All the boundaries between cinema, TV, DVD and online have become blurred.
- Allègre Hadida
The battle lines have been drawn: consumers have broken free of traditional formats and schedules, and we now want our content wherever and whenever it suits us. It’s the biggest disruption the entertainment industry has ever seen, driven by new technology. As Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Director of the MPhil in Management at Cambridge Judge Business School (CJBS), Dr Allègre Hadida is always fascinated by what’s driving change. So she posed the question: just what will we be watching in 2020 – and what will we be watching it on?
Hadida identifies several shifts that have recently changed the way we consume audio-visual content: first, platform proliferation. “TVs have become almost obsolete in most homes,” she says. “Now we can watch on mobiles, tablets – and soon, probably, watches. This has reshuffled the chronology of media. All the boundaries between cinema, TV, DVD and online have become blurred.”
Then there are our new patterns of binge-watching, which is changing our relationships to episodic content. Take the second season of Netflix’s blockbuster House of Cards: when it became available, all at once 660,000 viewers chose to watch the entire season in the space of three days. They didn’t want to wait a week for a new episode. So Netflix ensured they didn’t have to. “Binge watching has been allowed by the availability of content online and on those mobile platforms,” Hadida points out. “But will it change the narrative structure we adopt when telling stories and the way we produce stories?”
And what of the many new platforms – Amazon Instant, Sony’s Crackle, Walmart’s Vudu – emerging to serve our insatiable desire for new stuff? “There’s an evolution in the value chain of media production,” says Hadida. “Content aggregators such as TV channels have a growing concern that they might be squeezed out of that value chain altogether, as we increasingly find our own content and watch it without their filters. There’s a growing trend of hitherto content distributors going into content production. By 2020, will Netflix still exist, for example? Will Amazon be the one-stop shop for everything content related?”
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Image: Popcorn
Credit: Joakim Wahlander
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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