August 17, 2007

Going Mobile With Discovery's Doug Craig

Discovery introduces 14 green series for mobile platforms

By Debra Kaufman

Discovery Communications is one of the pioneers in committing significant resources to mobile programming.  They offer short-form content for the mobile platform on MobiTV, Sprint, SmartVideo, Modeo and now Helio and V-CAST. As part of its Planet Green initiative, the network most recently produced 14 original mobile series including Go Green!, Green Gadgets, and Strange Science. Doug Craig, VP of programming for New Media at Discovery, tells Debra Kaufman what's working for Discovery Mobile.

What was the first mobile program that Discovery Channel launched?

Our first mobile program was a show called The Physics of Baseball, which was nominated for a Sports Emmy this year. We did this show in Spring 2006 and it launched that summer on MobiTV and Amp’d. It was an interesting model because our Science Channel has shown a production about the statistics and math behind baseball. What we did was launch onto their production cycle in Florida at spring training to produce some shows specifically for mobile. We produced five shorts out of it that had nothing to do with the show itself. They came out really well. This was the first example of what we called pre-purposing, when we produce mobile at the same time as a network production. We’ve since used this programming also on our website.

Now that you have a year of mobile programming under your belt, what have you learned – what programs work best and why?

What we’ve learned isn’t based on data we’ve seen. To tell you’re the truth, we’ve seen some information on how many people are accessing our mobile channels but not on specific clips they’re watching. That level of detail just isn’t out there. We recently launched on a clip basis with V-Cast and Helio, and since it’s a unicast model, we’ll know exactly which clips they’ve accessed.

We’ve learned a tremendous amount but more on the production side in terms of deliverables that make sense, graphic size, how fast a cut can be.  This week we launched Green Gadgets, similar to Go Green! in terms of focusing on green. This show looks at the high tech gadgets in the green space. We got the final deliverables and ported it to some phones to test it and quickly realized that there was too much information on the screen. We ended up creating two versions: one we’d use online and then a mobile version where the only difference was the graphic overlays. Instead of having maybe 10 or 12 words to display a point, for the mobile we may have only 3 or 4 and make the font bigger on a different background. It’s things like that we’ve learned a lot of….and I look forward to learning more about peoples’ preferences for content.

You have three production models for mobile — re-purpose, pre-purpose and original. What have you learned?  Which kind of programming is the easiest to produce?  Which is the most successful?

I think they all have their strengths. From a perspective of promotional value for our linear networks, obviously pre-purposed has the strongest ability. It’s closely tied to the show and we’re getting it in-house in time to promote it. Whereas re-purposed content can sometimes be related to a show, but the strength of those is to build off successful genres of our network. We produce Strange Science for mobile* and we pulled content from a variety of different shows to create it. We did one on why dinosaurs went extinct and we used footage from several different shows. Re-purposing is a great way to extend our brand into a short-form “cocktail trivia” or snack food for your brain.  It might be hard to create an entire show from these ideas, but they’re great mobile nuggets. What we love about original content is the power that brings in terms of expanding the viewpoint of what Discovery can be to a new generation of viewers. The “green” content is a great way to reach younger generation of viewers, and we present it in a manner we might not on our linear channel, be it subject mater or style.

Is it getting any easier to get metrics for how programming is doing on the mobile platform?  If so, how are you getting numbers and what are the numbers telling you?

No. It’s a challenge. Some of our carriers have identified the need for metrics, asking us if it would be valuable. And we said, Absolutely. Getting that next layer where we can tell specifically what people are watching. You really want to know what the shows are doing, to make better choices on how to schedule.

This article originally appeared in Mobi-lize, Cable360.net's sister website for news and analysis about content-on-the-go.

*Click here to watch Mobi-lize's video of Discovery's Strange Science for mobile.

*Click here for Mobi-lize's in-depth look at Discovery Mobile's Go Green! series.