Audience trends essay

Media
"How does your own experience of media consumption illustrate a wider pattern and trend of audience behaviour?"

My own consumption of media, in many ways, demonstrates and mirrors the current trends in today's audience behaviour. Society has had a gargantuan influx in the amount of media being consumed through various streaming platforms. I myself have conformed to the meticulous ways in which I consume media. Social networking and other main streaming websites/platforms are the soul apparatus I use. For example Instagram and Netflix would be my top for media consumption. I have a screen time of 8 hours and 25 minutes, yet almost 35% of that is taken up by Instagram alone. Netflix is now a big part of my media consumption instead of going to the movies on a regular basis all you have to do is watch a movie within the comfort of your own home. Cinemas are on the slow decline but myself as well as a small circle of friends still enjoy the social and cinematic aspect of going to see a movie in the likes of somewhere like Hoyts or Event cinemas.

Netflix had a total net income of over 1.86 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, whilst the company's annual revenue reached 20.15 billion U.S. dollars. Alone, the widely known streaming platform has more than 125 million subscribers worldwide. 1.2 million of those viewers are from New Zealander. Many influential and prominent filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan have joined the chorus in a protest against netflix saying, “Netflix has a bizarre aversion to supporting theatrical films. They have this mindless policy of everything having to be simultaneously streamed and released, which is obviously an untenable model for theatrical presentation.”. This is all to defend the honour and tradition of seeing a high class film/blockbuster in a theatre(cinema). The Box Office helps to make a films main revenue and sell the majority of the ‘tickets’ but without having to sell tickets and just stream the film from an online platform it takes away the cinematic and tangible experience that you get when seeing a film. This is where fragmentation between audiences has taken the biggest toll, through the easy access of different films and videos. There is where the biggest separation between generations comes into play. Ages like the silent gen and baby boomers are cable TV’s biggest viewer range, with channels like TV 2 and Bravo being a high demanded broadcaster.

Social media is a more recent and upcoming streaming platform. It has a popular usage rate with an estimate of 3.484 billion active users worldwide. The top 5 social media sites being used globally are, Facebook, Youtube, Whatsapp, FB Messenger and Webxin/Webchat. The estimated gross age range of users that have the largest utilisation contingent are between, 18-24 year-olds and 25-34 year olds. Millennials and Gen Z would be the most target audience for this method of media intake. This can also correlate with my generation, also known as the iGens and how myself included will spend hours scrolling through different social networking feeds rather than going out and purchasing something such as a DVD.

Disk sales have gone down more than 86% in the last 13 years, because people are no longer interested in hard copy pieces of information or sourced media. Audiences are now interested in on-demand and digital copies of films. The percentage is only increasing as new streaming services such as Disney+ or Youtube Red are being introduced, thousands of videos/movies can be offered within seconds yet it costs the same amount for an average subscription as it would to purchase a film on hard copy. This is one of the main factors in which younger generations are spending most of their time on the ‘internet’ because it is cost effective for a student with a budget. There are over 4.388 billion internet users internationally and 4.22 million of them are New Zealand users alone. Around 95% of New Zealand's population accesses or uses the internet everyday. This can contrast between the different age groups where elderly people may find it harder to ‘get online’ whereas generations like the iGens have grown up with this technology and over time many technological convergents have taken place where in the past you had to try and look for a signal in order to listen to someone speaking on a box radio, that was how people received the vast majority of their information. Whereas nowadays you can get a smartphone that has radio stations alongside the streaming of movies,music and even mobile gaming.

From the information of a survey that I recently conducted nearly half of the ages were between the ages of 15-20 and out of those over 65% of people watch more than an estimate of 250+ per year. This is because of how accessible film and media streaming is in this day and age. 40% of those were claimed to be watched at a cinema, which then contradicts the research done by other websites who claim that cinemas may be entering extinction. People prefer to watch a film without breaks unless they are small insignificant moments e.g. going to the bathroom or getting a drink/snacks. This is the perfect example of how a cinema works in how you are unable to pause the film so you have no other choice than to watch the film to its fullest extent otherwise you may waste your money.