Syfy Shifts Deeper Into Digital with Syfy Wire and Live Coverage of Comic-Con

As MTV News was announcing a restructuring in June and sharply cutting back the number of journalists on its payroll, Syfy was gearing up for San Diego Comic-Con.

The house of sci-fi and fantasy shows like The Magicians and The Expanse sees the same shifts that MTV sees — viewers dropping cable and watching more video on smartphones and tablets, social platforms becoming more video-friendly, legacy news organizations moving further into video — but Syfy reads those shifts as an opportunity to go bigger in news.

Syfy is attending San Diego Comic-Con this week both as an exhibitor for its programming and as a news outlet. Syfy Wire, which covers genre film and TV, will cover the breaking news, and the Syfy cable network will air Syfy Presents: Live From Comic-Con coverage Thursday, Friday and Saturday (11 p.m. on the East Coast) to run down the day’s events.

On the eve of SDCC, Decider sat down with Alexandra Shapiro, Syfy’s executive VP for marketing and digital, to talk about the network’s recent rebranding and its shift from a cable network to a multi-platform outlet with a news organization, TV shows and a large presence on social media.

DECIDER: Syfy will be at Comic-Con as a network and as a news organization. Is that how you’re thinking about it?

ALEXANDRA SHAPIRO: This is certainly a shift from last year. This is our second year with the three-night Live From Comic-Con prime time telecast, and this year we’ll have a very focused approach on reporting what’s happening at Comic-Con, analyzing it, and debating it with attention to how to put fans at the center of that coverage. That meant getting a host who embodies fandom, so we’re very grateful to have Zach Levi [NBC’s Chuck] hosting. We’ll have a very purposeful collaboration between the telecast and our news organization, which is Syfy Wire.

Syfy Wire is what used to be Blastr, right?

Right. It was Blastr and we renamed it Syfy Wire in December. That’s a news organization dedicated 24/7 to all things genre. We’ll be on the ground with expansive coverage, and the Live From Comic-Con telecast will use the personalities from Syfy Wire. We’ll have a live studio on the ground for doing packaged pieces for the show.

From a branding standpoint, will your digital coverage be Syfy Wire or Live From Comic-Con?

Our digital and social presence will be heavily oriented toward breaking news and analysis for Syfy Wire. In a world that’s so engaged in real-time media consumption, we play a role in feeding an appetite by getting information out in a timely manner and having a unique point of view. During the day, the lion’s share of our coverage will be articles, videos, Instagram stories, etc., and then we’ll package some of those things at the end of the day for the telecast. On the linear Syfy network, we’ll have a live ticker throughout the day for real-time updates and real-time news from Comic-Con on the linear network.

Are your flagship Syfy accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., more oriented now toward Syfy Wire than your Syfy network programming?

This is our 25th anniversary, and we want to use that as an opportunity to get back to our roots. We are shifting our center of gravity from being primarily focused on our own IP to celebrating the genre at large and the fans who love it. That’s a big move and has necessitated an operational shift and a change in priorities. We’re still promoting our shows, but we’ve opened up our purview to include other things and the key to that is Syfy Wire.

Have you staffed up since transitioning Blastr to Syfy Wire?

We have. Blastr was doing herculean work with a small team — 20 articles a day and covering junkets — and was sort of an adjacent property to the core brand. We saw that as an opportunity to bring that into the brand and make it an engine for the brand. If you think about what E! News is for E!, Syfy Wire is that for Syfy. It’s the entity that gives us permission to talk about what’s happening across TV, film, comics, technology and space, and we couldn’t be as ambitious as we want to be without it.

Even though you’re coming from TV, are you competing with outlets like Nerdist and Entertainment Weekly? Is everyone competing in the same space?

For our rebrand, we wanted to be larger than a TV brand. We want a presence across all of the major consumer touch points, and we understand that the pattern of the consumption is not linear. If we aren’t relevant in places where people are consuming content, we’re not going to succeed in the near-term or the long-term. Syfy and the other brands that you mentioned recognize that you have to serve an appetite for your content in ways that are native to and customized to every platform.

That requires a lot of video — a lot of customized video, horizontal video, vertical video, square video — for different platforms and playing within algorithmic marketing. If you don’t play by the algorithmic rules, we won’t succeed. That makes the marketer’s job difficult, but it’s incredibly exciting. We’re going to create more, test more, and iterate more. There’s a lot of untapped potential.

Covering film and TV, you’re giving a lot of attention to properties owned by NBCUniversal’s studio competition. You’re covering Game of Thrones, Marvel movies, DC movies, etc.?

Yes. If we’re truly going to be champions of the genre at large, we have to cover everything whether we own it or not. That’s what’s going to make us relevant and credible with fans. When we do have our own Syfy shows, we want people to sample them because we have credibility with those fans.

Syfy Wire is on platforms like Twitter and Instagram that don’t require cable authentication. How much are you looking to E! as case study for how to navigate that, how to monetize that, how to decide what stays in the authenticated environment?

Our programming strategy is a little different than E!’s, which is more unscripted than scripted. A lot of the issues are the same, though. We want to enable a fluid consumption experience whether that’s reducing ad loads, getting viewers from one episode to the next, creating bankable catch-up experiences, interesting scheduling strategies. Those are all things we’re all figuring out as an industry for linear viewing. The biggest share of viewers who watch your show are still the people who watch it live, so we want to make that an enjoyable experience and maximize the transition to a longer viewing window.

With the legacy part of Syfy being a linear cable business, how do you think about the digital part? Is it an incubator? A marketing vehicle for cable?

It’s all of the above. It’s absolutely an incubator. It allows us to go in and pilot franchise ideas, work with talent, see what gets traction with little risk, and then mine things to take back to the linear platform. It’s a business. The reimagined Syfy and the reach of Syfy Wire creates new lines of business that were not at our disposal before. The native digital business is thriving. For most of our competitors in this space, it’s their entire business. Now that we have what I think will be a credible, scaled platform in the next 12 to 24 months, we’re going to be able to attract advertisers and create partnerships that others in this space are already doing — plus leveraging other NBCUniversal properties.

MTV just dropped its news division to focus on digital video. Do you have any observations on why news makes more sense for Syfy than it did for MTV?

We have news that happens every day across multiple verticals, and the key thing is doing it in way that has a unique point of view. I imagine MTV had to make some choices and decided that good video was key. And it is. We’re creating exponentially more video for Facebook, for Instagram, for YouTube, and you can’t do that with articles alone anymore. That’s why you’re seeing a huge shift in news organizations toward more video.

What are you looking forward to seeing at Comic-Con?

I’m looking forward to Blade Runner 2049. I think that’s going to be super exciting.

Comic-Con has shifted from being a platform for shows and movies to make announcements to one for premiering clips and trailers. That’s the shift to video you’re talking about?

I think that’s exactly the shift. You have to provide content if you want to get a message out.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.