How far back does it make sense to trace invergence? I would go back to Walt Disney, who could rightfully be called the godfather of convergence because he figured out how a single narrative could be best leveraged across multiple platforms (movies, books, records, television, consumer products). When he combined it all with an amusement park concept, letting his customers actually interact with and ride around inside of the stories, he had extended into invergence.
For those who haven’t followed his career closely, Walt Disney was just as much a technology innovator as he was a storytelling innovator. Among the technical breakthroughs he and his team pioneered are the multiplane camera, stereophonic sound (to give people watching Fantasia in a theater the sense they were listening in a live concert hall) and Audio-Animatronics, a robotics breakthrough.
Also, he was the first of the movie studio moguls to realize that television was not the enemy and to embrace it as a means to an end: he leveraged his studio’s content capacity into television production to make money needed to finance the construction of Disneyland.
What are your thoughts on other invergence pioneers/visionaries?