In the rapidly evolving media and entertainment landscape, what are the big trends in the financing, production and distribution of screen content?
Are the main challenges rights management, creating quality content, controlling costs, distribution platforms, all of the above or other factors?
The Moving Images Moving Landscape survey sets out to answer these and other questions and to provide hard data and insights to help screen industry practitioners navigate their way through businesses in flux.
Preferred Media is running the online survey and is keen to get responses from every industry which works with moving pictures. The survey closes on March 2 and the aim is to release the report in April, which will be free.
“The cost of producing video content has shrunk to the point that we all have video cameras in our pockets,” Preferred Media’s Bridget Holland tells IF.
“With more opportunities to make content, it feels like there’s more content being made. But how is it funded, marketed and distributed? There are lots of individual stories but no overall picture on where the industry is at and what the greatest challenges are.”
Originally known as the Film Vault, Preferred Media was one of the first independent commercial media vaults in Australia. It has since expanded to offer digital asset management services and digitisation and now manages more than 20 million assets for hundreds of customers.
“Our main client groups are facing real disruption. And within that disruption, it’s really hard to see what the trends and benchmarks are,” Holland says.
“So we launched the survey to try to get some hard info about what’s happening in Australia. If we do and if it’s useful we’d like to run it regularly, which would help build a picture of how things are changing year on year. But that’s a long term ambition.”
As evidence of the disruption, Preferred Media cites such factors as:
* Netflix will release 80 films in 2018 – around twice as many as any Hollywood studio.
* Video traffic will be 82 percent of all consumer Internet traffic by 2021 and 13 per cent of that will be live video.
* The digital ad spend was predicted to overtake TV spend in 2017 but growth is slowing.
The survey will aim to gauge trends in funding and production budgets and look at the ways in which content is being distributed and how content is being managed.
Holland concludes, “This is our first time doing this survey or this kind of research. We couldn’t find anyone else who had done it previously, which is why we felt it was needed. But if it’s of value and interest to the industry, it won’t be the last time we do it. Being able to compare how things change over time would give even more value and insight.”
Take the survey here.