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.
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.
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.
Barnes & Noble just announced that the NOOKColor, an Andoid tablet fronted with a 7-inch touch screen, as part of their overall Nook eReading device line, has become their biggest selling product of all time. They sold their entire inventory of devices over the holiday season.
I don’t think there is any doubt that the market will have a ton of options available for tablet-based computing for reading digital texts. The major limit to them opening up the market for comics and graphic novels has been the lack of colour. With the exception of some Manga titles, most comics and graphic novels ship with colour panels. The end result is that most people aren’t going to be interested in downloading a heavily visual digital product that is going to look terrible on a grayscale screen. The growth of colour tablets and their steadily decreasing cost is nothing but good news for the digital comic marketplace. Keep an eye on the Fabler as we start building up the relationships that are going to let independents tap into that market.
Recently a buddy of mine, Riley Rossmo, the artist for Cowboy Ninja Viking, had the option rights for the comic purchased by Disney First of all, congrats, Riley works really hard at his craft. I met him at a regular meet-up of local artists at the Kensington Pub here in Calgary when his main project was Proof. He always had a number of creative properties on the go and had a keen sense that Hollywood was always looking around for something new. He was in talks with a number of studios that were all trying to find the next big hit for the film industry. Proof was the first experience but Cowboy Ninja Viking eventually made the deal. This isn’t anything new, in the past few years, comics have increasingly become a place for the film industry to look for creative properties. Next to the stack of scripts on the desks of the entertainment industry is another, shinier pile of graphic novels and trades.
There are some good reasons that comics and graphic novels are there on that pile. They all have a fully formed stories, lots of characters to fill up the story landscape and, more importantly, they’ve already been seen by thousands of people. One of the biggest challenges to the film industry is trying to figure out if the movie they are making is going to be a hit or a miss. If a story already has a fan base and a ton of positive reviews, chances are they’re onto something good. Most of the people making decisions about funding really don’t know anything about their prospective audience. With a large fan base they’ve got a lot of feedback that the audience loved the comic and they are hungry for more. The funders don’t have to rely on a single opinion that may or may not be informed. So basically, if you’ve got a story that works in a visual format you’re lowering their risk that they’re going to fund a bomb at the box office.
There are some other elements you should consider as well. Comics, as a medium, give you a lot of room. You can vary a lot of things in the narrative such as story structure, art style and characters. You can do it in a lot of unconventional ways and play around with narrative because the cost of your comic bombing at the store aren’t that high. If things don’t work out you just start up another concept. The cost of failure in movies is much higher and as a result they tend to play it safe. This means you follow a standard three-act structure that can follow the conventions of a film script. This can be a bit challenging with a long running series as they don’t really have a structured start and ending. In Riley’s case, they brought in the script writers from Zombieland to put it into a standard format that can actually be filmed. It is something that you need to think about if you are looking at your story moving into a different media. Have you built it so that it can move into film? Or is is something that is going to take a lot of work to fit into a standard format that runs for 80 minutes? The easier it is for a producer to see the transition, the easier it will be to get their interest.
Now comes the next steps, someone finally offers you an option on that comic title you’ve poured your soul into for the past year. An option isn’t an outright purchase, they are basically buying the exclusive right to buy the rights to your creative property in the future. It is a producer’s way of buying some time while they try to get writers involved to polish up a script, line up some name actors and get the financing in place to actually film the movie. It is usually 12-18 months, if they haven’t been able to pull all of that together in that time period, they probably never will. At this point you’re not going to get the big Hollywood windfall, options will only pay out a few thousand dollars. The option agreement will usually define how much you’re going to actually make if the film moves forward. If all of that comes together and the producer moves the film into production you can look forward to the big pay-off. This might be in the form of a cash settlement or it might be a piece of the profits from the film, each option agreement can be different.
One last piece of advice, get someone you trust to review the option agreement. I’ve known a few naive writers who agreed to take back-end points on a film, thinking they were getting a share of the profits. What they didn’t realize is that they only get paid after all of the debts for the film are paid off. Just so you know, it is in the best interest of the owner of that film (often the film distributor) to make sure that film never makes any money on paper. The end result is that you will never make any money even though your film ran for 6 months at the theatres and sells out every Christmas at BestBuy. There are a lot of pitfalls and you need to be well educated to make sure you avoid them all. If you don’t have someone who knows all this stuff it is worth it to hire a lawyer who does. You’ll be happier with the results.
I haven’t written a lot about The Fabler, but it is a new business that I’ve been rather proud to be involved in over the past year. It started with a discussion between myself and Bruno Steppuhn about the publishing industry, we both realized that it was changing rapidly. We had talked to a few publishers and printers down in the U.S. and they understood the shift as well, they just didn’t know which direction it was going. None of us thought it was going to die but we believed that the business was going to fundamentally change. We started to look at how social media technologies and new hardware were going to turn publishing into a very different kind of industry. We decided to figure out what that new industry was going to look like, raised some money and created our first shot at a social site that focused on digital viewing and print-on-demand for the comic book/ graphic novel community.
It gave us a chance to experiment with a very creative and demanding community. They were very vocal about the kinds of things they want to see for the future of comics. The creators wanted more creative control, more profit for the creators, engagement with their fans, distribution options, more profit…basically, they felt they were doing all the work, they should get more for it. The readers just wanted one thing, great art and great stories and a lot of choice. We put that all together into The Fabler and won “Best Use of Social Media” at the 2010 MediaFresh awards, beating out a number of much better funded crowdsourcing and social media projects. We worked closely with ZenSoft Studios (check out their demo reel, great stuff!) to develop the site. The feedback we got gave us a lot of encouragement so we’ve continued our discussions with publishers and printers about what was going to be in the next version of The Fabler. We don’t think we’ve got everything right yet but there are a huge number of publishers that are looking for new solutions for their industry so we’re motivated to keep trying. Keep an eye out for updates in the New Year, I’m hoping to show you some pretty amazing stuff and explore some new business models that are going to let creative industries explode and reach every single audience member they can, anywhere in the world.
QR Codes, or “Quick Response” codes are a two dimensional barcode that contains information that can be read by a scanner or smartphone. You may have seen them around, they are those black squares with a seemingly random collection of pixels on them. They kind of look like an early video game from Atari. They were initially developed by Toyota to quickly provide information so that parts could be tracked in the manufacturing cycle.
They’ve now become a fast way to provide information to people in the form of text or URLs. A smart phone can scan a QR Code and automatically show you the text it represents or a URL. You can then follow that URL to a website to get more information.
QR Codes are kind of cool because they’re fast and can pretty much take you anywhere on the web. If you are putting physical media out there, posters, postcards, business cards, whatever, you’ve got a quick way to let people investigate further. They don’t have to copy down URLs or try to type them in, just a quick scan with an smartphone camera and you’ve got all the information you need to continue.
The QR Code to the left will show you the URL for my PhD research site. It is the kind of thing that would be great on a business card or poster presentation at a conference. Those times when everyone is too busy to really hang onto another piece of paper, instead they have it in their phone for later. The same thing works for any kind of media campaign or trans-media narrative. You can create something that will generate some curiosity, even if it is a 12-foot tall cardboard hedgehog, and then have a QR Code on the side that provides a pathway to start down the rabbit hole.
So, there’s another way to get catch the attention of your audience, no matter what you’re trying to do.
How-to make your own QR Code
If you want to try it yourself go check out: Kaywa, the have a QR Code generator that lets you make your QR code and they have a viewer available for download as well.
