Public service broadcaster Channel 4 doesn’t have to make money from its education content, but it’s still interested in bringing home revenues from its education-related online games in 2010. The broadcaster’s head of education commissioning Matt Locke told paidContent:UK at C21Media’s FutureMedia conference that his department was exploring how it might profit from games content — whether via advertising or selling them globally as downloads.
C4’s education department has led the way in the company’s multimedia strategy: since 2008 its teen education budget has been entirely cross-platform, meaning that money that used to be spent on morning TV schedules now goes on YouTube, Bebo and Miniclip commissions. But Locke says: “For 2010 games I would is the strongest theme — we’re commissioning a lot more games and some in the past year have had fantastic engagement.” A game commission for Channel 4’s 1066 history series has received eight million plays since May and an average play time of 20 minutes.
Locke says that education is not a commercial strand of Channel 4’s content, “but having said that, we are exploring (monetisation), particularly with games where there are mature business models around them like the iPhone, Steam and online games… we’re looking at different models such as giving games away in the the UK and charging for them elsewhere.” Games could be distributed via Kongregate and other games portals, he says.
It could be that C4 meets its PSB requirements at home and makes revenue from its content abroad — just as the BBC broadcasts its content to licence fee payers in the UK but sells it to US audiences via BBC.com and iTunes. When C4 says it’s keen to generate revenue from pushing content to more platforms, games could be a serious part of that.

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