Published By: Alfaraz Laique

Understanding the collaboration in transmedia industry

Transmedia storytelling is a thing of a present. There are many ways in which content is available to people these days. Therefore, the need to control the privacy arose and it gave rise to collaborations.

The Television Industry has always been under pressure of the bottleneck owners who were not only the main distributors of content but also made maximum profit out of it. The domination in broadcast spectrum for choice of content and its availability monopolized the industry of television to which digital media came as a curse.

Intra Industry Collaborations - Intra industry collaborations are referred to spaces where an interface platform buys (aired)content from different broadcasters and distributes it on a single online portal. An example of this is the Kangaroo, whose contributing broadcasters were BBC worldwide, ITV, and Channel 4. The platform was decreed, citing it to be a loss to competition in content supply. Similar platforms later became popular like the SeeSaw.

Third party distributors - The companies not traditionally associated with the TV broadcasting come under this category. Instead of collaboration between different broadcasters here the collaboration takes place between a platform and industries in an individual space. This implies all the companies associated with the platform are not linked with each other in this collaborative model. Due to the expansion of the online market of advertisements with downloaded content from the internet, outsiders got interested in collaborations with the transmedia industry. For example, the running of different tv shows in illegal manner.

Collaborations Mobile Phones - The third generation network and advancement of mobile set led to the booming of the transmedia industry. In totality this collaboration is between electronic manufacturers who provided handsets, network providers (eg. Vodafone, Orange etc), and broadcasters who provided the content. How the TV content will be available on mobile phone was a big dilemma. According to Max Dawson there are two approaches to mobile content:  1. The "Miniaturized" versions of long episodes broken into clips and development of all new formats, narrative modes, and visual style. What Dawson missed was non minituarized full content as on TV be displayed on mobile which is now achievable.

Transmedia Engagement - Engagement was enhanced through Transmedia by various initiatives. One of those being breaking the standard flow of content and making it more consumable. Packaging and organization were also loosened to establish content in new formats that suits the new interface (for eg. Sorting the content by genre, name, episode etc). The removal of time restrictions helped to engage people in a more democratic. In all the online transmedia developed a user led process to ensure better engagement.