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In this Blog, I will look at 5 developing technologies in film and TV where I will critically evaluate them and discuss how developing technologies have changed the way we as consumers watch television and film. The first area I am looking at is YouTube. It was founded on 14th February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen. This is a video sharing website, this content uploaded by individuals, with only a minority uploaded by media companies. Anyone can upload and it is immediately shared worldwide. It is the second most visited site in the world only behind Google which owns YouTube (Since 2012). This is a developing technology in TV and Film and is almost like a television while providing endless amount of entertainment. YouTube was made because the creators at the time wanted to post videos at the time to be shared but there was no site at the time that offered that, so there would have been a demand for that. This was when digital technology was still in its early stages and entertainment was still on TV and Cinema. However when technology advanced, our way of watching entertainment has changed, YouTube was one of those ways, it has now eclipsed views of television, because it easier, you can watch it whenever you want, where ever you want and whatever you want. However there are some negatives to YouTube which is a lot of the content is misleading or not professional and have a negative effect on the viewer. Another is the content itself can go against the rules of BBFC such as a lot of the uploaders may swear and children would be watching without their parents supervision so this would be content not suitable but when it is on TV or at the cinema, the parent would know what they are watching. There is one major negative which is even bigger than all the others is the profit, YouTube does not make huge profit, even though it is eating into the television money. Here is an article:
This
shows that YouTube has monumental costs as they not only receive money from
advertisements but they have to pay back their creators and other
expenses. YouTube is great for consumers
but for the bottom line it is has many faults. This is a technology that is not
same area as television or film but is great advertiser, for example if a new
film has a trailer, YouTube would be a huge benefit to the studio as it gets
people talking about the film. It can even be done for free on their own
channel:
This example above is free advertisement
but is still not enough to promote the film, the marketing budget for this film
“Pirates of the Carribean”,would be in the 100-200 million dollar range.
YouTube is the most versatile out of the other technologies as you can rent
films, watch an abundance of content. We as consumers can interact more than
compared to TV where you can only be a viewer, but YouTube is one the
Interactive media, which is Interactive media normally refers to products
and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's
actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video,
audio, and video games. So YouTube is one of the advancing technologies while
satellite television is not one of the major developing technologies and is
becoming less popular while YouTube is as popular as ever.
The next developing technology I am looking
at is 3D television. Hitcahi was
the first company to release a non glasses 3D system at the CEATEC exhibition
in 2011. Sony then began to adapt to the technology and start to release their
own 3D TVs, then soon other markets began to compete with this. At the start 3D
monitors sales were very (below 100 million) but in recent years it has had a
big gross in sales.
Here is a look at the sales over the last
few years
It has become a part of the
technology for High end TV such as LGtvs, Samsung, Sony etc. after 2013 as the
public would demand more high quality in their TVs so 3D was a part of the
medium. Curved TVs are now a popular
feature for 3d monitors. It is for entertainment and now revenue would increase
because the price of TVs would go up and also brands such as sky starting
include 3D channnels to add to the subscription due to the public demand and
started to make more money. Dvds would also
provide 3D features. However there is now a decline being seen in 3D Tv over
the last 2 years as the 3D gimmick is starting to wear out on consumers who
decide it is not worth the money and the quality of 3D television is not of
high standard such as when it was being released.
This article shows this which is that there
are not 3D movies and TV shows to be on 3D monitors, as the entertainment
industry has released there is not a huge demand for 3D like it was before, I
fact even 3D cinema tickets have started to fall.
Another
disadvantage is the ethical problems or moral dilemmas. 3D works by tricking our eyes and brains, it
uses the natural way we process depth to create an appearance of 3 dimensions
in a 2D screen (How 3D TV Works). In extended viewing, even for only the length
of an average movie, this can cause many people to feel nausea or get a
headache associated with eye strain. Our brain can naturally compensate for
some minor eye problems such as a muscle imbalance but the process involved in
creating the 3D illusion can bring previously unnoticed eye problems to the
forefront and overwork this natural compensation resulting in a headache. More
significant eye muscle imbalances can negate the ability to see 3D content
entirely. So overall 3D does not improve the TV or film industry, but can be
great tool if used correctly, such as with Avatar (2009), but it means you
cannot use it for every TV show, or film. There should always be a preference.
The next advancing technology I am looking at
is streaming content (Netflix). This is one of the most developing technology
over the last few years, with shows more popular than anything on TV. This is
the future of entertainment and is the next level after satellite television. Streaming content is where you can watch video
files through the internet, such as TV shows or films. Netflix
was founded on August 29th 1997 which was originally a mail-rental
DVD service which at the time was facing massive competition with Blockbuster.
It opened a website in 1998 and a year later had the monthly subscription and
then went to Blockbuster for acquisition but they declined the offer. It slowly
kept growing reaching 1 million subscribers by 2003. On January 15th
Netflix announced it was launching streaming video, the first of its kind. It
would keep growing and eventually make it worldwide and no other streaming
service and put Blockbuster out of business. The only other main competitors
are Amazon video and Hulu both have the same function as Netflix but have
nowhere near the amount of content Netflix has. Here is a look at the profits
Netflix has:
Their profit margins
are huge even when going down from 2014, which would be because they are
spending more on content which would benefit them the next year. A huge benefit
for them is that they are monthly subscription service, so they only depend on
amount of subscribers, but they need to increase them to spend more on
production. As with YouTube, Netflix is a product of the internet, which itself
is the reason so many more advancing technologies, as before TV and films could
only be viewed on cable on a television or at the cinema. For the consumer the
service is a benefit as you only pay as small amount per month for a huge
amount of content, so you get your money’s worth, compared to paying to watch
per show or film which is not what the average person would want to do. One Con
on Netflix is that it is not TV and some shows are still on television which
have a bigger budget than Netflix, however Netflix have realized this and aim
to compete with normal TV and even movies are no going Netflix with large
budgets.
Netflix at the moment
is the future of television but the demand for satellite television will always
be there as there are still major shows that air on their but I the future
demand may change as watching something on television live is a feeling people
want compared to watching it any point online. It is the younger generation who
are influencing change as they are the biggest watchers of Netflix and it is
now on TV so you can have it as an app compared to just watching a device, so
this is the what the future of TV is which is connecting to the internet and
having all of the content on your TV from Amazon, sky Q, Netflix, etc. From
this image you can see some shows are watched immediately or over time a huge
advantage for Netflix as they can give a show time compared to satellite
television which needs the hits immediately otherwise it won’t get the
advertisement revenue. There are not many major moral dilemmas or ethical
problems other than addiction, which is relevant to any type of electrical
technology, where people would watch hours of TV a day which is known as “Binge
watching”, there is no limit to how much they could watch.
Satellite television is a service that delivers television programming to
customers (usually paying subscribers) by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the customer's
location.[1] The signals are received via an outdoor parabolic antenna usually referred to as a satellite dish. A satellite receiver then decodes the desired television programme for viewing on a television set. Satellite television was the second way to
watch entertainment, the first being the cinema, the satellite television was
brought into prominence in the 1970s in America, becoming the successor to
cable television and eventually made it to the UK, the first satellite channel
in the UK was sky 1. Satellite
television had a huge upswing with Sky, a major digital TV service being
released in the UK which allowed a huge amount of channels to be on its box
compared to what was before where only the main channels were available, this
led to Sky becoming the biggest subscription service and would have a vast
amount of television. One area where satellite television was sport because
years ago there would not be as much coverage as until now where You can watch
sport from all over the world, satellite TV allows the best coverage of this.
However in the last few years’ satellite TV has been on a decline as there is
larger choice of entertainment compared to before, so they would be advancing
to compete such as with Sky Q, which allows you to watch Sky from more than one
television, and you can watch on four separate devices. One major advantage
that Satellite Tv has is that the fluidity of watching
is a higher quality than watching from the internet where you can have problems
as sometimes the connection can be faulty. However I the future satellite TV
will become less popular as the prices are so much higher than services such as
Hulu or Netflix and are watched just as much. Also there many loopholes in the
system which allow you to watch satellite TV using the internet, where you
connect and watch for free. A few advantages of satellite TV is High-quality
audio and picture display. Satellite TV transmits high-quality digital data
with the use of MPEG-2 or MPEG-4. Think crisp and clear
and you have Satellite TV. Another advantage as mentioned Access
to hundreds of channels worldwide. Satellite TV providers obtain their line-up
of shows from both turnaround channels like HBO, ESPN and CNN as well as from
numerous local channels like ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and PBS. A disadvantage is the
price for consumers which would be the most expensive TV service to watch.
Another disadvantage is the minimum amount of recordings you can make so you
require connection to the internet to get the best out of a subscription box.
The next advancing technology is the most
innovative, which is virtual reality. The current
age of virtual reality began in 2010, when American teenager Palmer Luckey created the first prototype of a VR headset that
would evolve into the Oculus Rift. Two years later, he launched a $250,000
Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to commercialize it and $2.4m of pledges
later, the tech industry’s interest in VR was reborn. Two years after that,
Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, liked the Rift so much he bought the company for $2bn.It is the computer-generated simulation of a three-dimensional image or
environment that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way by
a person using special electronic equipment, such as a helmet with a screen
inside or gloves fitted with sensors. So using this in the TV and film
industries would be a new venture that has not been used yet. This is another
technology to help improve the television or film experience in a new unique
way. In the last year or so virtual reality has become incredibly popular with
it coming out on the mobile and gaming where it feels like you are actually
there, so it would be interesting to have this in TV and film as it would add
more in that department. Here is an article discussing this topic:
This
is a huge talking point right now as it has not been decided how use virtual
reality in this area as many creators wold be against it as they want their own
ideas, however it could be one production company that decides to take that
risk and have virtual reality be released. This is a medium which its only main
use Is entertainment as it gives consumers a different type of experience, it
has no set use and can be used for all type of entertainment, the major one as
mentioned gaming which would be its most popular use. There are some ethical or
moral dilemmas, one is that the technology is still out of reach, as the tools
required create that full immersive experience does not exist. Another dilemma
is the health problems are unknown but here are some that are possible side
effects to using Virtual reality:
