EXCLUSIVE: PixelPlay Teams with New Line Cinema on Interactive TV Game

--PixelPlay's Boltax, New Line's Sugarman Explain the Partnership

PixelPlay, the interactive TV games and technology company which was formed last year via the merger of Pixel Technologies and PlayTV (note: for more on the merger, see [itvt] Issue 5.92 Part 1), has partnered with Time Warner-owned film company, New Line Cinema, to offer an ITV game based on the summer movie, "How to Eat Fried Worms." The game is now available on PixelPlay's DishGAMES service, where, unlike that service's other games, it is being offered free of charge. (Note: DishGAMES, which launched earlier this year on EchoStar's DISH Network satellite TV platform, features an array of branded games, including such titles as "Asteroids Mega" and "Centipede Mega." It also offers leaderboard and tournament capabilities, and gives players the opportunity to win prizes. DISH Network customers have the option of subscribing to the new service via an on-screen "subscribe" button that connects them directly to the platform's interactive customer service application. The service costs $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year. For more on the service, see [itvt] Issue 6.79 Part 3).

The movie on which the new game is based tells the story of 11-year- old Billy, who inadvertently challenges a school bully and ends up agreeing to a bet that calls for him to eat 10 worms in one day. The game, which will be available for around eight weeks, is roughly similar to the classic "Snake Game," but with Billy as the head of the snake, gobbling worms as he moves around the board and avoids various obstacles on his way. Players have the opportunity to win 10 different prizes: the top three scorers will win a "Worms Prize Package," which includes a 10-inch Samsung Portable DVD Player, 10 movie tickets from Fandango, a New Line DVD Pack and movie poster, and a 17-piece stainless steel cookware set (so that "anyone can make their own tasty fried worm treats," PixelPlay says). According to PixelPlay, the new game represents the first time that an interactive TV games service has teamed with a movie studio to offer a game that features a leaderboard and a prizing component.

In addition to being accessible from within the DishGAMES portal, the new game can be reached via triggers in New Line's commercials for "How to Eat Fried Worms," allowing it to serve in effect as a Dedicated Advertiser Location (DAL) for those commercials. "The trigger says, 'Press SELECT now to play on DishGAMES!," Jonathan Boltax, PixelPlay's VP of programming and service management, explained to [itvt] last week. "The benefit of this for New Line is that it allows them to significantly extend their 30-second spot with highly engaging content. Also, since the trigger takes viewers to the DishGAMES portal, PixelPlay also gains visibility through New Line's commercials. We're hoping that people will see this game and then see the other 15 great games on the service, as well as the tournaments, the polls, and the leaderboards that we offer. Once people take a look at all that, we're very confident that they will subscribe. And, of course, another benefit is that we get to associate our brand with a really great movie. So this project is a win-win proposition for both PixelPlay and New Line," he added.

[itvt] asked the New Line executive who worked on the project with PixelPlay, VP of interactive marketing Aaron Sugarman, why his company had decided to participate in the project: "My primary goal is to generate awareness for my movie," he explained. "But marketing a movie to children and families on the Web is particularly difficult, because you have to be very sensitive to concerns about inappropriate content. An interactive TV games portal like DishGAMES provides a really wholesome environment for delivering marketing messages to children and families." In addition, the fact that PixelPlay was willing to produce the game for a very small budget (both because the company believed the game would provide it with significant marketing benefits and because it could develop it quickly and inexpensively, using its existing gaming infrastructure) was an important consideration: "Now, I don't expect this to be a mass-market game," Sugarman explained. "I believe that somewhere in the region of 100,000 viewers are likely to interact with it. But if I'm able to do it on a small investment that includes barter and so forth, I can afford to do a trial like this and see if it pays off." Because the project provided substantial benefits to PixelPlay, the company was also willing to work on it without first securing a licensing agreement with New Line: "I do a lot of deals for new platforms, especially mobile, and what happens is you often cross the line into licensing," Sugarman explained. "That's not inherently bad, but my job is theatrical marketing: I market movies, and I'm interested in generating awareness for my films, not in negotiating licensing deals. So one of the things that made a difference here is that Jonathan understood my promotional needs and we were able to avoid more complicated negotiations over licensing." [itvt] asked Sugarman if New Line plans to work with PixelPlay on similar projects going forward: "I'd like to continue working with them," he said. "Everybody feels so far that it has been a very positive experience. It was a really good shared venture, in which Jonathan's team invested time and effort and expertise and our team invested a bit of money and some assets. It's a good model for us that allows us to conduct promotions in a family-safe environment that's not already overrun with marketing messages."

According to Boltax, the new game represents the first stage of an incipient PixelPlay strategy of incorporating more advergaming into DishGAMES: "Advergaming is one of the things that we're trying to incorporate into DishGAMES, which we feel would be very powerful for our viewers who would thus have access to more high-quality branded content," he said. "We want to work with appropriate partners to create fun and exciting games for the portal that would promote their products and services. Aaron Sugarman at New Line is someone I've known for a long time, so he was one of the first people we reached out to. And it just so happened that he had a movie set to premiere that had a great theme that we could build a game around, and that was not only in an appropriate timeframe from a development perspective, but that would also make for a great game experience."

In the course of our conversation with Boltax, he also revealed that PixelPlay is planning to promote its DishGAMES service via an interactive TV advertising campaign, slated to begin next month: "We are in the midst of developing three nice, creative commercial spots that will start airing in September for a set amount of times each week, and that we think will be the first large-scale commercial campaign in the US for an ITV games service," he said. "Those spots will contain triggers that will take people to DishGAMES. We strongly believe that there is a lot of great ITV out there, but that it's up to the developers and the publishers to let people know that it's available. Clearly, it doesn't do people in the industry any good that there's all this ITV available and viewers don't know about it. So we feel strongly that marketing these types of apps and services is key at this stage of ITV. We believe that PixelPlay's purpose isn't just the creation and development of interactive TV services, but also managing the day-to-day marketing of those services."

URL: PixelPlay  http://www.pixelplay.com

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