Each Image Has Its Own Story To Tell
11.06.2013
MI – Self Assessment
category: Media Industry
tags:

– ROLE – 

I like the way our groups are formed – not by nametags drawn out of a hat, but instead we all came together out of common interest. We were all interested in the same research topic when we explored and discussed ‘Online Distribution (mainly Netflix and TV culture)’ in class weeks before; this helped to minimise a lot of potential conflicts. The biggest problem for me is that I don’t feel confident in my writing and I write extremely slow. Hence, I tried not to take on too much responsibility in terms of writing the content. However, I am very fascinated and interested in researching on this topic and tried to commit to the workload as much as I can. Due to the natural of our project being that we all came together already having a rough research direction that we wanted to explore further, we decided not to set fixed roles to each of our group members so that we are all in the same common ground, sharing the same roles (researchers) and the same goal: A deeper understanding of the online distribution shift in television, hoping to have a clearer view of the direction its heading. Fortunately, our research directions didn’t overlap and kind of formed itself quite well. Matt was interested in exploring the correlation between online music stream services (Spotify) and online television stream service (Netflix); Tom Russel was interested in the role that advertising plays in this online shift; Jeffery was interested in the logistics, economic side of the shift; I was interested in the television sector (How it was changed and what is happening now) and Tom Pike was in charged of the overall, filling the gaps of our research while keeping in connect with our progress.

Matt: Spotify and Netflix
Tom R: Advertising and economic solutions
Jeffery: Economic issues
Tom P: Culture and Community
Scott: TV evolution (Past - Present)
Together: Speculation

– Progress –

In terms of progress, I have put in quite a lot of effort into this research. Even though it would seem very minimal from a ‘word count’ perspective, I still spent a lot of time in reading articles and journals in my spare time, I generally really like our research topic and would like to explore more on the possibilities that lies beyond this shift. The beauty of this topic is that, it is always in a state of flux; there are so many new information and news updates everyday that would provide new insights and perspective to our study. I find that the most efficient way of research for me is to read articles and then discuss them we my group members. I find that it is through discussion, sharing our research with each other that we learnt the most (person to person, groups, and also online). We all came together interested in the same topic, but our direction was very vague at the start. We began our study from the research on Netflix, attracted by its content ‘House of Cards’ and the new distribution model. However, after we had done some research, when we come together to discuss our progress, we realised that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge and rely on our own speculations. The future is yet to be in our hands and the best thing we can do now is to be prepared. With every change, lies a new opportunity. We are always living in an exciting time if we are constantly searching for new possibilities. Even though our website is done, our research is never done and the discussions will never end.

Course Reading/Lecture Reflection: (POST 1 ) (POST 2)
Thoughts on our research topic: (POST)

 – Strategies –

I like the way we tackled this research – not from an observer point of view where we simply summarise our findings, explaining what is being happening; but instead, we tried to tackle this topic (online shift in television industry) from a point of view as if we are part of the work force, hence, being critical of the potential risks as well as constantly seeking out new opportunities and possible solutions to minimise risks.  We had our own exploration phase at the beginning where we encouraged everyone to search and read on anything relatable to our topic while keeping in contact with each other. After that, through discussion, we share and compare each other’s findings and began to shape our arguments for further research either backing up or redefining our claims. Although, it got a bit hard to keep track of everyone’s progress because we don’t see each other that often, but at least we have an idea of where everyone is researching, because we had many great conversations. I wished that we had recorded some of them, but I would probably be so nervous and the discussion wouldn’t be as natural. I think the discussion is just a thought process to shape our understanding better. I had a good experience collaborating with the group and I learnt a lot in terms of how to communicate an idea better and to be more precise with providing concrete evidences and arguments.

Annotated Bibliography (POST)
Research Bookmarks (LINK)
Twitter Favourites (LINK)

– Problems – 

As a group, I think the biggest problem is that we couldn’t meet up together with everyone all the time. It was very hard to find a time that suits everyone. I think the solution we come up with is to talk to each other online, through our facebook group. We also try our best to talk to each other about our progress whenever we can. I think that talking with other group mates are the best way for me to reflect on my study. I could sit in front of the computer for hours, but it wouldn’t be as useful as to when I talk to my group mate about our findings on facebook. Tom and I had a great chat on facebook about binge viewing and the way it can affect our experience of show. Nevertheless, I see this as only a temporary solution to my problem, I still need to work on improving my writing skill, and so I can write better and become more efficient. I have since tried to blog more after our annotated bibliography. I find that if I type it in a colloquial way as if I’m talking to someone, I could write a lot faster, in synch with my thought process better. What I found interesting is that when I start writing some reflections down on my blog before we have our discussion; it became more fluent when I try to communicate an idea with my other group mates, so practising writing more frequently does help a lot, not just in terms of writing skill but also self-expressions.

Research Reflections (POST 1)(POST 2)(POST 3)(POST 4)(POST 5)(POST 6)

– Connections and Interactions –

Overall, I feel like that I grow to see the value of reflections and research more. It seemed very challenging at the beginning of the semester, mainly because I felt that this course would required a lot of academic writings and critical analysis. I did not want to let my team down, because I can’t produce decent academic content. I tried to make it up by providing more insight and do as much research as I can to really dig into the core of our subject. It is far more valuable to be able to identify and spot out potential opportunities from research, discussion and reflections. I feel like that writing takes time to improve, and it is a slow process that requires consistency and a lot of patience, working out a way to express myself more fluently. I enjoyed a lot with our group discussions, just evaluating different strategies and potentials issues in terms of working in film/TV industry in the future.  The term ‘Media Industry’ really frightens me, because it feels so immediate, in a sense that it inform to us that we are no longer freshman university student, but are entering the work force very soon. I definitely still need to improve on my communication and writing skills. This course taught us how to push ourselves to me more self-motivation, finding out what is the best way for us to grow and improve. It is great for the tutors to guide us, providing a working space for us to collaborate, giving us the opportunity to find our own orientation. This was quite a beneficial learning experience for me, and I actually enjoyed the research journey a lot more than I thought, I just need to document and reflect on it more through the writing, because it does help to make me organise my thoughts better.

– GRADES –

ROLE: HD
PROGRESS: HD
STRATEGY: HD
PROBLEMS: HD
OVERALL: HD

04.06.2013
Hodddooorrr….
category: Media Industry
tags:

We are living in a world where people are even considering of turnning your windows into screens in the future, the more screen the more advertisment. The current state is that, your 50 inch TV screen is no longer the dominating screen in your house anymore comparing to previous century, so the battle of eyeballs has shifted away from tht screen.... TV content producer has to think of how they can branch out into all other screen and mobilize those additional screens for their own gain...

This week's game of thrones is a great success for HBO, because u could see that pretty much all screens were dominated by game of throne content yesterday, your facebook page, your twitter account, news you read, people and friends yoou talked to today.... etc Doesn't matter if have only 4 millions people who watched tht episode on tv yesterday, HBO's impact is so much bigger than their viewership.... that's wht Neflix needs to aim for. yet we need to consider carefully really how much/ to what extent can you monetize 'talk and discussions' into actual revenue, though ppl will continue to talked about GoT fro the nxt few days, but of all these ppl who talked about GoT, how much of them are actually giving HBO any money?

Monetizing the Second Screen

It is already happening, but it's just harder to define its ownership, who is allow to claim the gains from the second screen, onces a show is air, it's air, the tv company gets its fair share of income from their channel and the rest of the pie goes to other people... its sort of greedy to want ot eat the entire pie, but the thing is, the current state might be suggesting tht tht these secondary source of income is actually getting more and more effective and hence more valuable than its primary source, thats' why television advertisement is declining, because social advertisement is growing to be more effective... why should the top-end content producer be getting less than the secondary? or should they be allow to claim that bigger peice of the pie?

28.05.2013
The TV and the 2nd Second Screen
category: Media Industry
tags:


- http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/what-does-second-screen-mean-viewers-and-advertisers-148240

Social media is the key, it should be the second screen that has embeded advertisemnt, like the main screen is the tv (Netflix) and then ur phone and other screen u look at while u watch tv show u ads... that way it's not directly linked to the company so u wouldn't blame netflix for giving u ads... ppl will b real angry if today, netflix suddenly decide to have ads, and they have way past that point of "service is free if u watch our ads" because if they suddenly decide to switch to that, "it means all these 29.2m of subscriber now suddenly have the option to stop paying the $10 fee and use neflix free by only occasionally watching 15 sec of ads... that is way too risky for the company cuz these subscriber r their only source of income...how to monetize the second screen is what i tihnk they should go... Tom and I studied Lev Manovich's spatial montage during our first year in uni, we were right about the way tht we r used to seeing a lot of stuff in front of us at once... but we should hv go a step further to say that instead of putting so much stuff on the actual tv screen, why not put it on secondary screen.... which is what is consider as a norm now, with twitter and facebook on ur comp and phones... don't put all these stuff to block ur main screen put them somewhere else, where their eyes see while they watch television. 

22.05.2013
Game of the Year – Netflix Stocks
category: Media Industry
tags:

-  http://www.cnbc.com/id/100731947
-  http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?play=1&video=3000167411
-  http://www.cnbc.com/id/100724187

Netflix kept telling people about how many hours people are watching their streams and how much internet usage they r creating....

but tht doeasn't really mean anything, because tht statistic is worthless to advertisers... they don't have ads, who cares if ppl watched a total of 2 billion hours of television on netflix, tht just meant tht they watched 0 sec of ads... those states r there just to attract investors and try building their brands image as a company that matters in the current landscape of the television industry... Every year advertisers in US put in around 75 billions of dollars into tv ads and netflix get none of it...

One of the major problem with tv adverisement is tht, rating is getting harder and harder to track when there is so many options, and hence less reliable... this might be the advantage for netflix, cuz they keep tracks of their users' behaviour, and tht is gold for advertisers.... it's just a matter of getting ads in netflix, which is very unlikely to happen given how easily enraged tht netflix subscribers can get... perhaps they should hv ads established at the very start of the launch... it's a bit too late now.. they missed out the big advertising pie... youtube is doing much better in terms of getting this advertising pie...

Hulu plus does have ad support, so even when their subscriber base is lower, they are still earning quite a lot of money from ads.

 

19.05.2013
Television is ever more social!
category: Media Industry
tags:

- http://www.salon.com/2013/05/31/a_mad_men_nightmare_the_second_screen/singleton/

Contemporary television is now much more than the 15 inch screen hanging on ur living room wall, it's much more than tht... the fight is not restricted to wht appear on tht particular screen, but more so to where the "television content" can appear on all ur many screens (both content and socail conversations).... netflix could potentially acknowledge tht as well hence going for changing user behavior, once ppl r introduced to their platform, it is available through all ur other devices (similar to ipod, mac, , itunes, iphone...etc), if they can get a big enough user base, they may no longer even need to fund their original content, independent content makers may even want to test or showcase their piolet on netflix for a bargain....maybe... what is tv in a contemporary culture? i think it might just well be if we r talking about it, saying tht it is tv, it is tv. I donno where advertising can go though... i can see why there is a decline in advertising revenue on traditional broadcast networks, because there are now much more effective way of target advertisement through different means.... Say game of thrones attracts a kind of wide audience viewership across all kind, pirated or non pirated, ppl still watched the same Got... and think about where can advertising benifit in this?

14.05.2013
NEW STUDY CONFIRMS CORRELATION BETWEEN TWITTER AND TV RATINGS
categories: Media Industry, Media Industry
tags:

- http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2013/new-study-confirms-correlation-between-twitter-and-tv-ratings.html
- http://www.socialguide.com/

This is so smart!

It's a fact tht most people are using their phones and stuff while watching TV, I've always thought of it as TV being a supplementary form of entertainment, almost ambient-like in the space... However, they looked at it from another way, seeing the correlation between social media and television viewing.... just by pointing out tht ppl r using social media to talk about tv shows while they r watching tv flipped the entire conversation.... the second screens has enhanced the television experience (may even argue tht it's more communal) the contemporary viewing experience - television is in fact not ambience, but the fuel for conversation/ social interaction maybe.... the second screen is not drawing our attention away from the television screen, in fact it is drawing us closer, making us more engaged.... also no longer is the television experience restricted to us sitting in front of a television in the living room, this is where online distribution comes in.... as long as we r linked, no matter the actual location, as long as we r watching the show/broadcast sports, through stream or any screens, we are experiencing TV on a hyperrealistic platform maybe? Netflix strength thrives on unifying all these possiblity in a single platform, u can stream content on ur tv, ipad, computer, game consoles...etc and if they could grow big enough to acquire the ability to stream live broadcast sports/game shows.... it would be where the impact is... maybe....? just by acknowledging the benefit of social media, second screen, there is so much potential to where tv is going.... and online distribution is just one of/part of the many stepping stones to the transforming tv culture.... I think i'm a bit off topic now....

02.05.2013
Television, Technology, and Culture: A Contextualist Approach (Reflection)
category: Media Industry
tags:

"To say this is also to recognize that, although we know what TV was, in the classical era of Western broadcasting, and we know that, in some places, that story no longer applies, we do not yet know what it is going to be in the 21st century—and we should resist any siren calls to extrapolate a uni- versalized answer from our contemporary Western experiences. This is also to recognize that, empirically speaking, the assumed truths of media stud- ies only pertain to media operating within particular types of sociocultural, legal, and economic frameworks and we must be sensitive to how particular locales produce different media cultures and technological forms."

"To this extent, we must also avoid any evolutionary presumption that there is one single future trajectory for digital media, independent of location, for “there is no guarantee that the technology will produce the same effects in every case” (Turner, 2011, p. 36; cf. also Tay & Turner, 2008)

Online Stream Service:

  • I feel like that at the moment there is so many different options, it's all getting very messy, so the aim is to come up with a way to make it more organised
  • The technology is there, it's just a matter of making it as easy to consume and use as possible, so people will be on board with it
  • it's sort of lk what steve job did with iPhone, the technology of PDA and all tht is already there, it's just a matter of making it user friendly

I think our approach to this research is sort of like saying, change is unescapable, some will fail to adapt and others may prosper from it. The key in staying afloat is by acknowledgy the users behaviour, not necessarily always in favour of their demand, because too often consumers doesn't know exactly what they want - the industry has to entice them and tell them what they want by taking into consideration of their needs.

It is different to technology determinsim, it's more of a strategy to foresee change and make use of it. Thats how the succeeder of other platform thrived by knowing their customers needs and evolve to benefit their experience... and hence tht's why we are looking into other successors across different industries, to help us understand the corelationship between company development and its contemporary costumers more. This will in terms further help us to speculate or think of projected future of TV.....

How content and form might be changed, whether its for better or worst is not the argument here; we are more concern of providing a well rounded analysis of the current economic climate and construct a plausible forecast. This research should be less of a critic on the current TV flux, but more so for people who are interested in partaking the Television rally as well as companies that has desire to benefit from this transformation and also possibly filmmakers who might be considering tv as potential path. 

17.04.2013
Media Industry – Annotated Bibliography
categories: Annotated Bibliography, Media Industry, Uncategorized
tags:

1: AMC – STUMBLING TOWARD A NEW TELEVISION CANON 

2: PUTTING THE PREMIUM INTO BASIC: SLOW-BURN NARRATIVES AND THE LOSS-LEADER FUNCTION OF AMC’S ORIGINAL DRAMA SERIES

3: IT’S NOT TV, IT’S ONLINE DRAMA: THE RETURN OF THE INTIMATE SCREENS

4: TELEVISION’S NEWCOMERS: NETFLIX, APPLE, GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK

5: WHO’S WATCHING? WHO CARES?

6: BEYOND BROADCASTING? TV FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

7: TELEVISION, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE: A CONTEXTUALIST APPROACH

8: ONTOLOGY, INTENTIONALITY AND TELEVISION AESTHETICS

17.04.2013
MI: #8 Ontology, intentionality and television aesthetics
categories: Annotated Bibliography, Media Industry, Uncategorized
tags:

Study done by Ted Nannicelli (2012)

This journal article is very different to all the other research journals that I've annotated. Nannicelli pays close attention to the ontological aesthetic of television as a whole, asking philosophical questions that seize to determine the 'spatiotemporal boundaries' of television work, drawing on television identity and the persistence condition of its artform. Questions like 'when is a television work finished, and when is a television work a distinct whole rather than a constitutive part of some other work' seeks to determines the 'spatiotemporal boundaries' of television shows, serialist or minseries. This article consideres television aesthetic differently to the way Glen Creeber looks at it in my other annotated bibliography, where Creeber examines the 'broadcast' quality of television, the liveness and sense of intimacy; Nannicelli on the other hand regards television as 'text', drawing on Roland Barth's theory on 'work and text'. This article was published in a film study journal, Screen: Oxford Journals, that's intended for readers that are interested in cinema studies. Hence, they look at television through a filmic lens, putting its distribution methods aside and focus primary on 'authorship' and the content itself. This article might not be relevant to our study of media distribution, but it looks into television in a broader sense. Television in this article has been studied as an 'artwork' and hence, offering us a fresh new insight into the fundamental and conceptual framework of television form.

Reference: 

Nannicelli. T. (2012). Ontology, intentionality and television aesthetics. Screen. 53 (2), p164-179.

15.04.2013
MI: #7 Television, Technology and Culture: A Contextualist Approach
categories: Annotated Bibliography, Media Industry
tags:

Study done by David Morley (2012)

Although, Morley's academic style of writing is very dense, his study on the contemporary debates surround emerging television culture are solid and well constructed, provided with cross referencing and textual evidences that can withstand the test of time, some of which is conducted through his own studies on household uses of information and communication technology. Morley is not afraid to be critical of his own research and acknowledged the importance to treat information rationally and be objective. He warns against media-centric that based of their study on speculations and predilection towards 'trendy' technologies that tells us 'what new technologies are going to to us,' instead he opts us to 'think about what people do with media technologies'.

"It is evident that we must be cautious about assuming how much difference new media make, given that all communication is mediated and has always been—not least, through language, in the case of face-to- face communication. Failure to attend to this issue is, as Madianou and Miller (2011) argued, the blindspot in many contemporary debates about mediation/mediatization."

This is crucial to our study on Innovative Media Distribution. In the case of Netflix, we must be wary of the fact that Netflix Inc. is cautious of their public image, being able to present an optimistic image is the key to attract sponsors and investors.

"For several years now we have been told that the age of broadcast television, and its couch potatoes, is over and is being replaced by a new form of interactive communications. This is partly a discourse of commercial boosterism driven by companies who hope to profit from these changes."

We must aim to be objective in our study, not to make overly-enthusiastic assumptions and speculations base on un-grounded theories and news articles. Streaming services seems to be the new innovative media that's 'projected to reshape the way we watch television,' however Morley points out that we need to recognise the notion of 'newness is a historical constant' as Marcel Proust puts it, 'The one thing that does not change is that, at any and every time, it appears that there have been 'great changes'..."

Reference:

Morley. D (2012): Television, Technology, and Culture: A Contextualist Approach, The Communication Review, 15(2), p79-105

Madianou, M., & Miller, D. (2011). Migration and new media. London, England: Routledge.