Today, a variety of displays compete for consumers’ attention. Media and content activities are moving towards a world of five screens: television, PC, video game consoles, connected televisions and mobile devices (smartphones, phablets, and tablets), a growing range of digital media that are competing for the attention of consumers.
Currently, 90 percent of our media consumption occurs in front of a screen, averaging 4.4 hours a day, leaving a mere 10 percent to screenless media (radio, newspapers, and magazines). And this multiscreen behavior is fast becoming the norm as consumers divide and balance their time between devices. Streaming sites, online news sites, social media, even VR porn sites dominate how people spend their time.
Screens are used mostly sequentially (mobile phones in the morning and commuting; PC at work, while tablet use skyrockets at night), but each time with higher frequency simultaneously (multitasking, complementary activities). The content industry is beginning to approach this environment with an all-media approach.
The multitasking and multiscreen behaviors are on the rise
The new participants, especially social networks, are the engines of these changes towards multitasking and multiscreen behaviors. The Pew Internet State of the News Media 2014 report states that half of Facebook and Twitter users also read news on those pages, as do 62 percent of Reddit users. That was the situation 7 years ago. Today is certainly not the same and multitasking & multiscreen behaviors are on the rise.
There is a rapid growth in both the use of mobile phones and tablets to read news, even as mobile applications are gaining prominence in news about browser consumption: 47 percent of smartphone users say they mainly use news applications and 38 percent of news consumption was carried out through a browser.
The distribution of films on mobile devices, previously viewed with skepticism, “is increasingly the place where young people, in particular, choose to watch films”. Another example of the proliferation of screens comes from the video game industry: 25 percent of all American gamers play on all screens. A few years ago, gamers were mainly using the console, television, or PC, but now they can distribute their game time between two additional screens in combination with the previously existing ones. This multiplication of screens allows the ubiquity of playing in different media on all platforms.
The evolution of value networks
This section focuses on the evolution of the value network in this new ecosystem, on the rapidly evolving relationships between players. The digital revolution of the media and content industries is largely a revolution of intermediation in its various components. New entrants emerge and offer unprecedented solutions to add and distribute content, design original marketing and transaction agreements adapted to this new environment (free subscriptions, micropayments, virtual items). Therefore, the weight of technology is also the weight of the intermediaries and economic actors that support these technologies: Google, Amazon, Apple or other ISPs, for example. Their importance is unmatched by that of cultural actors and explains their ability to quickly forge a place in the cultural landscape, using technological innovations to impose new economic models that drastically affect the balance of the sector.
These new entrants show specific value networks, including many technical intermediaries as opposed to linear value chains of the past. The very notion of a linear value chain in each industry becomes more diffuse. The launches (books, CDs, films, video games) come from new models of cooperation between various actors (intermediaries, distributors, technology providers, etc.) with different professional specializations. Such specific industrial collaborations cannot be conceived in the traditional sense, but rather as a set of industrial relationships of networked collaborators within an ecosystem or as a combination of horizontal and vertical relationships across layers of the ecosystem.
The collaborations
Strategic technology collaborations trigger the redistribution of the business ecosystem. Digitization brings with it a new way of unifying the entire value chain, from creation/production to consumption, which has been drastically altered and is becoming more complex, highlighting collaboration and experience management.
At the same time, tensions arise between creation and monetization and the various intermediate steps. Integrated media companies used to control distribution (wholesale and often retail as well). But a significant change is taking place in the dynamics of the sector, breaking the balance of power after the previous one, that is, distancing the part of media production from the part of the distribution. In other words, two distinct classes of economy collide the economy of upstream production of cultural goods and the economy of downstream distribution of digital goods and services.
Large retailers (‘new entrants’ such as Telecom operators and IT companies) tend to impose their own conditions on their suppliers. In addition, downstream participants, such as Apple, can operate on the loss of sales of these products and encourage people to buy others (such as iPods) in their stores, as Amazon did with books (with e-books and its Kindle reader. ), thus narrowing even more the margins, already quite fair, of the publishers.
Although the content of all kinds is clearly a strategic asset for these new entrants, it does not provide them with the bulk of their income. For most of these participants, content is just another app. The case of Amazon In addition, very often, the business models adopted by newcomers depend, explicitly or implicitly, on the alteration of existing business models. This has been the driving force for companies like Amazon to disrupt existing relationships between consumers and legacy providers, to achieve disintermediation of markets with existing gatekeepers (retailers, distributors, etc.). By collecting data from millions of customers, Amazon was able to figure out how to sell everything else cheaply on the Internet. Books were to be the way to get usernames and data. The sale of books was a strategy for the acquisition of clients.
Ultimately, a collaboration between Internet technology and screen behaviors will be the future of all of us. This collaboration will increasingly influence how people engage in activities, how the business world adapts, how consumers are reached, and much more.