The Ontario government has a Entertainment and Creative Cluster funding program that is now supporting transmedia development. There are a number of areas that are being supported, including 3D film, media portals and Transmedia.
Ryerson University is developing a Transmedia Production Acceleration Program that will help develop the digital media skills necessary to produce Transmedia.
You can read more in the press release.
I’ve been watching CES news and almost every presentation, including the latest Honeycomb operating system from Google, has a sequence on digital books. You can catch it in this video clip.
Honeycomb is designed for tablets and should be an experience that is as good as the iPad. The question why aren’t they selling as much as the Apple product?
Well, I think the answer has a lot to do with how those companies are being run. Android has focused on making some great tech, a goal that they have definitely achieved. What they haven’t been quite as good at is focusing on how Android technology is going to mean you have a better/ cooler/ more creative/ less stressful/ “add in adjective” life. Apple aggressively went out and got a lot of fantastic content and created a market for a lot of great apps. Both of those made their hardware a part of the productive and recreational lives of a lot of people. Android is going to start thinking the same way and comics should be part of that strategy.
From the previous blog post it is obvious that Sony has taken an aggressive stance towards getting the best content it can for its e-readers. Nintendo is going to need to do the same thing if they want their e-book store to succeed on their new gaming hardware. It isn’t just about aggregating large collections of books either. Google has Google Books hooked into their Android tablets. You would think that a free book collection of that size would have readers buying up Android tablets all the time. This isn’t happening and what has happened is that Google has a collection of millions of books that most people don’t want to read. It isn’t about the most content, it is about the best content.
Comics are going to play a part in that strategy for the best content. The tablet that can access the best quality comics and provide the best reading experience is going to have another check mark next to it when buyers compare their options for purchasing a new tablet. There are a lot of solutions out there for buying and viewing comics from Comixology, Graphic.ly and The Fabler. Comixology has the largest collection at the moment and arguably the best quality content. Although the content is there I don’t think is that any tablet can claim that they’ve created the best comic viewing experience. Something to consider when manufacturers look for ways to differentiate themselves in the market.
I’m always interested to see how new technology can facilitate an existing experience or even change it. I’ll be keeping an eye on CES releases over the next few days to see if any tablet announcements might be thinking about how they are going to do that for the comic book.
Nintendo is in the process of starting its new ebook store that will be part of its Wii U ecosystem. If you are unfamiliar with this, its basically Nintendo’s new video game console that will be released later this year. The hyping factor is that it comes with a touchscreen tablet that doubles as a controller to interact with your unit. One of the great things about the Wii U controller is that it will tap into the Nintendo store to download indie games and apps, and soon books.
It is said that Nintendo plans on rolling out the Wii U Digital Reading program that will stock not only ebooks but also magazines and newspapers. You will be able to read them right on the tablet that comes with the console or view them on your TV. The company also plans on rolling out a games section that will have official strategy guides in digital form.
via Good E-Reader
The cannibalization of sales in the paperback market has already happened. I don’t mean that paperback sales have been dropping. I’m talking about the drop in sales of printed paperback novels in favour of e-book sales. It looks like the same shift is just starting to happen in comics.
In the first week of September, three of the five most popular iPad apps in the Book category were comic apps. The ComiXology app came in second and was closely followed by the official Marvel and DC Comics apps.
This is more than a case of novelty and free comics driving downloads. The ComiXology app was also the second highest grossing iPad app in all categories. The reason for this seems to be convenience. DC Comics is simultaneously releasing print and digital comics on the same day. This allows readers to make a choice about how they want to read their favourite comic. The sales numbers seem to indicate that readers are leaning towards the digital.
These new apps are currently offering a single way to purchase comics, you need to find and purchase each comic. I think there is going to be a lot of demand for a variety of purchase options that are convenient for the reader. The readers are gonig to decide how they want to read digital comcis. It might be by subscription or based on a page model. The key is providing flexible purchase options for readers. Consumers are going to decide what is most convenient for them and app developers are going to need to listen carefully.
It is important to remember that Comixology is also working closely with Diamond distributors so there is a lot of financial support and industry pressure for the Comixology business model to dominate the marketplace. It keeps the status quo for publishers and distributors which is exactly what they want. They already know how to make money with existing business models and they are keenly interested in keeping it alive. This doesn’t mean that their model won’t continue to be successful but it does mean that there is a lot of room for innovation in the world of digital comics.
There are a lot of reasons for Google to buy Motorola. Access to hardware and patents seem to topping the list on blogs this morning. Most of those conversations are about Google protecting themselves from Apple and Microsoft as both of those companies focus on generating income through patent lawsuits. Google needs more ammunition in those fights. Despite the obvious legal stuff, the acquisition could have a major impact on transmedia production and social TV.
Google has been trying to become a content broadcaster for awhile. Its acquisition of YouTube was just the beginning. Owning Motorola gives them a hardware division that will let them create the same kind of ecosystem that has made Apple so successful. They will be able manage both content distribution and the platform for delivery. Content and apps in the iTunes store have made Apple’s mobile hardware strategy extremely successful.
Transmedia
Transmedia becomes relevant when you realize that Google has also bought Motorola’s Medios software along with the company. Medios was designed as a white label product that could allow content providers to integrate all the walled content related to a creative property into a multi-screen experience for an audience. It fully embraced the belief that TV was going to become an internet-delivered form of entertainment. Motorola’s design decision would allow creative properties to utilize any form of technology that was supported by the internet. Now Google has the ability to integrate distribution channels from the internet with apps, video, audio, interactive media and audience-created content. I realize that a collection of related media isn’t a transmedia experience, but what will it take to assemble those pieces into something that could be called a narrative? I’m sure someone at Google has thought about it but it is a complex problem. Breaking down walls between content is one challenge, giving that collection of media a meaning that resonates with an audience is just as big of a challenge. It will be exciting to see how that space begins to evolve.
Social TV
Google is also working on integrating your life through their new offering, Google+. They already own a lot of services, like Picasa, that are designed to integrate all aspects of personally created media in a single place and now you can share it with your “Circles”. Google’s integration into multi-screen hardware and software solutions are going to give them the opportunity to collect your favorite television shows, music, books and whatever else you enjoy into your social experience as well. Once you have your media integrated into a single vertical it isn’t difficult to envision how you’d be interacting with your friends on Google+ using your Google/ Motorola smartphone while you all watched the latest episode of your favourite television channel being broadcast by YouTube’s Professional Content channel on your smartTV.
The Future
It could be a really exciting time for the evolution of transmedia and social TV. A Google content channel that allows innovation from third party content providers would be ideal. It would provide the first real opportunity for content producers who get transmedia and social media to weave a narrative through all of those channels and give audiences a new kind of entertainment experience. It also wouldn’t hurt Google if audiences started finding the most meaningful and entertaining experiences using Google’s hardware and software. I’m sure someone at Google is already thinking about that too.
The iPad has gotten everyone excited in the comic publishing industry. This is based on predictions that 20% of households in the U.S. will have one in the next two years. These aren’t being purchased as productivity devices, they are for fun. They aren’t just fun for the person who buys them either, they are becoming pass-around devices that get into the hands of everyone in their family. The idea that 62M people in the U.S. will have one of these devices in their home should make anyone producing creative content very excited. Considering that there are going to be a whole pile of other tablets and e-readers adding to those numbers and you’ve got a huge potential market for anything that can be consumed on a tablet.
These devices aren’t going to just be for watching movies and playing games. Any initial speculation about whether or not people will actually read on these devices is now gone. Currently about 25% of adult fiction is being purchased in the form of digital e-books. People are getting to like the idea of a digital library, more than that, they are starting to see digital as a great way to read for enjoyment.
Several comic publishers are thinking that the iPad will cause the same kind of shift in comic reading. Mike Richardson, the CEO of Dark Horse Entertainment thought the iPad signaled the right time to get into the digital market for his company. They began conservatively with a few titles and Mass Effect, a video game title, became so popular that it crashed their servers. They have now going to begin offering every comic in digital format, on every device and in seven languages. Dark Horse will also be releasing motion comics soon. The interesting thing about Dark Horse is that they initially worked with Apple and Kindle to get their content into those markets (iTunes & Amazon). They learned quickly and realized that they didn’t like the deals they were being offered by either of those content aggregators. They decided to build their own store and will be driving traffic to that store with regular announcements and free comics. Dark Horse won’t have much trouble with this as they have a large collection of highly regarded IP. Having titles such as Star Wars, Hellboy and all of Joss Whedon’s properties means that they already have huge audiences.
Dark Horse is one of the most interesting examples as they began thinking that they were going to have work with content aggregators, such as iTunes, to get their content out there but quickly shifted to building their own content distribution strategy. All of the other publishers are trying to figure out which strategy will work best for them. Regardless, it has forced everyone, including DC/ Warner to adopt a transmedia strategy as there is no clear marketplace for their creative properties. The general consensus is that the next 18-24 months will help all of the publishers identify the most successful model. Consumers will drive the industry towards a tipping point, it remains to be seen if the publishers made the right decision about their own strategy. The ones I talked to were fairly open about it, they would typically tell me to talk to them in 2013 to see if they got it right because they wouldn’t know until then.
There are a number of interesting consequences to the move towards digital. As I’ve mentioned before, the bricks and mortar retailers are worried that the digital purchases will cannibalize their current customer base. After all, why go to the comic store when you can download everything on your iPad while drinking your latte at Starbucks? A lot of people are thinking about the same thing so what is interesting is that Comixology, Dark Horse and especially Diamond distributors are creating digital strategies that are designed to support bricks and mortar stores. Mike Richardson owns a chain of comic stores and he wants them to survive. Diamond is the monopoly distributor of comics in North America and they want their customer base, the comic store, to survive the move to digital. So what seems to be happening is a “paper-under-glass” strategy that is attempting to take the existing business models and bolt on a digital component.
This means that rather than creating new business models around digital they are trying to maintain the status quo in comics. This is good news for all the major players in the industry but not so much for the smaller publishers and independents. The move towards digital comics has the opportunity of creating a direct connection between the creator and their audience. This barrier that has always been the biggest problem for creators, they have been able to typeset their own books and self-publish since the 90s but they still need to find an audience for the hundreds of comics in boxes in the spare bedroom. Traditionally they need to find their audience through sales tables at comic conventions and such. This meant that the barriers to audience building for independent creators was real and significant. It is only going to get worse as print costs rise and distributors like Diamond take fewer risks. Technology and social networks have done a fantastic job of eliminating those barriers for creators and digital distribution is providing them with a real opportunity to exploit new models. Unfortunately most of the time, effort and money being spent on digital comics is about keeping the big publishers, and their bricks and mortar retailers, around for the next few decades.
I’m really hoping that the next 18-24 months will see them successfully achieve this but I’m also hoping that we’ll start seeing some new opportunities arise for creators to step out of traditional publishing models. After all, “paper-under-glass” might be one successful model but I think some entrepreneurial thinking might create a whole bunch of news ones.
ICv2 published a summary of all the digital publishing and platform announcements made at Comic-con.
ICv2 – Comic-Con Digital Round-Up.
A summary of the digital distribution and platform announcements made at Comic-con 2011
COMICS ARE DEAD!
…What? Too soon?
…Well maybe not dead but things are changing quickly, read on…
Dropping Sales
The comic book industry is having another tough year, the volume of comics being sold through comic stores continues to drop, the latest numbers indicate a 7% drop in sales while comic sales in books stores went up 8% (even with the meltdown of Borders). In terms of genre, Manga continued to drop, down 11% over the year while the largest gains were in the kids and tweens market, up 67% from last year. The drop in sales has been blamed on the decreasing number of stores to sell product, heavy piracy of scanned copies of comics and a resistance on the part of most publishers to move into the digital marketplace.
Bricks and Mortar
It seems that as bricks and mortar distribution continues to drop in sales that Amazon is taking up a larger share of the sales of physical copies of comics. This isn’t digital sales, I’ll talk about those in a minute. Amazon seems to be doing this by offering deep discounts for comics/ trades/ graphic novels (without any say from the creators) and providing cheap or even free shipping for the product.
The Digital Market
Now onto the digital market. There seems to be a few main distribution/ consumption channels that were considered relevant to the comics industry. Apple’s iTunes and the iPhone/ iPad hardware that goes with it are currently the most popular destinations. The other channels are Android, PSP, Kindle and the web. The current trends on those channels is growth in Apple’s offering, an increase in Android but the PSP comic market is collapsing. Kindle, Nook and the web are seen as emerging channels that will continue to grab more marketshare.
The sales through these channels have started out small but the general belief is that they will continue to grow considerably. In 2009 they amounted to about $500K-1M. As Dave Steinberger, the CEO of comiXology, described it, “If print comic sales were a sheet of paper, digital sales would be a piece of dental floss”. Despite the small numbers the consensus is that the sales will continue to grow even though they are lagging behind digital book sales. Currently e-books on Amazon are outselling printed books. That happened only four years after Amazon started selling digital books. Milton Griepp from ICv2 believes that comics are poised to follow and that growth in the digital market will be exponential over the next few years. The problem with growth in the industry has a lot to do with the comic publishing industry lagging in their transition towards the digital market. The industry is being heavily disrupted and the opportunities that are appearing also come with considerable risk. Like most traditional publishing industries, risk isn’t something that makes them comfortable. Here are some of the big questions that they would like answered before they engage in a digital publishing strategy. Are digital comic buyers going to be collection buyers? In other words, will they want to follow a continuing storyline over several months or are they looking for short, discrete story lines within an existing IP franchise? Is the current pricing going to work? And if not what kind of pricing experimentation are we going to see? Are digital comics going to cannibalize the existing customer base? This is based on a concern that if current buyers go digital they aren’t going to be interested in going to their local comic store and picking up a printed copy. These are all good questions based on some honest concerns. The thing is, you can’t be paralyzed by the uncertainty, the comics industry can look to the tech sector for the kind of entrepreneurial attitude required in a constantly disrupted space. Tech needs to re-invent itself constantly as new technology makes old models of doing business obsolete. The comics industry is already starting to see the effects of the disruption in dropping sales and it has started to react with a lot of new ideas. It can be certain that some of them are going to succeed and those companies are going to be the real winners in the evolving industry.
The Future
There was a lot of speculation about what else is going to happen in the comics industry over the next couple of years. The general belief is that the proliferation of tablets was going to present the largest opportunity for growth but that it will tend to be organic and evolve from small initial successes. Brick and mortar retail locations are going to become increasingly involved in deciding future directions of the marketplace. They are now very much aware that they need to be extremely active in re-inventing the shopping experience if they are going to survive the rise of the digital comic book. There was also a belief that Transmedia exploitation of comics and comic properties was going to become increasingly common as narratives continue to slip between media and platforms. One of the most interesting speculations, and the one that I’ll end with, was the interest in a creator-to-consumer channel developing. Digital books are already doing this and there was a lot of interest on technology providing the opportunity for comic creators to bypass publishers and build a direct relationship with their audience. I’m working with The Fabler on making that kind of channel become a reality so it was interesting to see it brought up as a future trend.
So, things are still very much in flux, I think they will be for several years, I hopeful that at the end of it all there are going to be a lot more comics out there and a lot more readers.
I just had to throw up a quick post on the inclusion of the “Super 8″ film trailer as a playable level in the new game “Portal 2″. You can check out the game player trailer here. You can then compare that to the actual film trailer here. Having the trailer as an interactive, playable level is an interesting twist on moving a story between mediums. I can only think that J.J. Abrams and crew thought that getting the trailer is a heavily marketed game is going to increase the profile of their brand. It seems to be a typical approach of transplanting the strengths of film into a game engine, but I’m not seeing something different that is playing to the actual strengths of the game media itself. I’ll have to see how this plays out, perhaps there is more coming that is going to make this an interesting approach to interactivity and storytelling.
So, it looks like I got into the Merging+Media lab being held in Vancouver on April 28th and 29th, 2011. I’m pretty excited about it, only 24 people from across Canada have gotten into the lab which is going to be lead by Anita Ondine. She’s got a lot of experience in developing transmedia properties for film and is currently producing “Pandemic” for Lance Weiler’s next film “HiM”. He’s currently one of my favourite independent film producers as he’s got the business savvy that has allowed him produce his own films, distribute them and make money without ever having to deal with a distribution company. This has been the largest roadblock I’ve encountered to getting transmedia properties up and running in Canada so I’m looking forward to the feedback and expertise in the room.
It sounds like I’m the only one in Alberta who got into the lab, everyone else is from Toronto and Vancouver. Given the increasing interest in taking storytelling out of traditional media, I’m expecting to hear about a lot of new and creative approaches. It will also be interesting to see how the changing hardware market is going to influence how media is going to be produced and consumed as well. It always comes down a great story but it is becoming a very interesting time to be a storyteller.
