World Media Economics and Management Conference 2016

Digitization and a range of accompanying innovations enabled over-the-top (OTT) platform companies such as Netflix, Apple or Google to enter the broadcasting sector. As a response, the traditional incumbent broadcasters and distributors built their own digital platforms. Platforms started to dominate different stages of the value chain – the industry became subject to the phenomenon of ‘platformization’. An ecosystem with a unique structure and competitive dynamics driven by the diverging business logic of platform companies emerged. This platformized broadcasting industry can hardly be captured by current approaches in the field of media and platform economics. Thus, the paper uses the theoretical framework of Platform Networks (PN), which extends existing platform theory. In an in-depth case study, the framework is applied to explain the changing structure and competitive dynamics of the digital broadcasting industry in Belgium. As a result, the paper argues that broadcaster, distributors and new entrants need to carefully balance competition and cooperation in order to create a sustainable digital ecosystem.

For the last two decades, the emergence of broadband as a distribution mechanism for video has generated significant concern about the future of television and a sense that the medium is greatly imperiled. The sixty-year dominance of broadcasting created a “broadcast paradigm” through which industry and audiences came to conflate the medium of television with its preliminary distribution technology and the logics developed to manage broadcasting’s affordances and limitations. Rather than posing any threat to the medium of television, broadband distribution threatens broadcasting as a distribution technology with its unprecedented affordances that allow some sectors of the television industry to significantly adjust their businesses. This paper explores the emergence of broadband-distributed portals and their related logics with particular attention to new business models and ramifications for long-form, industry-created television content. The paper explores the utility of conceptualizing changes in the business of producing scripted television series as a transition from the logics of what Miége termed the flow model to those of the publishing model through a consideration of the variation from typical “publishing” industries provided by the thus-far dominant use of a fee-based circulating library model. It concludes by identifying how the book publishing industry might provide more applicable logics for the business of television series production than those established in previous eras of linear television.

Industrial convergence driven by the Internet has been making the market boundaries among industries such as the telecommunications, radio and television, publishing, film gradually fading away. Different industries become to supply substitute content products and services for the same target market and enter each other market. The competition of substitute goods is becoming more intensively. The operation patterns of these industries are experiencing disruptive change. The two-sided market relationship (audience maker: product/service provider → consumer + advertiser) of the traditional television media are quietly undergoing changes. With the diversity of information provided by China's TV media as well as the connection groups, TV media has become a brand-new platform with the characteristics of market maker, audience maker, and demand coordinator. This study explores and analyzes the platform characteristics of the television media transformation from the perspectives of platform positioning, agents’ connected, platform structure and network effect. In order to set up well-functioning platform, TV media should improve the direct network effect through deepening the integration of cable television network, improving product differentiation and expanding sub platform construction. TV media should start from the concept establishment of platform users, and form themselves from the single platform leader to hybrid platform leader, and work out effective incentive mechanism for the stakeholders of platform to enhance the indirect network effect. The construction of the platform is to promote the TV media operations from the original content supply caused by the attention economy to focus on the information service of the data economy.

This study is about the cultural discount of Hollywood movie in foreign countries by analyzing the box-office score based on influential variables of Hollywood movie success. For this study, we used 549 movies released in US from 2004 to 2014. 31 countries, where the 549 movie released, were set as dependent variables, classified based on Hollywood movie consumption and movie market scale. For independent variables that affected Hollywood movie success, we used production budget, MPAA ratings, running time, Nomination, Wins, Genre, Director power, Actor power, ratings of critics and audience. We used a linear regression for analysis, and put the Hollywood movie box office scores of each country as dependent variables. There after, we analyzed the similarity of each variable’s influences between US and other countries by Z-test. As a result, entire variables which had an influence on Hollywood movie success also influenced the Europe region(France, Romania, Chzech Republic, Bulgaria, Swenden, Estonia, Norway) which is similar with US. This means that the cultural discount rate of Hollywood movie is low in Europe region. Second, as a result of comparing the concurrence of significant, non-significant variables of Hollywood movie success between US and 30 countries, Australia showed the highest similarity with US. The most significant variables were Etc genre and Director power, which showed statistically significant p-values in all countries except Switzerland. Last, in terms of the influence of each independent variables on Hollywood movie success, there were no difference in all variables influence between Australia and US.

This paper presents the results of a survey of innovation in media firms in Ontario's book, magazine, television, film, music, and interactive digital industries, thereby providing an assessment of media innovation at the sectoral level. The paper employs an analytical framework that captures key aspects of media innovation while permitting some comparisons with innovation in other industries.The paper makes four main points. First, in most matters of innovation (with the exception of investment in formal R&D), media firms are more innovative than the average firm. Second, media firms consider content innovation to be of critical importance, and their notable strengths are related to product development and project management, while their relative weaknesses have to do with market-facing innovation. Third, innovation processes in the media industry are more inter-related than in the average firm, with product innovation often requiring complementary organizational, process, and marketing innovation. Fourth, we provide evidence of a positive relationship between a media firm's intensity of innovation and firm growth. Respondent firms with negative or zero growth had the lowest scores on four innovation indices, while higher levels of organizational innovation, product innovation, and marketing innovation support growth. Organizational innovation appears to support very high rates of growth.

This paper provides an overview of the e-book publishing industry in China and its changing business models. As the conventional publishing industry has continued to contract, digitization is becoming increasingly popular. Although China is an influential developing country undergoing rapid change, a dearth of research on its digital publishing industry exists at the present time. This article therefore explores two main research questions: 1) What are the recent trends and business models of digital publishing in China? 2) How might we evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of such business models? To this end, multiple case studies are employed, as is the paradigm of structure-conduct-performance (SCP). It is proposed that Content plus App and Content plus Device are the basic business models for Chinese digital content producers and distributors.

In this modern digital world as opposed to the analogue, translating business strategy into business processes has become much more of a challenge. Digital media business processes are now mainly digitized and ICT-enabled. Consequently, today's internet/online-based businesses' environment and management are more dynamic, characterized by ongoing fast changes and severe stakeholders’ pressure. Therefore, the dynamic BM has risen to prominence as a conceptual and contextual tool of ‘alignment’ to fill the gap between corporate strategy and business processes including their web, internet, digital infrastructure, providing crucial harmonization among these organizational layers. A successful digital media business should treat the business strategy, along with their business processes as a harmonized package. Furthermore, the author argues that the BM is an essential conceptual tool of alignment in digital media business. More specifically, it represents an intermediate layer between business strategy and digital media-enabled business processes, fulfilling the missing link created by the complex and digitized environment.

This paper explicates a possibility to measure transnational media trade. In this way, it aims at quantifying an important facet of cross-border media communication, i.e., the different ways for media to cross borders. Importing and exporting media assets, here understood as both final products and means of production, is a specific mode of action media companies might resort to when entering foreign markets. Thus, a quantification of transnational media flows indicates the consequences of and, at the same time, any (pre)conditions for strategic organizational behavior. At the same time, trade relations in media – being both social institutions and economic entities – hint at economic and/or cultural proximity respectively distance between countries. Exchange relations might reveal the existence of transnational and/or transcultural markets. The latter cannot be detected but by focusing on multidirectional flows connecting (or separating) diverse countries, whereas previous studies have traced joint venture or direct investments to backtrack cross-border media trade, mostly based on case studies. Consequently, we seek the possibility to illuminate these multidirectional transactions. We propose a way to capture the volume of media trade between countries by outlining different economic data sources and eventually identifying suitable variables in official data, thereby providing helpful information on where to find applicable data for both scholars and practitioners. The advantages and limitations of using official economic figures for capturing cross-border media communication are elucidated in detail. This way, our analysis provides an important building block to understand when, how and why media communication transcends national and cultural borders.

On the basis of the analysis of numerous texts and social phenomena, in which the hermeneutical method is applied, we would like to present the following article on a phenomenon that can be observed in new media. We have referred to the phenomenon as the Sixth Estate, the rule of algorithms. Nowadays, digital mechanisms applied for selecting contents, controlling consumer and political behaviour reach far beyond the limit of a marginal phenomenon, and they readily join the mainstream. With the appearance of the Sixth Estate, some other phenomena can be observed, such as mythologisation of abstruse digital mechanisms which interact with a human being, and network cyborgisation. “The rule of algorithms” emphasizes the role, or to put it more precisely, the growing hegemony of new media organisations and software developers who work for them, and the will to conquer new fields, which have so far seemed to be the bastions of human activities, as it is in the case of the “robo-recruiting” that has just appeared.

Based on the Hui Peng’s method, this paper measured the index of copyright protection strength in 36 countries and regions between 2008 and 2010. Econometric models were established to analyse the relationship between the strength and the music industry, and recommendations for the music industry in China were proposed through the international comparison. This research found that the copyright protection strength had a positive correlation with the sales per capita of physical music but a negative correlation with the sales per capita of digital music. Although the development of music industry depends on a robust mechanism in copyright protection, it was recommended that the governing body in China should implement a moderately loose policy to motivate innovation and competition in the short term and gradually improve the strength of copyright protection in the long term.