"It's both a pull to people to watch our TV shows and a way to attract younger audiences," says Louise Brown, head of multiplatform commissioning at Channel 4.įood Network in the UK is looking at how to create an appropriate app for its cooking and recipe content and is likely to launch something this autumn. Meanwhile, after the success of its Hippo cam last year, which had 45,000 people watching for 15 minutes on average every week, Channel 4 recently launched Foxes Live, complete with a "den cam", Twitter and Facebook pages and a live fox-tracking map that uses GPS technology. "In this way we are not limiting the game to one, eight-week long TV show." "We wanted something that works for No County For Old Men but that could also link to something else in the future," says Whiley. But the game can also stand alone and support other British history programmes yet to be created.
"Having compelling content online is a way of engaging with whole different audiences who may never have heard of us before."ĪETN recently launched a bespoke UK game called Build Britain that is meant to be a digital game extension for its upcoming No County For Old Men series, starring John Thomson and Simon Day. "These extra screens allow us to extend our brands both deeper to our TV audience and also to find new audiences." Whiley says that nearly two-thirds of the online traffic to AETN UK's websites comes from Google searches for terms such as "crime" or "UK history" as opposed to the names of their channel brands. "It's really old school to talk about simply taking a programme and building a game out of it," says Dan Whiley, senior director digital media at AETN UK, which in a joint venture with Sky operates several UK channels, including the History channel, the Military Channel and the Crime & Investigation Network. In the UK, 140,000 people have downloaded it. Meanwhile, the Facebook game for Pawn Stars has been played 250m times since it was launched last year, with 1.2 million people on average playing it each month. The Food Hospital app was set up to help enhance scientific research into eating habits in the UK and there clearly was an appetite for that, with some 40,000 people signed up since the show aired last year. But there are clear signs, with shows such as Pawn Stars on the History channel and Food Hospital on Channel 4, that app and game makers are increasingly in tune with what factual viewers want.
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