In Order To Understand How The Media Economy Has Changed

The course provides an introduction to the most prominent forms of media that influence and impact social, business, political, and popular culture in contemporary America. It explores the unique aspects of each medium as well as interactions across various media that combine to create rich environments for information sharing, entertainment, business, and social interaction in the U.S. and around the world.

Colleen Dillaway is a Sales and Marketing director for Bright House Networks. She has over 15 years of experience managing, public relations, and sales channels. She has crisis-management skills and media relations. She has a history working with ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX news. Dillaway showed the class commercials for Bright House and explained the approaches that were taken to reach different customers. I will apply the concepts Dillaway used and apply them to our textbook. In chapter 13 Public Relations and Marketing is the main focus. Marketing is the process of researching, creating, refining, and promoting a product or service and distributing that product or service to targeted consumers (pg. 402-3). Public relations are the values-driven management of relationships between an organization and the publics that can affect its success (pg.403). Dillaway had to collect research to better understand how to gain and keep customers. In the process of her research she was also able to better advertise Bright House services as well. For example, Dillaway informed the class how Bright House created a commercial to aim directly at Bakersfield customers in doing this the commercial was filmed here. Chapter 13 also defines advertising as controlled media in an attempt to influence the actions of targeted publics. Going back to the Bakersfield commercial, we can see the that the targeted publics was Bakersfield consumers.

With the advent of information technology, the ways different aspects of life work and operate have changed a great deal. Media has always had a great influence in molding the culture of a society. There was a point of time when television and radio were invented and when computer was invented and there was little connection between the two. Time then travelled fast then through the age of cassettes, records, VCDs, DVDs, flash drive and then the internet. Media also started to go satellite on a massive scale and there came a point of time when media and digital communication systems became closely integrated with one another, opening the dimensions to digital media.

“Media cannot attract audiences; only content has the power to attract and engage an audience…Without great content, media re transient and perishable…The media are nothing more than a transient pipeline.” (p. 27)

There have been so many major developments in the evolution of mass media we now live in a day and age where we are constantly continuously connected. I have greatly always been fascinated by how much things have changed in just fifteen years. Fifteen years ago when I was sixteen and looking for a job. I would have to walk into an establishment and physically fill out a paper application and sometimes get an immediate interview. The other options were to use a news paper to look for jobs. Now just fifteen years later not even a century I can down load an application have my resume uploaded and apply for twenty jobs in a matter of minutes and receive call backs the same day it’s incredible. In the last century we have gone from the radio invention with just sound listening to movies, to black and white TV set, to color TV set to big flat screen TV that can go 3D.

Although what Ashley Hovey spoke about, the industry of technology and media, is not necessarily in line with my professional interests, it is definitely aligned with my recreational interests. Like many millennials, I am an avid watcher of on-demand streaming services like Netflix/Hulu, and an abandon-er of television. With the growing popularity of non-traditional media sources, there has been a mantra amongst millennial news sources that the medium of TV is dying Thus, it was incredibly interesting to hear Ashley’s perspective, as a person who works in TV, on the state of the industry. For one, it was surprising to hear how important advertising revenues are to big companies like Comcast. Although I knew that advertising revenues are high, I did not know that they are Comcast’s #2 source of revenue and in turn, a lot of its initiatives are aimed towards optimizing ad gains.

The television industry is one of the most rapidly changing media industries to date. Its evolution from black and white, to colour, to digital and now three-dimensional viewing, there is nothing slow about its development. Focusing particularly on commercial free-to-air (FTA) television, the FTA television industry plays a critical role in the Australian ecosystem. Due to its free delivery, it generates $3.2 billion per annum in economic and advertising surplus (Venture Consulting, 2015). This is why the value of commercial FTA television to the Australian public remains high whereby FTA television is watched by more than 14 million Australians daily (Free TV Australia, 2014). However, television nowadays is much more than a medium of entertainment and information. It is also used as a method for engaging in social interaction (Morely, 1986, p. 22), and this digital divide of interaction is what harms the television industry. The launch of streaming services not only confronts the traditional ‘linear’ TV format by allowing users to select what they want to watch and when they want it, it also broadens the offering to almost any device (Spooner, 2015). The research methods in the television industry despite its strength as a medium, must however, walk hand in hand with the fast progression of new technology and challenge the rise of digital omnivores.

In detail this paper will show how the media played an important role in the culture today. It will answer the questions What were the major developments in the evolution of mass media in the last century? It will also ask How did each development influence American culture? And What is ment by the term media convergence and how it affected everyday life?

Kang refers to Jhally (1987) and states, “audiences do not just receive meaning from the advertisement. They constantly recreate it by ‘transferring’ the meaning of one sign to another” (Kang, 981). This is how, Jhally argues, mass media advertising plays the role of a mediator (Kang, 981). Due to the fact that advertising has such a broad reach, influencing “millions of individuals daily”

When most people think of the media they think, various information sources such as magazines, radio, television and the internet. Media not only refers to the means of transmission of what people see, read or hear but also products –television programs, podcasts or news broadcasts.(scott,pg 136)

TVI is “the era of channel scarcity, the mass audience, and the three-network hegemony” (Pearson [Jenner, 2]). TVII is “ the era of channel/network expansion, quality television, and network branding strategies” (Pearson [Jenner, 2]). TVIII is “the era of proliferating digital distribution platforms, further audience fragmentation, and…a shift from second-order to first-order commodity relations” (Pearson [Jenner, 2]). While these distinctions are made, they are not necessarily set in stone. Hence the introduction of TVIV. Netflix “draws into question the previous notions of multi-platform as television, due to its independence from more traditional modes…” (Jenner, 3). Michael Curtin argues that there is an alternative means of understanding the current television trend, that of matrix media. “The matrix era is characterized by interactive exchanges, multiple sites of productivity and diverse modes of interpretation and use” (Curtin [Jenner, 4]). The entrance of Netflix as both a television producing and streaming system has led to the argument for TVIV, which “can be understood as an era of matrix media where viewing patterns, branding strategies, industrial structures, the way different media forms interact with each other or the various ways content is made available shift completely away from the television set” (Jenner, 4). Netflix does fit into TVIII’s guidelines in many ways, but its format is different from the existing

On the other hand, it is explicit that there are some limitations for this proposition, the economic force that drives the industry and establishes profit interest over the social role became a major barrier. However, a second challenge is presented, the possibility of mass media to focus on its social role its arduous due to the economic forces, consumers have

Economism, or vulgar Marxism, is a key feature in explaining the media’s role according to Marx. This is also referred to as the base/superstructure model. In economism, “the economic base of society is seen as determining everything else in the superstructure, including social, political, and intellectual consciousness.” (Marxist Media Theory 1) This maintains that the media is used as the base of society. Society is referred to as the superstructure. Clearly, media shapes society even today. Since consumers rely on the media for information and entertainment, (ex. Television and radio new, magazines, newspapers, Internet), they are shaped by whatever forms of media they chose to be an audience to. The media manipulates everything from popular fashion to the food people consume.

Technological advances have made a significant impact on the television industry in Australia. While new technology encourages the TV networks to improve the local content to satisfy the demanding young audience, it also scatters the audience into different media platforms and drives them away from traditional TV broadcasts. The first part of this essay will analyze the current trends in the Australia television industry. As the audience tends to spend more time on the Internet interacting with the live TV programs and watching videos content, the commercial TV networks still broadcast quality local content to attract the audience. The second part will address major challenges that television industry is facing and how particular companies including Optus and Channel Nine cope with this hardship. These challenges mainly emerge from the development of the streaming video on demand services. The final part will discuss the future of the free-to-air television in Australia as the audience keeps fragmented.

The rapid enhancement of technology in the contemporary society leads the phenomenon called ‘media convergence’. This is a process that developing the interactive communication constantly across multiple media platforms around the globe. Moreover, after human beings entered the twenty-first century, along with the development of digital and network technologies, media convergence patterns have become more mature on account of three major factors – technology, economic and market (Langtry, 2012). Moreover, the technical factor mainly refers to the digital and network technologies bring the interoperability, interchangeability and connectivity of media, so that the media convergence has become a possible and an inevitable. However, Media convergence is not only a simply technological shift but also “alters the relationships between the existing technologies, industries, markets, genres and audiences” (Jenkins, 2004, p.33). Indeed, media convergence is an accommodative process for the “existing media, communication industries and cultures to adapt with new technologies” (Dwyer, 2010, p.2). Along with the technological development, which is integrating the resources of different mediums, this operation of media convergence brings both changes and challenges in the media industry (Thomas, 2011). However, advertising industry is one of the sectors of communications and cultural industry that cannot avoid media convergence. This literature review paper will analyze