Understanding structure and ownership in the creative media section

Intro

The creative media section is an ever changing ever growing industry that has a huge marketplace for jobs, it creates jobs that never existed before in the next 20 years hundreds of never before seen jobs will be created because of the media sectors and it will continue to the end of everything as there will always be a need for entertainment and news and children’s programmes. Over the past 100 years media has rapidly become a part of everyone’s life from setting dates into an IPhone calendar to emailing your resume. This assignment there will be explanations of the different sizes and structures of the sectors. There will also be an explanation on the different ownership of the different sectors and sources of income generated from the different sectors.

Structure and Size of the creative media sectors

Film

The film industry is a big sector of the media industry with over 27,800 people employed in the UK and more and more worldwide,the size of the film industry is ever growing for example the amount of 3D cinema screens world wide is well over 50,000 with about 15,000 of them being in the U.S Alone, it is also estimated that the worldwide film entertainment revenue is at about 90.9 billion dollars and is estimated to hit 100 billion by 2017 with the global box office revenue at about 38 billion. There is thousands of different movie production companies and aspiring directors and actors, some actors get paid ridiculous amounts for example 'Forbes' magazine named Robert Downey Jr as having an annual revenue of 75 million dollars and being one of the highest paid actors of all time, this gives just a small insight to how big the film sector is if that is just an actors annual revenue.
The structure of the film industry is as follows: there are many different roles in the Film industry: 
Studios: Studios are designed to finance and produce a film they do not distribute a film they sell the rights to a Movie to a production company. some famous examples of studios would be 'Warner bros.' 'Walt Disney studios' etc.
A production company has basically the same role as a studio but they are not owned by parent company some famous examples of these would be company's like 'Dreamworks Animation', '20th Century Fox' and other huge companies like 'Universal Studios'
A producer: A producer is involved in all the different aspects of making a film they are the supervisor of the film nothing happens before the producer has looked over it they supervise everything to do with the film/project, some famous successful producers would be; Steve Spielberg, JJ Abrams and Peter Jackson these people are immensely successful because of their producing work.
Executive producer: An Executive producer is one of the highest paid roles within the film industry because they are in control of the most important things within making a film things like Budgets, Location and various other things both in post and pre-production they also report to production companies and distributors.
Director: A director is mainly responsible for all the different artistic and creative ares of the film making process this includes directing/managing actors and directing the light used in a certain scene and other effects, some famous examples of these directors would be: Alfred Hitchcock,Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Martin Scorsese these directors have all made some brilliant films and are well deserving of their fame with Stanley Kubrick having an honorable for being one of  the most eccentric directors known for taking hundreds of re shoots and getting involved in the films acting himself (In The Shining in order to really scare Shelly Duvall he chased her up the stairs himself for maximum scary effect) The structure of the industry then dissolves down into lots of smaller jobs like a location manager or a location scout and a first assistant director who's job is to make sure other people or doing there jobs.

TV 

A study was conducted recently that showed TV was still massive in the U.S with 283 Million people watching every month (there is 313 million people living in the U.S) and a further 155 Million watching TV via the internet with the size value up to 74 Billion Dollars. Here this graph shows the steady increase in the revenue from cable subscriptions:

As you can see the TV industry continues to grow in size every single year.(image Sourced from http://www.marketsize.com/blog/index.php/2012/03/12/2403/)

Here another image that shows what percentage of station are going to expand their size to satisfy online viewers.

The image also states that they will be expanding their advertising to online as-well.

So this shows that TV is ever growing in size as roughly the TV industry employs more that 56,000 workers in the UK alone all with different roles within the TV sector from jobs like Directors to light rig operators to administrators,Television then has it basic channels in the UK which are called terrestrial channels; BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 are all the ones people mostly know about but people tend to forget about: S4C and UTV. These companies are also called Public Service Broadcasters, with a range of obligations set out in their licences, and in the case of the BBC in its Charter. The BBC is known as being the biggest TV production company in the world, It was founded and first organized in 1922 by a group of radio executives and John Reith became the general manager of an organization . Then in 1936 the BBC’s broadcasting system was started as an experimental service in the london area and by 1938 there were over 11,000 receivers in use. During that time most of the programmes aired were usually live and ranged from game shows to children’s programmes. Today the BBC has grown and become an larger organisation. The company now has 9 television channels; BBC one, two, three, four. The cbbc and cbeebies channels for kids and a BBC HD channel plus BBC news and BBC parliament.

Here this image shows the BBC licensing fees.

Radio

The British radio market is split roughly 50/50 between stations owned and operated by the BBC and stations owned by commercial groups and licensed by Ofcom. Most listening is via FM, but digital transmissions via DAB are growing in popularity and there is still some listening via AM frequencies (also known as medium and long wave).In addition there are about 200 community stations, also licensed by Ofcom, and many student and hospital services. BBC Radio is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation which has operated in the UK under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927. The BBC is primarily funded by the TV licence fee, currently £145.50 a year which is payable by everyone in the UK who watches television programming live. Commercial revenue and grants top up this figure to £4.6 billion a year. Of the monthly £12 it earns from each licence fee, the BBC spends £2 on radio. The BBC runs ten national domestic radio stations, five of which are only available in a digital format.The sector contains many different job roles Job roles: reporter; interviewer; researcher; script writer; presenter; radio journalist; producer; studio assistant; programme scheduler; commercial trafficker; audio/sound engineer; editor; station manager; air time salesperson; station management etc. These jobs all play a key role within the radio sector of the media industry.

Advertising

The structure of the advertising industry has been successful since the 1980's, most advertising agencies have tended to move towards a common structure. Whereas in the past, each individual agency offered a variety of different marketing services under a single roof, the rapid expansion and fragmentation of the media industry since the mid-1980s (for example the proliferation of cable and digital channels), as well as the refusal of clients to pay for services they didn't require, encouraged most large agencies to spin out their more specialised in-house departments as separate agencies in their own right. At the same time, while the number of individual agencies offering different services has as a result increased, ownership of those agencies has concentrated dramatically. Massive consolidation within the industry has led to a huge number of mergers and acquisitions, and the creation at the top end of the market of a small group of major holding companies, each of whom owns or controls a large number of separate agencies. There are still independent owner-operated agencies out there, but in ever fewer numbers than ever before, and most are small by comparison with the group-owned brands.

There are currently 4 major holding companies that are conglomerates in the advertising industry there are called, WPP, Omnicon, Publicis Groupe and Inter public. Each one of these conglomerates controls a huge number of different markets and brands that are spread all over the globe although most of the time the Holding company doesn't involve itself in small time markets and marketing,instead it works with its subsidiary company to make sure there is the right amount of creative synergy between the company's w

Ownership

The Film sector of the creative media industry is owned by many different people and many different however there is a few different film conglomerates(a conglomerate is a combination of two previously existing corporations that work together on different multimedia platforms) with the largest recognized conglomerate being The Walt Disney Company closely followed by News Corp (and 21st Century Fox) and Time Warner, these companies have been recognized as the main corporations that operate in Hollywood which is the most famous movie production haven to ever exist. 

The film sector has loads of different sources of income for example:

Advertising: the film industry has many different ways of Advertising for example they might put together a short 1 minute trailer that shows the basis of the story and some action to grab the consumers attention,a trailer is perhaps one of the most recognized and effective ways of advertising a film it has the simple effective layout that any age consumer can understand and process, another form of advertising could be  a movie poster. A movie poster was first created by the Lumiere brothers in 1895 for a film called L'Arroseur arrosé, the movie poster is the longest and most popular way of advertising a film to the general public,(obviously in the digital age it has been overtaken by online promotions and the like.)There is also things like the box office and DVD sales and product placement, Product placement is when a production company is paid a sum of money by a different company to include their product in their film for example 'Pepsi' might pay a company millions of dollars to have their product appear clearly in the film another source of income could be merchandise this could include things like; Toys,Video Games,posters,T-Shirts(among other items of clothing)etc.A company might wan't to fully expand their merchandise to include all different aspects.
Cross media ownership has some advantages and disadvantages for example an advantage would be the fact that Big companies(an example would be Asda or Tesco) have a lot more purchasing power so they can produce products at a reduced cost they also have a combined synergy so they are able to work with each others different resources from underlying companies to produce a higher standard of product for the different markets that they deal within,This in turn increases the distribution within markets because there is a much bigger selection of products.