GigaOM » Angry Birds

Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 22:46:59 +0000

Many long-standing legal rules of engagement between publishers and consumers tilted the playing field in unexpected ways in the first quarter. The period also saw a major expansion in the amount and quality of original productions for web-based video platforms and a major move by chipmaker Intel to stake a claim in the digital living room.

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Angry Birds, fat pigs and the future of television

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:01:04 +0000

Rovio’s Angry Birds games have been downloaded more than 1.7 billion times, and are played by more than 263 million active users per month. The company is now targeting those hundreds of millions of players with a weekly animated show called Angry Birds Toons, which launched in mid-March.

Rovio has been calling these efforts “one of the world’s biggest video networks,” and Brightcove’s Executive Chairman Jeremy Allaire, whose company is powering Rovio’s video streaming, told me Tuesday that he sees this as an inflection point for video franchises. But what do the famous birds and their disdain for pigs really mean for the future of television?

These birds are up to something

First of all, Rovio’s move into the world of original video programming is pretty ingenious. The company established an audience with its games, and now offers its ad-supported video series through the very same apps — no additional installs needed. “They clearly are in a really powerful position,” said Allaire.

Essentially, the company is using its games as very effective trojan horses, in turn demonstrating how iPads, Android tablets and mobile phones have become an important piece of of the puzzle when you’re in the entertainment business. It also shows how much they’re starting to change the game for the TV industry.

Netflix started its streaming efforts on PCs, but most of its streaming is nowadays happening on connected devices. Game consoles like Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are seeing the lion’s share of use, but devices like Apple TV are growing quickly as well. Netflix owes these devices its success. Without ways to get its content on the TV screen, the company would have never been in a position where it could spend $100 million on a show like House of Cards.

Rovio, on the other hand, is primarily a mobile company. Mobile devices are where people are playing Angry Birds, and it will be where they’re going to watch their weekly episodes of Angry Birds Toons. If the show turns out to be a success (and that’s still a big if) it could turn out to be the first big original programming success story for mobile devices.

And that could have an impact on the industry beyond birds and pigs, by signaling the industry that it doesn’t have to rely on traditional distribution mechanisms anymore. “You can establish a new programming franchise over the internet” thanks to mobile and connected devices, argued Allaire in our conversation.

When pigs fly

However, the flip side of this is that Angry Birds Toons also raises the bar for content companies to stand out and actually reach the consumer. It’s hard to compete with 263 million monthly active users. Heck, it’s hard to compete at all in a sea of millions of apps if all you have to offer is yet another show.

“In some sense, the business model hasn’t changed at all,” admitted Allaire. You still need to have highly compelling content, you still need to market that content effectively — and doing both effectively is likely going to cost you a lot of money. And if you’re in mobile, you’re going to also need a really good app.

Birghtcove learned that lesson the hard way over the last couple of months when it failed to establish its app cloud offering, which was meant to provide publishers with an easy way to deploy HTML5-based apps with a native wrapper across a variety of platforms.

Turns out that publishers actually prefer to have true native apps that take advantage of each platform’s strengths and features, which is why Brightcove discontinued app cloud in February. “If you want a premium video experience, you got to put your best foot forward,” acknowledged Allaire when I quizzed him about its app cloud.

The bottom line is that Rovio may demonstrate new ways to enter the game — but that doesn’t mean that the rules have changed. To find large audiences, you still need to be big yourself or partner with a bigger platform.

That’s good news for Rovio and companies like Netflix and YouTube – but not necessarily for a startup looking to change the future of television.

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MobileTechRoundup podcast 283: Nexus 10; Lumias; Angry Birds!

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:43:24 +0000

MoTR 283 is 55:20 minutes long and is a 33.4 MB file in MP3 format.

CLICK HERE to download the file and listen directly.

HOSTS: Matthew Miller (Seattle) and Kevin C. Tofel (Philadelphia)

TOPICS:

Nexus 10 – great hardware (superb actually), but software experience still feels slightly lacking compared to iOS.
Kevin’s first Kickstarter delivered and he loves it: Solar charging 54 WHr (9,000 mAh) battery with USB ports.
HTC event in NYC this coming week: does HTC need a 5-inch phablet?
Speaking of HTC: they’ve settled with Apple on patents. 10 year license agreement.
First thoughts on Nokia Lumia 822 and 810
AT&T not prepared for WP8 launch? Verizon launch event in Seattle
Angry Birds Star Wars: best game ever?

CONTACT US: Email us or leave us a voicemail on our SkypeLine!

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Rovio announces Angry Birds book app: Live from Frankfurt Book Fair

Laura Hazard Owen — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:32:54 +0000

Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish company whose “Angry Birds” app has now been downloaded over 1 billion times, announced its first book app, an iPad cookbook app called “Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes,” at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday afternoon.

The print version of the book, which Rovio published last year, goes by the same title, but the app is “not just a book,” said Peter Vesterbacka, Angry Birds CMO, to a crowd of people that included not just press and book fair attendees but also teenagers and children wearing Angry Birds sweatshirts. “We took the content from the book, 41 egg recipes, but didn’t want to just take the book, make a PDF and sell it to people. We actually made it a lot more interactive.”

“Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes” is on sale in the iTunes store for an introductory price of $0.99 or €0.69 (an Android version is expected soon). The app includes step-by-step photo instructions, an egg timer and photos of the finished dishes. Users can also upload their own pictures of the recipes they make. A Chinese-language version of the app, featuring some additional recipes and photos, will be available in the Chinese app store soon.

“Look at the implications of Rovio getting into the book business,” Vesterbacka said. “With ‘Angry Birds’ the game, we have built the biggest distribution format on the planet, with more than 1 billion downloads. For us, it’s very, very easy and very fast to cross-promote the book in all our games.”

“We’re not looking thousands or tens of thousands of downloads,” he continued, “we’re looking for millions of downloads of this book…We’re going for massive, massive volume.”

On pricing, he said, “there’s no reason why you should price book applications any differently [from other kinds of apps]. There’s no reason why something should cost more just because it happened to be a book before it turned up on one of these digital platforms.” So the app is $0.99 for now — it will later go up to $4.99 — while the print version of “Best Egg Recipes” is $9.99 on Amazon.

Here’s a short video of the app demo at Rovio’s stand at Frankfurt.

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Forget Bad Piggies, check Angry Birds in augmented reality

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:13:38 +0000

Rovio may have launched its Angry Birds follow up, Bad Piggies, on Thursday, but I’m actually more impressed by a version of Angry Birds that’s a proof of concept. PendAR, a company that specializes in augmented and virtual reality solutions, created its own vision of what mobile gaming might look like in the future.

Here’s how it works. Using an integrated camera, a mobile device can “see” the world around it. PendAR’s technology looks for a certain image — in this case, a printed Angry Birds startup screen — and then superimposes the virtual game on top of the physical image. The game then becomes 3-D-like and part of the gamer’s actual environment. Take a look:

VentureBeat caught up with PendAR CEO, Mojtaba Tabatabaie, and learned that this version of Angry Birds isn’t coming to an app store near you. That makes sense, since the original game’s development shop, Rovio, would surely — and correctly — accuse PendAR of taking certain illegal liberties with the Angry Birds franchise.

So don’t expect to play Angry Birds with your home or office in the background. However, this technology demo has me thinking that we should see more augmented reality games in the future. Mobile device hardware is quickly improving to the point where any flagship phone can handle a virtual reality app with ease.

To date, the only type of apps to truly benefit from such technology are generally navigation-based, showing virtual directions and point of interest information on screen. We’ve gone from 2D to 3D gaming graphics some time ago, so what’s the next big step? Augmented reality games on mobiles makes sense to me; at least until we can project interactive holographic games, that is.

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With Bad Piggies, Rovio strays further from Angry Birds success

Ryan Kim — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 13:43:24 +0000

Rovio has been under a little pressure to come up with a gaming title that shows it can win over fans with something not named Angry Birds. This past summer, it released the Amazing Alex, a rebrand of acquired IP Casey’s Contraptions and the title did pretty well, initially, though fell well short of Angry Birds success. Now, it’s out today with Bad Piggies, which takes the viewpoint of the pigs from the Angry Birds games.

The physics-based game requires players to build contraptions and vehicles for the pigs that get them to their beloved eggs. Once the device is built, the player guides it toward a map of the eggs, with physics taking over. The title is available today on the iPhone (99 cents), iPad ($2.99), Android (free) and Mac ($4.99).

The game is built in the same art style of Angry Birds and should be familiar to fans of the series. But the title is more like Amazing Alex, which also let users set off physics-based chain reactions and create their own over-engineered devices. That title got off to a strong start but has fallen to #112 on the overall iTunes charts and #58 on the game charts, according to App Annie. Meanwhile, the original Angry Birds, three years old now, is #25 overall in the iTunes App Store.

Bad Piggies will likely do better because of its Angry Birds heritage combined with the Rovio brand. But in playing the game this morning, I feel like it will also fall short of Angry Birds success, ultimately.

Angry Birds was pure simplicity when you first played it, but the payoff was visceral. It was so satisfying seeing the birds hurtling toward the pigs and seeing all their elaborate structures come tumbling down in different combinations. And all the unique birds with various capabilities created new game play that kept the title interesting.

Bad Piggies feels more complicated up front with less destructive joy. That’s by design, since you’re building something. But the whole act of putting something together in pretty much only one logical configuration and then pressing go is nowhere near as fun as just letting a bird rip in a slingshot. The results are less satisfying as well. If you deliver the pig to the map, you’re done. It’s a little fun to see if you make it there, but there’s not much variance in how a successful run goes. And there’s no glee in watching a big fortress come down.

This is not an in-depth review since I only played ~~a dozen~~ 20 levels this morning. But the early game play makes me doubt that Rovio will have a long-term success like Angry Birds. I haven’t played Amazing Alex in a long time and I don’t think I’m going to look forward to going back to Bad Piggies in the way that I did with Angry Birds. I could be wrong and this could turn out to be a huge hit over the long haul. That would be great considering Rovio raised $42 million on the premise it would be a hit maker. But increasingly, I’m seeing why Rovio stuck with Angry Birds so long: it’s a recipe that works.

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Fall of Angry Birds & some other posts you should read

Om Malik — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:03:47 +0000

The fall of Angry Birds – Trey Smith, a San Diego, CA-based game developer crunches the numbers on Angry Birds, and offers up an explanation to why it has fallen in the app store ranking. He argues that mobile gaming is becoming all about “free to play.”
Telcos and their subscription myopia: Dean Bubley argues that telcos are so addicted to the concept of subscription that they can’t really think beyond it.
The Portuguese technology exodus: Tao of Mac’s Rui Carmo bemoans about the quiet exodus of technology people from Portugal, which apparently is a great place to have a startup. I am thinking about visiting Porto, by the way. I hear they have startups there!
The Acqua-hire disease, startups and failure was the “big blog debate” this weekend. Three different takes from Nick O’Neill, Sarah Lacy and Michael Arrington and all make valid and interesting points.

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Amazing Alex: Rovio tries to prove it’s a hit factory

Bobbie Johnson — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 11:05:57 +0000

And so it’s unleashed: Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, has launched Amazing Alex, its follow-up to the smash hit game.

On Thursday it made its debut on iOS and Android, with PC, Mac and Windows Phone versions apparently on the way.

To be honest, there’s not much to say about Amazing Alex itself. It’s a physics puzzler in which you use a variety of objects to construct Domino Rally-style pathways that complete a task — such as moving a ball from one side of the screen to the other, or bursting a balloon. Cue comparisons with a million other titles out there, including big ones like Cut The Rope, and of course, Angry Birds.

In fact, it might look even more familiar than that: As rumors suggested, it does seem to be a pretty much a re-badging of a game called Casey’s Contraptions, which proved popular with players and was bought by Rovio recently. The art, design and most other things seem the same.

In fact, the core mechanic is pretty similar to Angry Birds, and the rest of the game owes it a great debt too. My first impressions were that it was a fairly strong example of its type, but didn’t quite have the destructive, chaotic element that makes Angry Birds so addictive. Plus on the iOS versions it was hit with a glitch that meant it couldn’t connect to Game Center, a problem which caused a bit of consternation.

@amazingalex I bought it half an hour ago. It won’t let me on game center.

— Cole Miller (@colewmiller) July 12, 2012

But generally reaction seems pretty good so far. It’s already selling well in the app stores: currently No3 in the iTunes paid apps as I speak.

So the big question: does it have staying power? That’s not clear. Very few games do.

But of course, Amazing Alex doesn’t need to be a megahit: Rovio is already making a ton of money. But it still has something to prove.

The company does need to show that it can generate success away from the Angry Birds franchise if it’s going to live up to its billing and become something of real significance. In this case, it seems to be trying to do that not by building a new game (remember, it infamously produced 51 non-hit games before Angry Birds) but in trying to use its marketing power to push existing IP into the stratosphere.

I’ve argued before that Rovio really needs to show it’s got more in the tank if it wants to meet its ambitions and go public — as it has said it wants to on many occasions.

Sure, it’s milking the Angry Birds brand for everything it can get, including games, toys, theme parks, the rest. But if it wants to build a Disney-style business, and not just burn on the bonfire of single-franchise entertainment properties, then it needs Amazing Alex to be right up there.

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Hed start: Angry Birds backer puts $5.75m into Kiosked

Bobbie Johnson — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 08:50:39 +0000

It looks like the success of Angry Birds is starting to trickle down into the Finnish startup economy, with the news that Rovio chairman Kaj Hed is putting money into local e-commerce startup Kiosked.

Hed, the father of Rovio CEO Mikael and the majority owner of the company, is the lead investor in a $5.75 million round of funding that Kiosked is announcing on Wednesday. He’ll also become the chairman of the Helsinki-based marketing technology company — his only external position outside the Angry Birds maker.

So what does Kiosked do?

Micke Paqvalén, the company’s CEO, explained it to me as an “end to end system for in-content discovery, sales and marketing.”

OK, OK, that may not actually clear things up. Although it’s shrouded in marketing babble, it’s actually quite simple: basically Kiosked allows companies and individuals to tag online content with clickable links. Those links produce pop-up boxes that can incorporate video, text, links, and images — and, crucially, hook into an e-commerce platform. It’s all managed through Kiosked’s dashboard and uses Javascript to hook into anything you like.

Here’s an example, a partnership with OnePiece, a Norwegian jump suit maker. Kiosk buttons are dropped throughout the video, and integrated in other ways.

On the surface it looks like another Finnish startup, the image tagging service Thinglink — but Paqvalén wasn’t keen on the comparison.

“The tagging is where the similarities end,” he said, “Really, that’s the easy part.” Instead, Kiosked is focused on partnering with content providers to help them provide extra services and information to users without them ever having to leave the page they’re on. Aimed at marketers and brands, it takes a small commission or fixed fee for each action or sale generated by the service.

It’s planning to use the money as growth funding, opening new offices — it has already got bases in Helsinki and St Petersburg, Russia, and has just expanded to the U.K.. Next up is New York, and the company will also be making a move straight out of Rovio’s playbook by looking at the Chinese market too.

Paqvalén is a serial entrepreneur who has built four previous companies, including communications provider Hotsip, which was bought by Oracle in 2006.

This is the first outside investment that Kiosked has taken, being self-funded until now. Also in the round is a total of $750,000 from Tekes, the Finnish funding agency, and a small amount from a couple of other private investors.

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Felicis Ventures raises a new $70 million seed fund

Om Malik — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 10:00:32 +0000

Felicis Ventures, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture fund started by early Google employee Aydin Senkut has raised a new $70 million fund. The investment group is one of the most respected early stage investors and is known for its investments in Angry Birds developer Rovio, Inkling and Shopify.

The firm got its start by making investments from Senkut’s pocket and later raised a $41 million fund to invest in early stage companies. Since then, the firm has added two new investment professionals – Renata Quintini and Sundeep Peechu. With almost 29 exits – both big and small – under its belt, raising a new fund wasn’t too difficult for team Felicis.

While the past fund garnered investments from institutional investors and individuals such as Peter Thiel and Gmail creator & Googler Paul Buchheit, the new fund has attracted institutional money from the likes of Rockefeller University (endowment) and Tencent. Institutional investor participation was at 92% in this new fund.

If mobile applications and e-commerce were the big focus for the first institutional fund, then this time the company is looking at new emerging categories such as 3D printing and bio-informatics. “The next Facebook won’t look anything like Facebook,” says Senkut, who believes the big opportunities lie in bio-informatics.

Senkut says his firm doesn’t chase trends or “what’s hot” and instead takes a more longterm approach to sectors that are ripe for fundamental innovation. A perfect example, he says is Inkling, which is tapping into the fundamental re-imagining of the idea of education.

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