films and games.

At the end of the six months, each team delivers a working prototype to the media company, which owns it outright and can use it in any way it chooses.

In the most recent round of prototypes, completed in late 2006, Cartoon Network New Media walked away with a prototype based on “Ben 10,” one of its top three series.

The Cartoon Network was aiming to expand its library of more than 150 games — which correspond to its TV cartoons — beyond computers and into game consoles, without spending a fortune rewriting all its software, said Suzanne Stefanac, a journalist, and longtime A.F.I. mentor who was recently named director of the Digital Content Lab. (Ms. Stefanac and I once worked together at ZDTV.)

In response, its team delivered a technical feat: a “build once, broadcast everywhere” game engine that allows the same application to run on a PC or on a PlayStation 3 and that players can navigate with a mouse, a keyboard or a game controller.

The Ben 10 prototype, the first game to use the PlayStation 3’s built-in browser, was such a hit that the network expects to commercialize the technology, which it calls a “megaseries,” for some yet-unnamed assets by year-end. “We look at this as an amazing new content window for distribution,” said Ross Cox, senior director for entertainment products at Cartoon Network New Media.

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