Representation Essay: End of Audience Theory - Shirky

"Analyse how media institutions are using different platforms to engage with their audiences."

Media institutions use many different platforms to engage with their audiences. Media conglomerates such as the Big Five - Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros Studios, Universal studios, Sony/Columbia Pictures, and 20th Century Fox - have the advantage of owning subsidiaries and film divisions to enable both horizontal and vertical integration to create platforms that effectively engage audiences on a global scale.

Throughout the global pandemic of 2019 to the present day, COVID-19 has had a large effect on the media industry. The media industry is going above and beyond to maintain its main role to inform, entertain and connect society by finding new ways to make an impact. Industry effects are recognized, but recent data shows that there is still a gap in consumer confidence in the media. The media industry itself - from content creators to distributors - have been severely impacted. While consumer demand for content has skyrocketed, advertising revenues have steeply declined. Theatre attendances have rapidly declined, and as a result, the number of subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) has rapidly increased as film institutions have had to rely on streaming services to generate income revenue. According to Statista, the estimated number of paid SVOD users worldwide by the end of 2020 has been increased by 47 million, according to recent data. Previously, it was anticipated that there would be just over 900 million SVOD subscribers globally. However, the pandemic has led to an increase in online TV and video consumption as the coronavirus has taken hold in countries around the world and consumers are confined to their homes. As a result, the source reevaluated its estimate and now suggests that the number could amount to 949 million by the end of the year.

Unfortunately due to this pandemic, and as people have been confined to living in solitude instead of going out to see movies in person, the number of SVODs have also led to increased rates of piracy. On a global scale, piracy rates have increased by 33% and by 45% in the United States. The pandemic has forced faster adaptation to the reality of less people in movie theaters and more people consuming content at home. The risk for content owners, however, is that viewers will search for free, pirated titles instead of paying for streamed content. Despite the best efforts of content owners to protect their copyright against digital piracy, the increasing speed of the internet and availability of online streaming has made online piracy ubiquitous. In 2019, the US Chamber of Commerce's Global Innovation Policy Center reported its estimate that, annually, there are 26.6 billion illegal views of movies produced by US organizations and 126.7 billion views of TV episodes made by US producers. What we saw in 2020, as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns, was an even greater demand for these streaming services. As movie theaters closed and people turned to in-home entertainment, VOD increased its reach. In the UK, one study reported that the country's national lockdown in spring encourage 12 million new customers to sign up for streaming services, 3 million of whom had not used a streaming platform previously, accounting for a 71% uplift in streaming services from the previous year.

Over the years, there has been a significant increase to the number of internet users globally, only fueled by the impact of COVID. The average person spends about 7 hours on their phone daily and there are over 4.66 billion internet users across the globe, with China being the country with the highest internet users. This has allowed for conglomerates to provide people with online entertainment. The total number of social media users is just shy of 4 billion users, with YouTube having more than 2 billion users. As of 2020, YouTube was the fifth most used social media platform for marketers, allowing producers to reach more people on a wider platform especially since views on YouTube were steadily rising as people were confined to their homes. As trailers for movies were being published on these social media platforms, it reached more people in a shorter amount of time. For example, the Avengers Endgame trailer reached 289 million views in 2019 and along with many other blockbuster movies, these platforms have been able to reach more internet users than if they only saw trailers and promotional videos in theaters.

The idea that audiences do more than just consume entertainment is brought about by Shirky's End of Audience theory. He believed that audience behaviour has changed due to the internet, for example Web 2.0 which allows people across the globe to be more interactive and share their ideas publicly and have responses to this. Thanks to the lower costs of technology audiences can now create their own content at home, thus creating the term 'prosumer' as audiences no longer only consume media, but also produces it. The introduction to interactive films and TV shows on streaming services such as Netflix, for example 'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch'  has allowed for more audiences to be able to interact and Netflix will be able to gather information that allows more specific recommendations with greater accuracy. For example, if someone were to continuously kill characters in interactive shows, Netflix might use this data to recommend horror films, and could be taken even further. If someone were watching an action thriller, scenes could be altered to shorten romantic scenes and extend scenes involving violence or action.

Conglomerates such as Disney use A-list actors in their movies to attract attention from audiences and is an effective way of promoting the film. Disney has the advantage of being such a large and successful film studio that the producers can afford to cast such big names for their roles. For example, Avengers: Endgame enlisted several well known A-list actors such as Tom Holland, Robert Downey Jr, and many more who all have established fanbases, several million followers (Tom Holland has 46 million followers) on social media. These people helped promote the movie in addition to appearing on tv shows such as Jimmy Kimmel to gain audience engagement. Smaller film studios do not have this advantage, as shown by What We Do in the Shadows (WWDITS) which had a budget of $1.6 million compared to Avengers: Endgame's $356 million budget. Madman Entertainment - the company that produced WWDITS - resorted to other methods of seeking views that would create their box office revenue when the movie was released by using methods of synergy and cross-media convergence to create a dating app with the characters as well as selling items from the set on TradeMe and changing Wellington's sign to 'Vellington'. Other movies have done similar things. For the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, an AirNZ clip was used to promote it which could be viewed on YouTube, gaining 120,000 views per hour and reached a total of 12 million views. Music from soundtracks were readily available on platforms such as Spotify and YouTube. The Bond movie 'Skyfall' had Adele singing the main theme which helped the movie gain popularity and awareness. Audience engagement and promotion of films is much more accessible and easy for larger conglomerates and their well known subsidiaries, but while it is not as easy for smaller film studios such as the NZFC to be able to promote and distribute their films on a broader scale, it is certainly not impossible and there have been several successful New Zealand made movies in the past and more to come in the future.