With PRH’s Markus Dohle moved on, the single biggest and most powerful opponent of book streaming is no longer narrating the publishing agenda for the industry.
“The popular British preschool series Peppa Pig has launched on Disney+ in 19 new markets across Europe, with availability in 25 additional languages,” writes Jamie Stalcup over at WorldScreen.
“The animated series is now available on Disney+ platform in the Balkans, the Baltics, Benelux, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, GSA, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the U.K. It will debut on the streamer in Portugal on March 29.”
Along with the expanded streaming reach comes whole new markets for the huge range of Peppa Pig books and assorted franchise products.
“We’re delighted to be partnering with Disney+ to bring Peppa Pig to our existing fanbase of passionate preschoolers, as well as introducing the series to a new wave of families across Europe,” said Monica Candiani, executive VP of content sales at Entertainment One Family Brands.
And yet we still see many in the publishing fraternity talking about the “attention economy” and how SVOD is the enemy, taking eyeballs away from our precious books, as if there is some unwritten law that enjoying reading and watching video are mutually exclusive activities.
What publishers should be doing is embracing the model and making as many connections as possible between books and screen, to reach these new audiences that SVOD is opening up and that so many publishers, with their anachronistic territorial restrictions and Luddite resistance to the very notion of streaming and of offering readers format choice and affordable, accessible content, are missing out on.
When we throw regular TV and satellite reach into the equation along side the myriad streaming services beyond the big brands like Netflix, Prime, Disney+ and co. that we westerners have actually heard of, the global – literally global – reach of video is beyond anything any publisher could even dream of with the twentieth century ink-on-paper-book-sold-in-a-bookstore model.
With PRH’s Markus Dohle moved on, the single biggest and most powerful opponent of book streaming is no longer narrating the publishing agenda for the industry.
Whether the new management at PRH will soon reverse Dohle’s unfathomable decision to pull all PRH titles from unlimited book streaming services remains to be seen, but clearly the time has come for the wider industry to re-evaluate its relationship with streaming across video, audio and text and embrace the opportunity streaming brings to the table.
