The extent that the TV and film industry has changed because of the effect that the internet has had on it is unprecedented, much like every technological sector. Before the days of broadband internet and fibre optics, the TV and film industry was very different. The main change to this was the way DVD’s and films were distributed. Shop’s such as Blockbusters would physically store these in their stores so that people could visit the store and purchase them. But now in the broadband era, services such as Netflix offer streaming whereby 1000’s of TV and film titles can be watched through paying subscriptions.
This new surge has brought the demise of many famous high-street retails such as HMV and Blockbusters, both going into administration and announces store closures across the UK. This leads to an uncertain outlook on what may lie for high-street retailers as the internet is becoming a more viable option to stream services and sell goods. From this, organizations such as Amazon have benefited greatly from this due to the fact that they house massive warehouses of niche products, making them available to be purchased online. This is also because people would rather buy a collection of things at the click of a button and wait a few days for it to ship, than travel out to a store to purchase the same products.
Storing thousands of niche products is a key aspect of what is called The Long Tail Theory. Published by Chris Anderson in 2006, this theory states that the amount of sales of more varied, niche products equals the amount of popular sales that are made by a company. For example, if a music distributor were selling items of thousands of obscure, niche bands it would equate to the money made by just selling the same amount of items by more popular groups. This can also be shown in the graph below.
The debut will be available to watch for non-members for the first month, as Netflix not only aims to increase its customer base, but single-handedly change the TV industry as a whole in their favour. The problem the company has had is getting permission from the biggest distribution companies to showcase their TV shows and movies on their site.
This is an expensive and risky strategy because Netflix is competing with the likes of Google Amazon and Apple.
This has been met with both positive and negative views, people say that it has revolutionized the way we watch TV by making every episode available to watch straight away. Negative views stem from the fact that it doesn’t feel like a TV-experience anymore, and that the rise of different social networks make it almost impossible to avoid spoilers in this sort of way.
To conclude, I believe that the extent of which the internet has changed these industries is very pronounced and almost inevitable. To me now, watching TV programmes and films online has lost some of the experience it used to have, such as travelling to the store and looking through all the films they had to offer whereas now you can simply click what you want albeit somewhat easier. I feel though that despite this, brick and mortar stores will face even more tougher times until they too meet their demise, which seems quite disappointing but exited to see what the future holds – in terms of more advancements –for the TV and film industry.
