3 must-read articles for TV in the online age

OK - read these articles, it won't take long.

The Economics of Netflix's $100 million show
HBO to Consider expanding HBO Go Beyond Cable Subscribers
House of Cards: Netflix's experiment in binging pays off

Now read the following and answer these questions in a new blog post:

1. Describe the business models of these two companies - how do they make money?
2. How are these business models becoming more similar?
3. What are some good examples of Netflix and HBO's actions to develop online audiences?
4. What are some good examples of how audience behaviour is changing in the online age?

In the online age film and TV distribution and exhibition become increasingly blurred.

Already the best in moving image drama has left the big screen and migrated to TV... Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, The Wire, The Killing, Game of Thrones are all good examples of how TV seems a more natural place for the long story arcs and in-depth character development of drama – compared with the 2-3 hour cinema experience.

The best way of looking at this is through several articles which together represent a useful case study for the exam.

The Economics of Netflix’s $100 million show (House of Cards)

·        The article starts by saying Netflix recently announced (Feb 2013) they were, for the fisrt time, investing in new content. It is important to understand that one of the things that has made Netflix different from TV network broadcasters in the past is that all they have done is make TV and films owned by other organisations available for streaming through their service... customers pay them, and they pay the owners of said content (eg Disney, BBC etc)

·          

·         The next part of the article goes into some serious maths based on US data – what it basically says is that it will take half a million new subscribers to pay for an investment of $100 million – but with over 33 million subscribers currently that is reasonable to expect... especially when you take into consideration the idea that many of HBO’s subscribers pay $7 per month just to receive one or two favourite shows.

·          

·         It goes on to suggest that if Netflix continues with its current business model it would eventually go out of business. This because the cost of the rights to TV and film content is going up – its going up faster than they are finding new subscribers.

·          

·         A good example is that Netflix pays $1million per episode for the streaming rights to AMC’s Mad Men... which can be viewed, recorded and streamed on AMC’s (an American TV channel) normal schedule – so audiences are not so willing to pay another subscription for something they already have.

·          

·         “Exclusivity is king!” – What Netflix is doing in order to draw in new subscribers – remember they need ½ million just to break even on one season of this new show – is create their own super-popular TV drama that customers won’t be able to get on any other channel. In order to get people hooked on it they offered the first episode to non-subscribers.

HBO to Consider Expanding HBO Go beyond cable subscribers

·         This article, published 21 March 2013, describes HBO’s recent announcement that its online service HBO Go might open up to everyone, rather than those who have already paid for the cable channel.

·          

·         The article goes on to say HBO Go is accessible from various portable devices (iPhones, iPads etc) but at the moment only to the cable subscribers.

·          

·         It is then suggested that HBO Go – as an online only subscription service – costing less than the full cable TV subscription may encourage audiences away from illegal downloading and into cost-effective (and fully legal) streaming of content.

·          

·         The example they give is Game of Thrones – which is currently the most pirated TV show in the world... in 2012  the season 2 finale achieved 4.2 million viewers on the cable TV broadcast. But each episode was also downloaded on average 4.28 million times. More people were viewing the show through unpaid downloads via bit Torrent etc than paying subscribers.

House of Cards: Netflix's experiment in binging pays off

·       The main point of this article is to discuss Netflix’s strategy of releasing all 13 episodes of House of Cards at once.... A TV channel would draw it out over 13 weeks.

·          

·       What’s interesting is that this highlights an important change in viewing habits of audiences called ‘binge viewing’. It’s not that new – been around since DVD box sets. Normal TV wisdom states that it is better to have a week in between each new episode to allow audience discussion and hype via the social networks... but Netflix chose not to do this.

·          

·       Here’s an example: “figures suggest a significant portion of fans “binged” on the entire series in the first weekend it was available.” – in other words they watched all 13 episodes in one weekend.

What can we summarise from these 3 articles?...

Streaming services such as Netflix started out strong, but now have rising costs for content and need to change their business model to compete.

Investment in good original content will bring profits, but must remain exclusive to the service in order to keep subscription numbers up.

HBO must diversify to meet with the demands of an audience who are used to web-only cheap or free services and to try to combat piracy.

Ultimately Netflix is becoming a bit more like HBO and HBO is becoming a bit more like Netflix.

Viewing habits of audiences are changing. Not only from ‘time-shifting’ – watching things when you want to instead of when they are scheduled – but also in terms of binge-viewing.

Making all 13 episodes available at once catered for the binge-viewers but alienated those who like to discuss developments online.

TV in the Online Age: iPlayer

Read this (very short and easy to read) article and start a BBC iPlayer case study by answering these questions:

http://m.techradar.com/news/internet/5-years-on-how-the-bbc-iplayer-sparked-a-tv-revolution-1120558?attr=all&src=rss

• How long has BBC iPlayer been going?
• Describe typical audience behaviours in a pre-internet age
• Describe what iPlayer allows audiences to do.
• Discuss iPlayer’s success in increasing the number of platforms it can be viewed from (PS3, Wii, iPhone, Android etc)
• What is the statistical break-down of how iPlayer is viewed?
• What is the fastest growing platform for the iPlayer? 
• What might be future developments for iPlayer?

Cinema attendance in the online age

Task:

Go to this blog page - http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6693/business/cinema-attendance-in-uk/

and answer the following questions:


1.Why was cinema attendance so low in the 1980s?
2.In your own words... Why have cinema ticket sales grown since 1984?
3.In 2006 DVD market share was 56% - Google DVD market share and find out what it represents now and in the future.
4.What is the current cinema turnover?
5.Draw a conclusion – how would you describe audience behaviour as a result of online technologies?

Example Essay Point

Here's the example point we did in class, remeber - PEE! (Point, Example, Explain)



(Point)
The internet offers a number of opportunities for media producers.
(Example)
For example the film This is 40 has its own website on which audiences can view the trailer. The trailer is hosted on Youtube and embedded to the website. Underneath the embedded trailer is a link allowing audiences to share the trailer along with links to Facebook and Twitter.
(Explain)
Promoting a film via a trailer at the cinema or on TV will cost the producer a substantial fee, whereas publishing the trailer via Youtube is free. Furthermore the producer is taking advantage of social networks by offering audiences the opportunity to both ‘like’ and share the trailer, thereby finding a wider but more targeted audience.

Now use this formula to write your own essay paragraph.

Online Age - Past Paper Questions

Jan 2011

1. "The impact of the internet is revolutionary", discuss

2. Discuss the extent to which the distribution and consumption of media have been

transformed by the internet.

June 2010

1. “For media audiences the internet has changed everything” discuss

2. Explain the extent to which online media exists alongside older methods of distribution in

2010.

Jan 2011

1. “The impact of the internet on the media is exaggerated”, discuss

2. Evaluate the opportunities and threats offered to media producers by the internet

June 2011

1. “This is the age of the prosumer – where the consumer becomes the producer”, discuss.

2. Discuss the extent to which the behaviour of media audiences has been transformed by the

internet.

Jan 2012

1. The online age has led to competing theories of cultural change. Which do you consider the

most relevant to the media and why?

2. Evaluate the ways in which media audiences have benefited from online media

June 2012

1. “The online age has significantly changed consumer behaviour and audience reception

compared with the offline age”, discuss

2. Evaluate the ways in which media producers have taken advantage of convergence.

Case Study Example: This is 40

This is 40, Director: Judd Apatow, 2012

Production Companies: Apatow Productions

Distributer: Universal Pictures

Budget $35m

The Official website offers a fairly limited number of interactive features:

 but interestingly the trailers are hosted on Youtube (1,145271 views; March 2013) rather than Universal’s own servers. In bold, underneath the embedded video is a banner with the imperative “SHARE THIS VIDEO” and and the full Youtube URL – along with some handy links to Facebook and Twitter.

Universal hopes you will share the trailer via social networking with other potential audiences, which will save them a lot of time and money in trying to reach them themselves.

In the ‘About’ section the top of the page tells us 64, 180 people ‘like’ this on Facebook, and includes a button for you to ‘like’ it too.

The IMDB page for This is 40 gives it a user rating of 6.3 from 28,082 users, clicking into this number gives a demographic breakdown of those users. There are also 144 user reviews – many of which are quite negative... the first one begins “This movie was actually painful to watch...”

In the 'download' section one of the things on offer is a 'Twitter skin'... a theme you can use as part of your Twitter identity... Universal is really trying to place the film into the sphere of the social networking.

A few simple conclusions we can draw from this case study:

Web 2.0 is a phenomenon which is utilised by both institutions and audiences.

Institutions take advantage largely user-generated websites such Youtube and Facebook in an attempt to widen their audience share for their products.

Audiences also use these sites to share their views on those products. While 64,000 Facebook users clicked a button to indicate they ‘liked’ the film - or at least the trailer, 28,000 IMDB users generated a decidedly average user rating of 6.3/10. All their demographic data are shared.

This raises the issue that web 2.0 has had a ‘democratising’ effect on the media... this a change from a time when only critics’ opinions were published and available to audiences.

Who benefits most?... (that’s for you to answer)

Life in a Day – Creation through Participation

Article taken from Media Magazine:

Life in a Day – Creation through Participation

A feature length documentary film crafted from 4,500 hours of YouTube users’ footage of their lives. Sounds dull as a day in the life of a dishwasher. Can Life in a Day cut through countless hours of forgettable, self-indulgent crap to create 95 minutes of unforgettable documentary film?

On 6th July 2010, Ridley Scott, director of Hollywood classics including Alien, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down appeared on YouTube calling for entries to a new film experiment. Appealing to any YouTube use – consumer or creator, video maker, video blogger, video watcher or aspiring feature film directo – Scott demanded that nothing should hold people back. If you have a digital camera, there is nothing to stop you. Pick up your camera and film your day. Like an advert for Nike sportswear, Scott insisted ‘Just do it’. See the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGYACultjCY&feature=relmfu

A few days before, Kevin Macdonald, director of classic documentaries One Day in September and Touching the Void had outlined the idea behind the project. Macdonald would direct the film from the footage shot by anyone on 24th July 2010. All they had to was upload the footage to YouTube. Whatever a person was doing that day – getting married, walking the dog, getting drunk, going to work – could become a part of this unique cinematic experiment. He outlined some elements to include; what do you fear, what do you love, what makes you laugh? Empty your pockets on camera to show the contents. No doubt terrified at the prospect of having to edit down countless hours of footage, some repetitive elements seemed like a small blessing. See the video here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_4uii96xqM&feature=relmfu

With participants ranging from a little boy who shines shoes for a living in Peru to a smug American Lamborghini owner, Life in a Day crosses the globe and brings viewers a taste of a huge range of cultures, from the super rich to those that have nothing. As a social experiment, not just a feature documentary film, the filmmakers wanted to make this a global project. No doubt to avoid accusations of ethnocentrism and an attempt to eliminate too great a focus on ‘narcissistic, bedroom-bound Western teenagers’ (Macdonald, 2011), the filmmakers wanted to include people from the developing world who don’t traditionally have access to cameras, computers or any means to upload their footage to YouTube. So Macdonald and his team spent £40,000 on 400 HD cameras and had ‘various aid organisations distribute them among people in remote towns and villages’ (Macdonald, 2011) in around forty different developing countries. The images and sounds of Angolan women who sing as they work, the men who herd goats, and the people who dwell in the rainforests are testament to the film’s attempt to bring representation of all corners of the globe to the big screen.

The participants

Among the other participants who made it into the final cut of the film are a huge number of parents filming their children; following them around houses, waking them, watching them shave for the first time and generally showing the world what they love most. The Japanese single father who gets his child to say ‘hello’ to the photo of the absent mother sticks in the memory: this is one of the first moments of the film where the narrative stays with one set of characters for a few moments before leaving them again. It also demonstrates how this film makes something extraordinary out of the ordinary. The sadness of the clip is subtle; the woman in the picture is presumed dead, but this is never stated; and the child’s reaction to the ritual the father and son perform in front of the picture seems distracted. The child has moved on, while the father perhaps remains tied to the past.

The film also takes the audience through the entire day so contributors range from those who are still up past midnight (the drunken couple that open the film) to the people who rise for work, prayer and play at the earliest hours of morning. Again the Western world is juxtaposed with developing countries in these early scenes as viewers see the contrast in lifestyles of the fortunate and less fortunate.

Other notable contributors include the sick: a man who has just had a major heart operation thanks the nurses for looking after him and a woman whose family is coping with the aftermath of her cancer. There is a young man who uses parkour to demonstrate how he can live off very little (shoplifting, hanging off the back of buses and jumping over train station barriers); and abattoir workers who show that death is a huge part of a day in their life. The Korean cyclist who has been travelling by bike across the globe for nine years is featured more than once in the film; and politics is briefly alluded to with the juxtaposition of an ‘army wife’ with an Afghan photographer.

The thematic structure

However despite this sounding like a potentially gimmicky mish-mash of globe spanning clips randomly dispersed across a 90-minute film, the film has a structure of sorts. Macdonald and editor Joe Walker assemble the clips in thought-provoking thematic sequences as well as following the progress of the day. So the film begins at night with shots of the full moon and takes us through the day barely stopping to witness early risers, people taking a morning leak, eating their breakfast, through to lunch, sunset and finally to night time again. Just the simple task of getting up in the morning works to promote a theme of the film. The repetition of certain images; feet touching the floor, flushing toilets not only shows the similarities in how people live their lives but also shows that many people chose to film this in the hope that their ordinary actions could become part of something extraordinary. Matthew Herbert fashions music out of sounds from the clips and this helps to express the beautiful, messy melee of humanity.

The use of montage helps to draw out other themes of the film. Love is a major feature of the film, whether it is love of parents for their offspring or love of people for their gods. Much of this is centred on the question Macdonald asked contributors to consider; ‘what do you love?’ but so much of the film is taken up by the idea of love, that the film becomes an occasionally emotional testament to how much love there is in the world. There are images of families, couples, a man and his refrigerator, even strangers dancing at the Love Parade that show just what a pleasant place the planet can be.

However the film has been criticised for shying away from war, famine, death and disease. Despite the abattoir workers demonstrating the killing of a cow, the mobile phone footage of the chaos and death that ensued at the Love Parade, the film has an overwhelmingly positive, optimistic outlook. American soldiers are glimpsed briefly (laughing and joking) and Afghanistan is seen mostly from the perspective of a young photographer who sees a bright future for his country.

The emptying of people’s pockets is a great theme for the editors to contrast the rich with the poor. Some people have nothing; some have the keys to a Lamborghini. It also shows some of the more extreme contributors to the film: one boy pulls out a knife, a woman pulls out a gun and one man has syringes in his pocket. Where this highlights some of the differences of the human race, the question of ‘what do you fear?’ is used both to show our differences but also more of our similarities. Fears include war, politics, loneliness, loss and death but one man speaks of his fear of homosexuality, emphasising how fear breeds hatred and separates us from each other.

Life in a Day is full of unexpected beauty, optimism and the ordinary becoming extraordinary. It highlights the similarities in the normal days of so many humans sharing the planet, but also attempts to show the full range of human experience across the globe. The participants are an often odd bunch; inspiring and sickening, filled with love, hate, hurt and happiness. The film structure is cyclical, emphasising that each day is a new start filled with possibilities, a chance to reunite with a father or a chance to ask out the girl you love. The editing is at the heart of the film. There is rhythm to the footage created by sounds, music and pacing. The composed score by Harry Gregson-Williams lends much of the images emotional heft, giving the film an almost melancholic mood in the opening and closing scenes.

Life in a Day could have just as easily been called Participation: The Movie and was a unique chance for anyone with access to a camera (particularly Media students eager to become filmmakers!) to get involved in the production of a feature film/documentary/social experiment. The sort-of sequel Britain in a Day was launched in November 2011 and participants from anywhere in the United Kingdom were asked to join in and upload their clips to YouTube of a day in their life, this time 12th November 2011. With celebrities from Ewan Macgregor to Stephen Fry urging people to get involved, it remains to be seen if new director Morgan Matthews can succeed in capturing a real, honest look at our nation, and particularly our troubled capital city as we hurtle towards the impending Olympics in the wake of the summer riots.

Pete Turner is undertaking a PhD at Oxford Brookes University and writes a film blog at http://ilovethatfilm.blogspot.com

This article was first published in MediaMagazine 39, February 2012: the ‘Participation’ issue

A good Prezi covering lots of key information...

David Gauntlett and Life in a Day

Look up David Gauntlett and summarise his ideas about producers and consumers. Analyse how Life in a Day represents a good/bad example of his theories.

Audience Theories

Apply theories of audience to one of your coursework productions.

1. Intro to which coursework production you will analyse
2. Describe your target audience (demographics and psychographics)
3. Apply Uses and Gratifications
4. State an opinion on The Effects Model (Hypodermic Needle)
5. Discuss Stuart Hall and reception theory. (look it up if you don't have notes)
6. Finish by saying how useful (or not) any of these ideas are to understanding how your production appeals to your target audience.

Describing your audience:

The socio-economic scale

1. 

	Social grade		Description of occupation		Example
	A		higher managerial, administrative or professional		Company director
	B		intermediate managerial, administrative or professional		Middle manager
	C1		supervisory, clerical, junior administrative or professional		Bank clerk
	C2		skilled manual workers		Plumber
	D		semi- and unskilled manual workers		Labourer
	E		state pensioners with no other income, widows, casual and lowest grade earners		Unemployed

 

Cross cultural consumer classification - or 'psychographic profiling'

Resigned	Rigid, strict, authoritarian and chauvinist values, oriented to the past and to Resigned roles. Brand choice stresses safety, familiarity and economy. (Older)
Struggler	Alienated, Struggler, disorganised - with few resources apart from physical/mechanical skills (eg car repair). Heavy consumers of alcohol, junk food and lotteries, also trainers. Brand choice involves impact and sensation.
Mainstreamer	Domestic, conformist, conventional, sentimental, passive, habitual. Part of the mass, favouring big and well-known value for money 'family' brands. Almost invariably the largest 4Cs group.
Aspirer	Materialistic, acquisitive, affiliative, oriented to extrinsics ... image, appearance, charisma, persona and fashion. Attractive packaging more important than quality of contents. (Younger, clerical/sales type occupation)
Succeeder	Strong goal orientation, confidence, work ethic, organisation ... support status quo, stability. Brand choice based on reward, prestige - the very best . Also attracted to 'caring' and protective brands ... stress relief. (Top management)
Explorer	Energy - autonomy, experience, challenge, new frontiers. Brand choice highlights difference, sensation, adventure, indulgence and instant effect - the first to try new brands. (Younger - student)
Reformer	Freedom from restriction, personal growth, social awareness, value for time, independent judgement, tolerance of complexity, anti-materialistic but intolerant of bad taste. Curious and enquiring, support growth of new product categories. Select brands for intrinsic quality, favouring natural simplicity, small is beautiful.(Highier education)