Ted Prince

October 2008

The beautiful images and footage offered up by National Geographic’s magazine and channels adapt themselves easily to the type of short-form content that is ideal for websites and mobile phones. Add to that the factual accuracy that characterizes Nat Geo’s articles and TV programs, and the company has a compelling offering for people who want to get their information from their computers and portable devices. Ted Prince, the executive VP of operations at National Geographic Global Media and the COO of National Geographic Ventures, is keen on migrating his company’s many assets, including magazines, television, movies, music and books, to the digital world.

TV REAL: How do you take this treasure trove of content that National Geographic produces and move it to digital platforms?

PRINCE: Regardless of what the platform is, we’ve figured out how to bring our great stories, our beautiful imagery and our factually accurate magazines and television content to the digital world, whether it’s web, mobile, video games or blogs. And because our content is so visually driven, it works really well with consumers in short form as well as in long form. Short form is really the key in the digital space because people consuming our media in digital have a short attention span and they want lots of facts, as many facts as you can get to them. What we’ve been able to do is package our content in a very relevant way but also made it accessible to the consumers on whatever platform they’re comfortable with. If you look at the beautiful imagery in unique places or rare species of animals, whether you’re watching an hour-long documentary or reading an article in a magazine or, more recently on our blogs, or getting ring tones of animal sounds and images of those animals, our content works any which way.

TV REAL: Is your multiplatform approach opening National Geographic’s product to new audiences?

PRINCE: Yes, and I think there are two key things. Some of these digital platforms have a younger demographic, so just by being on the web, on mobile, and in video games we’re reaching them. But the digital marketplace has also allowed us to get our content around the world much more easily. We’ve launched websites in Japan, India, the U.K. and Australia. Hopefully we’ll be in China and in other parts of Western Europe and in Latin America. It’s easier for us to enter a market where our channel has done very well. Our magazine has done very well internationally. But we need digital content to be distributed internationally. It is getting us to a whole new global audience that maybe before we weren’t reaching because some [people aren’t] subscribers.

We’re also taking our content to places where new younger demographics are consuming media. We make widgets available on Facebook or on YouTube or MySpace, so it’s not just a matter of getting new or younger demographics to come to our website or our mobile offerings, but it’s also taking our content, through widgets, to places where the younger demographics are.

TV REAL: What have you developed for mobile?

PRINCE: We’re doing a couple of things. First, we’re launching our own web portal so people can come to NationalGeographic.com, or whatever URL we’ll be using, from their mobile phones, and our content will be formatted appropriately so they can see it from their mobile phones. The second is we’re starting to do licensed deals. We’re working with major players in the mobile space internationally to make our ring tones—in this case it’s animal sounds, images and videos—available. We have a franchise around National Geographic news, which is news from the natural world.That will be available as small pieces of content over mobile phones.

For example, we have a new regular feature on our website with a lot of content about hurricanes. We’ve had it up since hurricanes Fay, Gustav and Ike and that is an ideal thing for us to deliver on mobile. We’ve had big spikes with hurricanes Gustav and Ike. I think people come to us for that type of news because they feel the science will be there. And when people want to learn about something like a natural disaster, we’ll have the most information.

TV REAL: What have you been doing in the area of video games?

PRINCE: We’re trying to develop products, whether it’s for consoles or PC games or handheld. We did a game in Japan with Sony, and a lot of it was based on our images and our video for them to render in 3-D. The premise is that you go to Africa to do a photo shoot or tag animals to track them. As another example, we have a panda game coming out, which is in that genre of the Neopets, where you have to take care of a panda, and that’s going to be on the Nintendo DS platform. We are excited about video games because our authentic storytelling can really play well to some of the scenarios and creations that video games inspire many people to do.

Another example could be going to visit Machu Picchu. So we’re giving people a real-life experience of being explorers and seeing things that National Geographic has discovered.

TV REAL: Does the content you’re creating for children give you lots of opportunities on various digital platforms?

PRINCE: Our kids’ website has done very well. We really aspire to be a nonfiction edutainment website. We’re not Nickelodeon. We’re not Disney. We do have a little bit of that education bent, and for parents who want their kids to be able to spend time on the web, we’re a safe and secure [environment]. We want it to be known that our site is a leader in the nonfiction category. To that end, we have developed casual games around our genres and blogs. We had a blog based on a 12-year-old-boy in Beijing during the Olympics, which was very popular. We developed a partnership with a company called ePals, which is an online community that’s connecting classrooms around the world. Our vision for our kids’ website is it has to be entertaining so the kids come back and they’re excited about it, but it can’t just be pure entertainment.

Our goal is to make kids realize that being an explorer, an archeologist and a conservationist [is exciting].