- Question: "The relationship between media & audiences is changing drastically" Discuss.
"The relationship between media & audiences is changing drastically" In my view, I agree with this statement in a lot of senses and can be backed by the media ecology theory. This aims to describe ways in which diverse media environments shape today's society and our everyday lives. And the central premise of the theory is that the communication content doesn't exert nearly as much influence as the medium of communication itself does.
We see media theorist McLuhan talk about how the media and the medium, which is the media being the message, and the medium is the technology used to show it. He went on to talk about how our environment inevitably affects how we interact with media and their perceptions of it. An example of this view of our environment affecting how we view and perceive our media is COVID-19 and the lockdowns. These lockdowns have massively changed our viewing habits, as people have become accustomed to watching everything online and streaming movies on SVOD rather than going to the theatre and watching a movie in the traditional way. In the 2020 lockdowns, we also saw a massive increase in people paying for SVOD subscriptions with there even being 4 new SVOD platforms starting up including, Apple TV, HBO Max, Peacock, and the massively successful Disney +. Some stats on how many people are paying for paid SVOD subscriptions since the start of COVID-19:
- Netflix = 208 million
- Disney + = 103.6 million
- Amazon Prime Video = 200 million
- Apple Tv = 40 million
- HBO Max = 63.9 million
- U.S. & Canada = $149.3 billion
- Europe = $32.6 Billion
- Asia = $27.7
With all these massive changes and additions to movie budgets etc... we can also see this with Tv budgets continuing to soar and get higher and higher. In 2020 a budget for the average Tv series was around $59.6 million which is a 16.5% increase year-over-year. Whereas the budget for the most expensive show last year was $200 million for wandavision. As series budgets rise, the line between film and Tv is getting more and more blurred with other series such as Loki and the Mandalorian as well.
Also a big thing now because of the big companies such as Disney adding their own streaming services and a massive increase in home viewing you can see they are now doing simultaneous releases with the theatres to maximize profits and get the most out of their films. However, this has affected the box office numbers and therefore possibly actors' salaries as well. One example of this was with Scarlet Johanson and how she is suing Disney for releasing Black widow on Disney + premium access at the same time as box office release affecting her salary which was dependant on box office numbers. And another thing. We can see with the increase in SVOD services that there is a massive increase in fragmentation and a breakdown of the "nuclear family" no longer sitting down and watching TV/movies together anymore, rather they are watching on multiple devices at the same time watching different things. and this could allow us to even go into how the media is the moderators now rather than parents because it is now so easy to access the internet etc... without parental consent and we also see families not sitting down watching Tv at night with each other so the parents cant moderate the things their kids are viewing and taking in.
"Audiences becoming producers" Movie and Tv studios have started to seriously listen to their audiences/ viewers more and even getting audiences to help or change parts of movies because of the movement to get the best content to viewers. This links to Shirky's "end of audience theory" which pretty much says, audiences have changed due to the internet (web 2.0) and the ability for audiences to create their own content at home thanks to the lower cost of technology. Audiences are no longer just consumers but also producers, which shirky coined the phrase "prosumers". This could also be connected to Jenkin's "Fandom Theory" in how a fan made a different scene in addition to one of the scenes in "The Mandalorian" to replace it with something they thought suited the episode more than what Lucasfilm/ Disney did. This ended up in Lucasfilm/ Disney seeing his video/ work and hired him.
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