New Media and Business Research Workshop: Social Media Entertainment
Week 1: Lectures
Platform Strategy (Chapter 1)
SoCal “Majors” Oligopoly vs. NoCal SoCal
Large conglomerates who have been around since the early 20th
century
- Primarily vested in traditional media legacy media
- Vertically integrated (own the production of content and
distribution networks, but only recently with the launch of their
new streaming services as they never owned theatres)
- Horizontally integrated (film, TV, music labels, publishers,
theme parks, merchandising)
- These companies did not harness the potential of the internet
Top 5 Examples
1. NBC-Universal (owned by ComCast - one of the largest
telecommunication companies in the US)
2. Viacom CBS- Paramount
3. Warner (AT&T also owns HBO)
4. Disney-ABC (owns Disney studios, Fox, National geographic)
5. Fox (most of Fox has been bought out by Disney)
SoCal and NoCal are rivalled, but also are integrated into each
other
NoCal Internet “Pure Play” NoCal
Top 5 Examples
1. Apple (hardware)
2. Amazon (E-commerce and streaming)
3. Google (YouTube)
4. Facebook (Instagram, Oculus)
5. Netflix (streaming and production)
, - Large online customer or user platforms
- Extensive data on search behaviour and purchasing
- Overriding focus on technical innovation
- Market directly to consumer base on basis of each individual’s
past behaviour
- Control the platforms delivering content to growing audiences
across multiple screens
Advertising revenue (figure 1)
Income of New and Established
Players (figure 2)
Interdependent clash of industrial Interdependent: They work together, but they are also competing
cultures against each other at the same time, they need each other but they don’t
want that, but there really isn’t a choice either
- There is a difference of culture: industrial, corporate culture
, 1) Business culture of NoCal and NorCal:
SoCal - Embraces information technology strategies of aggressive
disruption (new technologies come out, you’re going to mitigate
it, copy it, add new features, try to put the other company out of
business, maybe buy their business, hyper aggressive type of
business culture, often times people make businesses hoping that
they’ll be bought out)
- Rapid prototyping and iteration (put out new apps, features
continually, go back and edit things, updates occur all the time)
- “Permanent beta” (never a finished product)
- Advanced measurement (getting data on users)
- Programmatics (deals with how these profiles on users are
curated from data, and then choose to serve up advertisements to
us)
SoCal:
- Established screen media strategies of talent-driven mass media
(“star system” - use big Hollywood stars to be on films/tv shows,
sell advertisements through these mass media audiences)
- Premium content
- Limited measurement techniques (harder to discern who is
watching TV or going to the movie theatres)
- Non-iterative (once a movie is published, they can’t go back and
edit it, they will only sometimes re-publish a film with feature
scenes but it is not celebrated)
2) Digital platforms Professionally generated content (PGC)
- used by NorCal pure play companies - Hulu (bought by Disney),
Amazon, Apple, Netflix (they do not publish amateur content)
- Also used by SoCal
Pure social media leveraging monetized user-generated content
(UGC)
