Issues raised by media ownership

In addition, candidates should be familiar with:

• the issues raised by media ownership and funding in contemporary media practice

Give real examples of media ownership and funding and how they affect the media around us.

In contemporary media practice, with media ownership and funding comes many challenges.

First off, media ownership and funding means marketing and advertisements of the products. The marketing of film media products has the potential to bring in a large audience, leading to high success for the film. In contemporary media practice, marketing reaches potential viewers on social media platforms, posters, commercials, theatres, magazine advertisements, and more. However, if marketing fails to intrigue an audience, perhaps because of a poor production design, the funding for the film will fluctuate. For example, the 2019 film “Cats” released their first marketing trailer and got an extraordinary amount of bad reviews and reactions from viewers. Based off of the original 1981 musical, viewers were disappointed in the tone, structure, and animation effects of the film trailer. The distributing studio of the film, Universal Pictures, ended up losing around $115 million due to their marketing fails. This is an issue raised by media funding as unsuccessful marketing can lead to a significant loss of money and a smaller audience.

In addition, copyright and property issues are a big portion of media ownership. In owning a film media practice, the republishing of a film can be hard to regulate. Films that are initially published to online streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video especially face these issues. For instance, someone who pays to have access to a movie on one of these platforms may easily download or record the movie and then post it on another site for free. This can be considered copyright as it was derived from its original source and posted elsewhere without permission. Ultimately, this will allow viewers to see the movie without paying, which puts a big dent in the funds of media ownership.

Large film media companies, such as Disney, Sony, and Warner Brothers highly affect the media around us. For example, marketing advertisements of Disney products are often seen all around us, due to their creation of sequels and their ever-incoming revenue, allowing for their excessive amount of advertisements. Particularly, this limits room for advertisements of smaller company’s products. This is a media ownership issue as major media companies distribute content that is overtaking toward other film products.

In conclusion, there are many issues that can be encountered in media ownership and funding. The challenges of this contemporary practice greatly affect the media around us every day.