People still want the TV and movie experience offered by traditional studios, but social platforms are becoming competitive for their entertainment time—and even more competitive for the business models that studios have relied on. Social video platforms offer a seemingly endless variety of free content, algorithmically optimized for engagement and advertising. They wield advanced ad tech and AI to match advertisers with global audiences, now drawing over half of US ad spending. As the largest among them move into the living room, will they be held to higher standards of quality?
At the same time, the streaming on-demand video (SVOD) revolution has fragmented pay TV audiences, imposed higher costs on studios now operating direct-to-consumer services, and delivered thinner margins for their efforts. It can be a tougher business, yet the premium video experience offered by streamers often sets the bar for quality storytelling, acting, and world-building. How can studios control costs, attract advertisers, and compete for attention? Are there stronger points of collaboration that can benefit both streamers looking to reach global audiences and social platforms that lack high-quality franchises?
This year’s Digital Media Trends lends data to the argument that video entertainment has been disrupted by social platforms, creators, user-generated content (UGC), and advanced modeling for content recommendations and advertising. Such platforms may be establishing the new center of gravity for media and entertainment, drawing more of the time people spend on entertainment and the money that brands spend to reach them.
Our survey of US consumers reveals that media and entertainment companies—including advertisers—are competing for an average of six hours of daily media and entertainment time per person (figure 1). And this number doesn’t seem to be growing.2 Not only is it unlikely that any one form of media will command all six hours, but each user likely has a different mix of SVOD, UGC, social, gaming, music, podcasts, and potentially other forms of digital media that make up these entertainment hours.
I can't remember the last time a movie came out that made me want to go see in theatres. Tickets are so expensive that I only want to go to one or two movies a year. Then with TV I find every show these days has "netflix syndrome" with lazy writing, exposition dumps, dummed down dialogue, I'm just not interested in what they have to offer most of the time.
Careful about mentioning the "Netflix syndrome", people here are touchy when you call out low effort writing in movies/games. Somehow studios/publishers have been extremely successful in having people establish para-social relationships with their characters and stories regardless of how poorly written they are. This results is very strong antibodies every time anyone calls out the utter lazyness in dialogue, set pieces and exposition.
Dumbed* down (sorry ☹️)
no worries, nice catch!
I can't remember the last time I wanted to go to a theater. My choices are:
Go $20/person to go to a theater and hope I get there early enough to not be in a terrible location, sit on hard-ass uncomfortable seats, pay out the nose for shitty popcorn and candy and hope the people around me aren't dicks texting on their phones, scrolling IG, or just generally being a nuisance.
Pay $20-30 total for a 4k BluRay and sit at home with filet mignon and a nice scotch, lounge in my reclining sofa without distractions. Also I own that movie forever.
Sure the theater has a dope screen and sound engineering but it's not worth it.