Integrated Media and Gaming

Media..

A fundamental purpose of our Technology Roadmap is to align product innovation activities with specific vertical industries, and the trends and dynamics relevant to their key themes.

For example our new section for ‘IM+G’ – Integrated Media and Gaming, covers the sectors of publishing, movies and gaming.

A perfect example of a headline topic for this industry is the recently leaked NY Times Digital report, defining many of the critical agenda points for the industry, most notably the big elephant in the room, the complete destruction of the traditional print industry by digital media, and their currently inability to adapt to this change.

Y’know,  just that small item, no biggie.

In this article Searching for a New Business Model, they sum up the sinking ship by how much water is coming in, versus how much is going out.

Need bigger buckets.. 🙂

They also offer telling insights into the challenges faced:

“In general, the shift to replace losses in print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers continue to contract with alarming speed, according to the study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Cultural inertia is a major factor. Most papers are not putting significant effort into the new digital revenue categories that, while small now, are expected to provide most the growth in the future. To different degrees, executives predict newsrooms will continue to shrink, more papers will close and many surviving papers will deliver a print edition only a few days a week.”

Canada even has their own equivalent.

Not quite leaked and not as sensational but also the Ottawa Citizen showed off their new Digital strategy describes how that newspaper is adapting to the trend, launching a multi-platform content strategy.

There’s a ton of great research to tap to plan these strategies. For example in this article Neilsen explore the different customer segments within this trend, such as the difference between tablets and e-readers, and where and how each is used.

..and Gaming

As per the introduction this industry group is Media AND Gaming, so why this combination as typically they are treated quite differently, because they are.

However at another level really the most important point to highlight about the Digital trend is of course Convergence – The Cloud is blending content, apps et al together, and then it is intelligently fed out to the various devices.

Hell we’re all in the same business now, there is just audience and there is services and content to deliver them.

The gaming industry is now become bigger than movies – As mind-blowingly described here GTAV pulled in $800m in the first 24 hours, dwarfing all the biggest of the movie releases.

As the Guardian reports here when you consider that games sell better when they have well written story lines, then you can see that the lines that separate publishing and gaming are blurring too then it’s all becoming one big melting pot.

New format innovation

Given how the size of this pot is expanding hugely then the opportunity is growing, but as per the above points about the Digital trend, if you aren’t adapting to how it is also changing then you’re being left out of it.

So the primary goals of our sector program are to showcase some winning ideas for these new business models and critically define how they could be implemented via Cloud Computing, so they are actually possible, repeatable and scalable.

This means ‘new format innovations’, how is content produced, delivered, consumed, paid for, etc.

For example there are niche market opportunities, and the NY Times has a huge range of fascinating projects: Their labs, a mobile app, new interactive story models and a book/blog type format, called Snowfall.

It’s this last one that I am personally passionate about, in particular where it further involves comics.

Great innovations in this field include developments like Alan Moore, the icon of this industry who authored Watchmen, V for Vendetta et al, who is launching open source software for creating Digital Comics! Nerd alert,  I am super psyched, and I have a few ideas of my own in this same area that I will be trying out to help flesh out this sector program, like is discussed in this Guardian article.

We also have a Linkedin CCN sub-group for this industry program – Join in here.