Angry Birds to move across platforms as Rovio is changing the IP value paradigm for fictional characters

One of the guiding principles of Content Licensing, a membership periodical published by The Licensing Letter (EPM Communications), is that those executives charged with the task of growing their consumer brands in media need to break away from parochial tendencies and watch trends in all categories.  Editor Paul Sweeting states:

All of the media industries were traditionally siloed off from each other. Yet the issue is the same, how do you monetize a given piece of content on the various platforms? If you are mounting content on the same platform as a company in another industry, you are now competing, across siloes, across industries, for the attention of the consumer. “It’s one big ocean and everybody is swimming in it.  What happens in the music industry has a huge impact on what happens with books.”

As if setting out to prove the point, Rovio Entertainment Ltd. announced this week a bold foray from the video game business into the video-entertainment business with its ever-popular Angry Birds franchise.  Rovio is creating a new cartoon network … within the Angry Birds App. A year’s worth of cartoons is planned, each about three minutes in length.

There will also be an Angry Birds Toons channel on Comcast, also streaming from other vendors.

Though Disney has little to fear, Rovio is resetting the bar in proving what is possible in growing the value of IP nestled within fictional characters, growing a 99 cent video game App to an estimated $200M company in 2012.  And now Andrew Stalbow, executive vice president of strategic partnerships for Rovio, calls the latest move to a video-entertainment company a “game-changer.”