For the first time, MILIA ’97 – the new-media equivalent of mip-tv – played host to a Canadian booth organized by Telefilm Canada, Canadian Heritage and the Foreign Affairs department, which acted as ground control for the more than 60 Canadian companies making the trip to Cannes mid-February.

Slow to build since it launched four years ago, Telefilm projects this year’s milia interactivities market generated between $7 million and $8 million worth of business for Canadians either through distribution or coproduction deals.

Leif Storm, president of Pebble Beach Interactive, left the -30 C Saskatchewan winter to suffer the sun of Cannes at milia for the first time. Pebble Beach, which split from Heartland Motion Pictures and Heartland Releasing just a year ago, has two cd-rom titles to market, Ideas and Inspiration: Contemporary Canadian Art and Stories of the Seasons.

What follows is his evaluation of the international publishing and new-media market.

* * *

milia covered a broad spectrum of interactive products from all around the globe. Mostly cd-rom, as it is obviously still the platform of choice. There were a few displays with dvd, the new high-density format discs, but they were more of a novelty.

The Palais was not quite as packed as midem and mip, but the main floor was full, and exhibitors stretched up to the third floor. Intel had a large display on the second floor and Apple had a big chunk of the third.

A few Internet companies were in attendance, and as most producers are working on cd-rom platforms, the I-nets seemed there mostly for profile and/or an exchange of information. Long-term strategy may also have been a reason to be there since all the telecom and network companies are designing networks with bigger pipes, and cd-rom level information transfer and video are not too far away. Large booths like Microsoft Network and France Telecom were busy.

Action games were not the deal at milia, although there were some gaming companies. The market was for interactive media, in its myriad of formats. Primarily edutainment, but also education, art, reference, and mystery games.

Kids’ product was the largest contingent. There seemed to be an endless array of ways for small children to learn the alphabet.

And for those with no life who have several hundred hours to fill up, there were lots of mystery titles. You can spend endless hours wandering mazes, solving puzzles, even be a cockroach climbing through a really messy house.

The links between tv and new media kept surfacing again and again. Many of the producers and distributors came from television.

I only noticed a few x-rated cd-roms, although there was a separate booth set up just to market Pamela Anderson screen savers.

There were all kinds of producers, publishers, and distributors in the Canadian booth. Irwin Multimedia, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Interlynx, the Canadian Museum Association, I Hoffman and Associates, and my favorite, abcd-rom. They had a very innovative title on Quebec City.

In addition to the Canadian booth, there was a Quebec booth as well, not unlike midem.

There was a reception hosted by the Canadian ambassador to France, who also toured the stand. The staff from the consulate in Paris really put an effort into establishing the Canadian presence, and although dealing with a new environment, did a very good job.

Andrew Cochrane of Halifax’s Andrew Cochrane Associates was a familiar face amongst strangers, attending with his marketing manager, Maureen Wheller. In addition to the globally successful Theodore Tugboat series, he has produced a number of documentaries on the Internet, and is heavily into creating Web pages and Web-based marketing. They were one of the few non-cd-rom producer participants, and had a successful market as well.

Another Canadian participant was Richard Vincent of Kutoka in Montreal. His title Cyber-Grannies is distributed by Fisher-Price into all the Toys-R-Us stores. Kutoka also produced Cassandra’s Galleries, distributed by Corel.

At the end of the day

While there were a great many cd-rom titles displayed at milia, the infancy of the market was evident as well. Product ranged from spectacular to embarrassing. Many of the titles I looked at had great information and/or graphics, but few were really engaging. Click, get more information. Click, get more information.

The art form of taking someone in and leading them enough to keep the interest up is the new language of interactivity. When it works, you can’t get enough, and really want to see what’s next. When it doesn’t, you get real bored, real quick, regardless of the subject.

DK Multimedia had really interesting titles focused on education. There seemed to be more distributors dealing in solid educational resources for the school market than there were products addressing that area. Many of the traditional book publishers, such as Oxford Press, McGraw-Hill and Macmillan have seen the coming wave, and are working to broaden out into interactive learning materials.

At Pebble Beach, we left with interest in forthcoming titles from Australia, the u.k., Germany, Benelux, and the u.s. Also of note was interest from the Louvre in distributing our Canadian Art cd-rom through its bookstore and affiliated stores to the French market and schools.

Subsequently, Southern Australian Education agreed to join mit, Massachusetts Education and Saskatchewan Education on the advisory board for our forthcoming title, The Creative Process. That alone proved the value of attending and the connections that come out of events such as this.

Overall the market was a worthwhile experience. It is costly to get there, but this new marketplace is full of opportunity. On a long-term basis, starting the connections was an essential step, but there were tangible immediate results as well. It appears that next year Telefilm may be managing the stand alone.

But regardless of who is running the stand, Pebble Beach will certainly be there next year. For an interactive production company, it feels as essential as mip is for film and television.