Media and Society Lecture Notes PDF

Preview

Summary

Download Media and Society Lecture Notes PDF

Description

Media and Society Lecture Notes Streaming Media (November 11) o The Traditional American Position o Consolidation is harmful to innovation.  Unfair and monopolistic practices:  Vertical and horizontal integration (mergers)  Price fixing o Solution: Antitrust regulations since the late 19th century to facilitate competition. o FTC since 1914 o Amazon o Owns the marketplace and participates in it o “An unfair advantage:” Amazon has access to its competitors’ operation information o Retailers cannot avoid the site if they want to be viable o An essential infrastructure  Central to economic life o “A platform utility”? o The problem today: how to adapt to this framework to online companies o A pro-concentration philosophy shaped the information revolution o The concrete harm doctrine since the 1980s: the market harms consumers in the form of higher prices. o Recall mass media as “a dual product market”  The anti-trust framework did NOT anticipate the rise of online companies which offer their products to consumers for Free =  User data as a “new asset class” in 21st century digital economies o 1992 – founder of Fox on the future of television o Diller “realized that each one hoped someday to control either the wire highway to each home or the switching mechanism that would someday direct video traffic or the computer data bases that would serves as a library or the technology that converted pictures and programming to digital signals and back again” (Aulletta, 1993)

o Questions for the clip (Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas Jan. ’16) o What constraints of “linear TV” is Netflix removing? o With what desirable consequences for viewers?  “the goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” (Ted Sarandos, chief content officer at Netflix) o Three attributes distinguish Netflix from traditional TV companies:  On-demand access  Subscriber funding  Global reach o Business model and technology o Subscription video-on-demand – direct to consumer business model  OTT: send video “over the top” of an infrastructure built by someone else o Partnerships o “From a business-model perspective, it’s really the Holy Grail for us… The highest-margin consumers we have are CBS All Access subscribers.” (Joe Ianniello, chief operating officer of CBS corp.) o “Everything we’ve done, were watching to the show, even down to our TV commercials.” o Netflix disrupts TV o How to keep the audience watching? o Television: Audience flow – the attempt to control viewing behavior from program to program. o Schedule: a linear sequence of programs o Catalog: an interactive, curated database  Non-linear television: “the personalized delivery of content independent from a schedule”  Original production vs. licensed  Change in viewing habits? o Tech giants enter streaming o Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Apple TV (no library), Disney+ (Nov. 12), HBO Max (AT&T, Time Warner), Peacock (2020)  “Talent flows to streaming”

Consumer Targeting (November 13) o Apple’s goal: Ecosystem Loyalty o “Apple has an innovation crisis… Entertainment is one of their attempts to do something innovative, but they’re just dabbling”  Jeffrey Cole, director of USC o Biggest challenge: needs content o Converging Destines – AT&T and Time Warner have reached an agreement to merge after decades of consolidation and deals in the telecommunication and media industries. o WarnerMedia o Vertically integrated: produce and distribute o To be more like Netflix: “We need hours a day. It’s not hours a week, and not a month. We need hours a DAY. You are competeing with devices that sit in people’s hands that capture their attention ever 15 minutes.” (John Stankey, WarnerMedia NYT 7/8/18)  AT&T’s Stankey says the streamer is targeting 75-90 million subscribers worldwide by 2025, Sets monthly pricing o Harms from Consolidation? o Independent filmmakers – will lose the ability to create a singular vision o Indie theaters – will lose their tenuous hold on survival o Workers – will lose the ability to profit from their successes o Fans – will lose options on finding their favorite franchises  “I believe the streaming wars will end with some entrepreneur figuring out how to bundle streaming services at one price, bringing us all the way back to a more expensive version of cable. But along the way – it’s good to be the Mouse. o Personalization o Definition:  Most developed in marketing  Music, video games  Long-form entertainment? o In marketing:  Direct marketing (direct mail, mail order) vs. Advertising

 Direct Marketing is two-way, the customer identifies him/herself.  Companies compile lists of customers  Up to the 1930s: “the peddler era” – personalized selling  1930s-1980s: non-personalized selling  1980s: database marketing gains ground o Market Segmentation o Segmentation Vs. Personalization o Geographic o Demographic o Psychographic o Behavioral  User status, usage rate  Information already available and processed o Personalized commercials o The web and steaming ONLY, not cable or satellite o The browser cookie = marketer advantage  Vs. information equality o Media buying: Planning and purchasing space or time for advertising on various media outlets.  2019: broad reach TV ads for launching a products, promoting to the mass market o Experimental: different commercials to different households watching the same show  Amazon’s advantage: behavioral data  “Streaming platforms allow companies to tailor their marketing to a bigger audience and with more precision than ever. That’s causing advertisers to rethink their strategies.”...