What's in a Name?

We have a very active user community that generates a huge amount of the content for each other in the form of reviews and blogs and that is just snowballing at the moment. It's what's helped us amass around 1.2 million subscribers in the UK and around 4 million site visits every month and we're in that position because we've gone beyond offering a film rental and purchase service to become an entertainment portal.

So the relevance of our service is to be found in the fact that we've created this huge engaged community of entertainment focused UK consumers. We can see the crossover from film to games not just in terms of franchises like Spiderman or Batman but in terms of the demographic profile and entertainment interests of our customers. Statistically, demographically- and profile-wise there's a good chance that a lot of our customers are going to be interested in games.

We created the games side of our business a couple of years ago as an added value proposition to have it there as part of our service and it's grown from strength to strength. We now have something close to 2700 titles on the games platform on LOVEFiLM and if you compare that to walking in to a games retailer their range is limited and so, for example, my son is experiencing various archive titles on the PlayStation 2 through the rental and sales service of LOVEFiLM that he wouldn't be able to get elsewhere.

Yes, definitely. It's been a really easy and natural extension of our business to get in to games. It's apparent for us to see that clearly there's something in it for our customers and clearly there's market opportunity in it too and so we're taking an increasingly closer look at the games market as it fits well with our strategy and with our brand and business.

We're looking at what we can do with it for our customers, but also what we can do for the games industry and what it can do for us. I think the concept of our advertising that has so far appealed to the games industry is our ability to target the most attractive audience that the games publishers can reach in an affordable and effective way.

There's definitely room for videogame publishers and rights holders to experiment with release schedules for both rental and sales models of games.

In the lifecycle of the products that we deal in there have always been windows: rental, retail, free trial windows and so on each with its own distribution methods and I think that the exciting thing with this brave new world is that these models are being challenged.

We're seeing distributors experimenting with putting product out on the same day for digital download and DVD retail or cinema release and with some considerable success so there's a great opportunity in the games publishing business for rights holders to experiment in this way too.

LOVEFiLM is in a unique position to be able to assist with that experimenting because we have hundreds of millions of pieces of data to be able to help effective targeting. We can work with games publishers to target consumer groups that rent and buy specific franchises, or that game on PS3 and 360, or who are in to RPGs or female gamers that play beat-em-ups...

We've been reaching out to the games publishers and increasingly the games publishers have been reaching out to us so we've got the likes of Capcom, Activision, EA, Ubisoft, Codemasters, SEGA, Microsoft all of them have advertised with us and look to work with us in order to reach customers.

LOVEFiLM is a brand that people like, relate to and trust, and one that works to those three principles that I keep banging on about: value, range and convenience. In the next 6-12 months we're looking at ways of bringing more of that and more of the games industry to our consumers.

One of the things that we're really interested in is the games platforms themselves as they are entertainment platforms, we have content that we can put on these entertainment platforms and so we can clearly see a symbiotic relationship emerging between us and the platform holders.

I think that we are really uniquely placed, not just in terms of our distribution method, but also in terms of the social networking side of things with the number of users that are actively speaking to one another and creating content for one another. It'd be interesting to look at the heavy-usage gamer market as I'm not so sure about that.

We have the data, a good relationship with our customer base and we've got a great brand, if you add all of that up I think it shows that we can be a natural ally to the games industry and we're in a position to score a three way win: a win for us, a win for the games industry and win for consumers.