A World of Difference
As I have read the report, “ A World of Difference” by Chris Lederer and Megan Brownlow, I realised it is true that the spending in entertainment and media industry has been growing rapidly throughout the years.
According to the graph above, we can see that Lederer and Brownlow divided into 5 categories: video entertainment (regardless of films or TV shows), publishing, music, video games and internet. As we can see, the spending on Internet has a massive growth as compared to the other four segments. In 2011, the global spending on Internet was like below $400 but it is expected that it will shoot up to more than $800 in 2020, whereas publishing only had like a 1.1% increase in its growth. The Internet has become our of the daily need whether in work, daily chores or entertainment. We have everything on the Internet in the 21st century, for example like e-news or e-magazine. It is environmentally friendly and definitely will cut down a lot of costs and spending for the publishers. I still remembered back in 2011 when I took the subway in Hong Kong, almost everyone had their eyes locked on the phone and reading the news, and a stack of new newspapers was in at the side of the door. This made me realised that sooner or later, the publishing of physical newspaper will be replaced by e-news because of it convenience. With the Internet, we can do everything like streaming movies, checking for information, read the latest news and a lot more. Time saving, environmental saving, and energy saving (in terms of manpower for producing and publishing physical material), so why wouldn’t we choose to surf the Internet?
Also, content is still the core element to achieve the success. For instance, the highly anticipated film for nearly 2 years, “Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice” faced a drastic box-office drop after the first week of its premiere. (Wikipedia, 2016) The reviews were generally negative about its content, like complex plot twists, draggy storyline, humourless and more. Whereas “Zootopia” the animation had grossed a total of $1.023 billion worldwide despite its $150 budget surprisingly. (Wikipedia, The critics reviewed that it has a good character development and strong moral values, and for the change of Disney heroine’s character, she is not focusing on romance or family but rather her dream and her career, which has caused the viewers to relate a lot. Thus, we can see that content really plays a very important role in the E&M industry to help to reach the success.