Disney's Stephen Wadsworth

It's seen as a critical growth opportunity for the company, and an area of very smart investment. We're investing in the business, in product development capability, better and more titles across platforms - and more and more it's an integrated part of the conversation when the company says "Hey, we've got Cars 2 coming out in 2011 - let's get the key people together, the videogames team, the online team, the film team, and let's start talking about what we're going to do to make this a big event." And it's the same thing with Tron.

So we're very early in the process when the company looks at these opportunities. We as a company think about them as cross-platform experiences for sure, and within the Interactive Group - tied to the internet and videogames - we're doing more and more connecting our products, because we can.

Whether the consoles are connected, the handhelds, or anything connected to the internet, we can create a shared, integrated experience. That's a key thing that we're focusing on when we talk about franchise properties - let's not just create a range of products across platform, let's create an integrated experience across those platforms.

One, we see our audience is interested in it - and it's been successful. We have an example from 2008, when we produced a Club Penguin title for the DS, related to the Club Penguin online world, and there was integration there. You bought the DS game, you get access to an online area within the virtual world that you didn't get access to otherwise.

Of course every Club Penguin player knew that in order to get in there, they had to have the DS game - and when you have the DS game it's an extension of the online story. It's a separate mission, but it's tied into the story, and when you earn coins from that mission, you can upload them into your virtual world.

We saw close to a billion coins uploaded from the DS, and we were shocked that hundreds of thousands of kids connected their DS to the internet for the purpose of creating an integrated experience. They get it - they know how to do it.

So not only are we integrated at the company level, as a core part of what happens to these franchises - within our own group we're trying to create a different kind of experience.

We know a lot about the customer - for something like Club Penguin it's an 8 year-old kid - so we know a lot about that kid audience.

But a lot of the knowledge that Disney's had comes from fairly traditional market research and our interactions with them - one of the interesting learnings from Club Penguin is that the level of engagement with a player of Club Penguin that happens between our customer service team and that audience is huge, it's unbelievable.

And they're not really customer service reps, they're like camp counsellors - they listen to whatever the kids have to say. They take that insight and make the product better, and as a big media company, we had a historical model of being careful not to accept unsolicited ideas from the outside - media companies just don't do that, in case it creates exposure later.

We looked at how the Club Penguin team was doing as we were bringing them into our environment and we thought: "Wow, we need to change what we do."

So now, not only do we have all the insight that we get from all the interactions and research across the company elsewhere, we've got the insights from talking to them every day across our four virtual worlds - and we're about to launch another one. We know what they're interested in, what they want, what they like, and in essence it becomes something that shapes our products. More than anything, it shapes our products.

For some things like World of Cars, the story is the core shape and product, but the key elements that we integrate into that comes right from the kids - so this audience does give us a bit of insight into the future audience that the broader market is going to deal with.

It's fascinating what we see - their engagement is incredible in what we do.