The Impact of Media Convergence and Mobile Media

Convergence of media content and technology has forever changed our relationship with media. Today, media consumption is mobile and flexible; we don’t have to miss out on media content just because we weren’t home in time to catch a show, didn’t find the book at the bookstore, or forgot to buy the newspaper yesterday. Increasingly, we demand access to our media when we want it, where we want it, and in multiple formats. In order to satisfy those demands and to stay relevant in today’s converged world, traditional media companies have had to dramatically change their approach to media content and their business models.

Our Changing Relationship with the Media

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The merging of all media onto one device such as a tablet or smartphone blurs the distinctions of what used to be separate media. For example, USA Today (a newspaper) and CBS News (network television news) used to deliver the news in completely different formats, but today look quite similar in their web forms, with listings of headlines, rankings of most popular stories, local weather forecasts, photo galleries, and video. On an Amazon Kindle, on which one can read books, newspapers, and magazines, new forms like the Kindle Single challenge old categories. Are the fictional Kindle Singles novellas, or more like the stories found in literary magazines? And what about the investigative reports released as Kindle Singles: Should they be considered long-form journalism, or are they closer to a nonfiction book? Is listening to an hourlong archived episode of Public Radio International’s This American Life on an iPod more like experiencing a radio program, or an audio book? (It turns out you can listen to that show on the radio, as a downloadable podcast, as a Web stream, on mobile apps, or on a CD.)

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SOCIAL VIEWING Superbowl XLVII watchers generated a record 24.1 million tweets, with a peak of 268,000 tweets per minute during Beyoncé’s halftime show.

Not only are the formats morphing, but we can now experience the media in more than one manner, simultaneously. Fans of television shows like The Voice, Glee, and Top Chef and viewers of live events like a presidential State of the Union address often multitask, reading live blogs during broadcasts or sharing their own commentary with friends on Facebook. Twitter encourages the same kind of multitasking with their search widget: “Displays search results in real time! Ideal for live events, broadcastings, conferences, TV shows, or even just keeping up with the news.”18 For those who miss the initial broadcasts, converged media offer a second life for media content through deep archive access and repurposed content on other platforms. For example, cable shows like Game of Thrones and Mad Men have found audiences beyond their initial broadcasts through their DVD collections and online video services like Amazon Instant Video and Apple’s iTunes. In fact, some fans even prefer to watch these more complex shows this way, enjoying the ability to rewind an episode in order to catch a missed detail, as well as the ability to watch several episodes back-to-back. Similarly, Arrested Development, critically acclaimed but canceled by Fox in 2006, garnered new fans through the streaming episodes on Hulu and Netflix. As a result of this renewed interest, it was revived with new episodes produced for Netflix in 2013.

Our Changing Relationship with the Internet

Mobile devices and social media have altered our relationship with the Internet. Two trends are noteworthy: (1) Apple now makes more than five times as much money selling iPhones, iPads, and iPods and accessories as they do selling computers, and (2) the number of Facebook’s users (1.15 billion in 2013) keeps increasing. The significance of these two trends is that through our Apple devices and Facebook, we now inhabit a different kind of Internet—what some call a closed Internet, or a walled garden.19

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APPS, like the one developed for Twitter, offer smartphone users direct, instant access to their preferred Web sites.

In the world in which the small screens of smartphones are becoming the preferred medium for linking to the Internet, we typically don’t get the full, open Internet, one represented by the vast searches brought to us by Google. Instead we get a more managed Internet, brought to us by apps or platforms that carry out specific functions via the Internet. Are you looking for a nearby restaurant? Don’t search on the Internet—use this app especially designed for that purpose. And the distributors of these apps act as gatekeepers. Apple has about one million apps in its App Store, and Apple approves every one of them. The competing Android Appstores on Google Play and Amazon have a similar number of apps, but Google and Amazon exercise less control over approval of apps than Apple does.

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Facebook offers a similar walled garden experience. Facebook began as a highly managed environment, only allowing those with .edu e-mail addresses. Although all are now invited to join Facebook, the interface and the user experience on the site is still highly managed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his staff. For example, if you click on a link to a news article that your friend has shared using a social reader app on Facebook, you will be prompted to add the same app—giving it permission to post your activity to your Wall—before you can access the article. In addition, Facebook has severely restricted what content can be accessed through the open Internet. Facebook has installed measures to stop search engines from indexing users’ photos, Wall posts, videos, and other data. The effect of both Apple’s devices and the Facebook interface is a clean, orderly, easy-to-use environment, but one in which we are “tethered” to the Apple App Store, or to Facebook.20

The open Internet—best represented by Google (but not its Google+ social networking service, which is more confining like Facebook) and a Web browser—promised to put the entire World Wide Web at your fingertips. On the one hand, the appeal of the Internet is its openness, its free-for-all nature. But of course, the trade-off is that the open Internet can be chaotic and unruly, and apps and other walled garden services have streamlined the cacophony of the Internet considerably for us.

The Changing Economics of Media and the Internet

The digital turn in the mass media has profoundly changed the economics of the Internet. Since the advent of Napster in 1999, which brought (illegal) file sharing to the music industry, each media industry has struggled to rethink how to distribute its content for the digital age. The content itself is still important—people still want quality news, television, movies, music, and games—but they want it in digital formats, and for mobile devices.

Apple’s response to Napster established the new media economics. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs struck a deal with the music industry. Apple would provide a new market for music on the iTunes store, selling digital music that customers could play on their iPods (and later on their iPhones and iPads). In return, Apple got a 30 percent cut of the revenue for all music sales on iTunes, simply for being the “pipes” that delivered the music. As music stores went out of business all across America, Apple sold billions of songs and hundreds of millions of iPods, all without requiring a large chain of retail stores.

Amazon.com started as a more traditional online retailer, taking orders online and delivering merchandise from its warehouses. As books took the turn into the digital era, Amazon created its own device, the Kindle, and followed Apple’s model. Amazon started selling e-books, taking its cut for delivering the content. Along the way, Amazon and Apple (and Google through its Android apps) have become leading media companies. They don’t make the content (although Amazon is now publishing books, too, and as mentioned in the beginning of the chapter purchased the Washington Post in 2013), but they are among the top digital distributors of books, newspapers, magazines, music, television, movies, and games.