How The Nerd Niche Is Giving Legendary An Entry Into The OTT Space With Alpha
There are a lot of OTT players in the marketplace, with dedicated services for everything from wrestling to anime and comedy. But Legendary is betting there’s room for one more, as it combines programing from its Geek & Sundry and Nerdist channels into a new OTT service, Alpha.The service, currently in beta, is set to officially launch on November 17th for $5 a month. Alpha is seeking to entertain a geek and nerd audience with an affinity for sci-fi, gaming, and comedy. Its first two entrees are existing YouTube and Twitch properties. TableTop—which started its fourth season last week and will move new episodes exclusively to Alpha until early 2017—is a board game heavy series, and Critical Roll, which airs still live on Twitch, is a live comedy D&D series.Underneath all of this is the fact that Alpha also has a community behind it. Whereas large OTT services like Netflix and Hulu have massive budgets behind their shows, there aren’t necessarily communities behind these shows that chat with one another on a show’s subreddit or forum. With Nerdist and Geek & Sundry, on the other hand, you have existing fanbases that already organize for things like San Diego Comic Con and Penny Arcade Expo. Alpha will have forums and chatrooms built into it, allowing users to interact with one another and the content, both in the service and at Alpha-exclusive live events at these conventions.For Adam Rymer—President of Legendary Digital Network, which owns Nerdist and Geek & Sundry— everything they’re doing has one simple test: Will someone wear a t-shirt with your brand on it? You’re not seeing anyone wearing Netflix or Hulu tshirts, he says, though they may wear shirts for the individual shows (looking at you, guy who dressed up as Bojack Horseman for Halloween). Alpha, on the other hand, is the combination of two already t-shirt friendly brands. If you’re not going to having it on a shirt, a community can’t exist.This goes beyond the OTT space and to the traditional networks as well. “There are a lot of brands that have been poisoned,” Rymer says. “People used to wear MTV and Sci-Fi shirts, but then the brands were diluted and the core audiences were diluted to the point that no one cares about the brands, and instead cares only about the shows.”Alpha thinks they will be the benefactors of this. They hope to have an audience that wants deeper level of connection with their content, whether it be for things like TableTop (and an aftershow for Critical Roll) or to watch a movie along with cast or creative, giving users an added experience. The hope is that this added functionality will convert audiences used to getting content for free on YouTube into paying customers, since the $5 access fee will bring the shows they already love along with new content that can only be created in a SVOD environment. For Alpha, it’s come for the board games and D&D, stay for new shows. The hope is that all leads up to, in the words of Nerdist founder Chris Hardwick, “Points!”
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