Festivals Extra: The Beat On The CCI/Lionsgate Video Streaming Service Partnership

Heidi MacDonald at The Beat has a solid, thorough article up here on Comic-Con International and Lionsgate partnering on a subscription-based video streaming service.

I agree with MacDonald that seems like a solid partnership for Comic-Con International and an idea that's certainly worth exploring the way it seem they're going to explore it. There's no way to time this kind of thing, and the vast majority of factors that will make it thrive or grind to a halt will only come out in the doing -- if there's one thing we've learned from the distribution of content through digital media, and we may have only learned one thing, it's that.

It's also worth noting that this seems like something that might compete -- a significant amount depends on the execution here as well -- with Con TV. I imagine most articles moving forward might compare the two no matter how things shake out in terms of any real competition.

Three more things stuck out to me on an initial read. The first is that Lionsgate is an excellent partner for Comic-Con International. As MacDonald points out, Lionsgate was an early adapter of Comic-Con International as a PR and marketing opportunity, and they have plenty of background in putting together the kind of material that such a service might count on. Comics partnerships of the last 20 years have fared much better for the involvement of established names just generally it seems.

The second is I think this provides an opportunity for Comic-Con to put some muscle into its claims that what it provides is a formula uniquely their own as opposed to a generic take on conventions that can be utilized by anybody. It remains to be seen how aggressively they'll pursue that in the years to come, but I would think they might for now wish to have that option and doing something with what they've achieved over the years seems like it would be a solid foundation moving forward, if only in the imagination of their potential customer base.

The third is that this may be part of the answer to the longterm attendance problem: not simply making virtual attendees out of those denied physical access but pitching the whole affair as a prestige event not dependent on outright attendance numbers. As far as most of this is out of what I cover related to comics, I'm intrigued by the possibilities.
 
posted 5:45 pm PST | Permalink
 

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