ABSTRACT
The connectedness of today’s media industries, be it in terms of their digital platforms or across sectors such as digital and mobile communications, advertising, and marketing, and so on, is itself a defining underpinning characteristic of transmediality. This chapter brings together key research from across a range of media industry contexts so to define the industrial form of transmediality. Specifically, the first part of the chapter presents a brief conceptual overview of what it means to characterize transmediality as a dynamic within and across media industries, before the remainder of the chapter is used to present a more focused snapshot of how this works in practice, focusing on mobile apps as a transmedia platform. In particular, I consider the role of apps in expanding the transmedia world of The Walking Dead (2010–), itself one of the most popular and well-known transmedia worlds of the past decade. As will be argued, the approach to transmedia storytelling taken by this example characterizes both the current trends and the future possibilities of transmediality in the media industries. The chapter shows how the industrial form of transmediality can be characterized according to two concepts: participatory brand extension and personalized immersive experience.
