Chris Lederer and Megan Brownlow’s report A World of Differences contends that ‘E&M [Entertainment and Media] is a dynamic, diverse industry with steady and sustainable growth’, despite more and more people moving towards ‘free entertainment’ sources. The article concentrates on five ‘dimensions’ of the global E&M market: demography (particularly looking at young people’s effect on the industry), competition, consumption, geography and business models.
The most relevant information for me stemmed from the demography and competition sections of the report. Lederer and Brownlow found that ‘…there’s an almost perfect correlation between markets with more youthful populations and those with higher E&M growth’, thus suggesting that young people are leading the trends in the E&M market, particularly the digital media market. They assert that younger people consume media in a different way to older audiences: they tend to multitask, consuming lots of different media at the same time. Youth demographics are also ‘…more open to adopting [new] digital behaviours – and therefore more open to digital spending’. I agree with this to an extent, but I think that it can be difficult for younger audiences, like myself, to have access to new technologies because they can be expensive, thus limiting large amounts of ‘digital spending’. Furthermore, youth audiences who have grown up in ‘the digital age’ are accustomed to spending little or no money on E&M, because it is so easy to pirate most video, music or gaming content. I am always tentative to spend money on digital media, because it can seem like a waste of money when it is available for free online.
Nevertheless, Lederer and Brownlow’s information suggests that as a video content creator, I need to figure out a way to tailor my content for younger audiences, with increasingly shorter attention spans, who are consuming a lot of media at the same time, on various different platforms and devices.
In the competition section of the report, Lederer and Brownlow mention that Netflix’s future is in ‘…locally produced content’. Although US produced movies are still doing very well, there is more demand for locally produced media, particularly in the film industry. This is good news for me, because I would love to produce films in Australia, for Australians, about Australia. However, it is difficult for Australian production companies to create good quality films, when there is limited funding (in comparison to the US). Hopefully streaming services like Netflix may be able to offer local production houses funding to create high quality content.
