This week I was forced to complete my outline chapters and draft chapter. I started off by completing my outline chapters, so I will know which draft chapter to write and have an understanding of what goes in which chapter. These were the draft chapters that I planned to write.
Content consumption.
Changing time (covid)
Does it have an economic effect?
Commercialisation
Impact on the visual effects industry.
How does this affect the outcome of the movie?
Demand for high-quality visuals ( Competition among VFX studios)
New technologies (Virtual Sets)
This is what the final version of the outline chapters looks like:
General Outline of Each Chapter
Chapter 1: Content Consumption and changing times
In this chapter, we are going to delve straight into the definition of content consumption. We will also speak about how the consumption of content has changed over a period of time, with a particular focus on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 on media consumption.
Chapter 2: Commercialization
This section is going to shine a light on the profits made by streaming sites before and after the pandemic. There will be a comparison of how different streaming sites compete against one another for viewership. We are going to compare this to the profits made by cinemas over the same period of time. We will also look at profits made by movies shown only at cinemas in comparison to movies showcased solely on streaming sites.
Chapter 3: Impact on the Visual Effects Industry
We will see the effect that all the information described in the previous chapters has had on the visual effects industry over time. This chapter will also describe the losses faced by the industry as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes that have taken place as a result.
Chapter 4: The End Result
This is a deep dive into the recent utilisation of visual effects in multiple streaming site originals and how it has helped the industry to gain a strong foothold in the currently trending content. We will also look at how the industry has evolved over time in order to be able to deliver content faster without compromising on quality.
Chapter 5: New Developments
A description of the latest developments in visual effects.
A Draft Chapter (Title)
Content Consumption and Changing Times
Content consumption refers to how an audience listens to and views entertainment media. This includes television shows and movies. Content consumption originally began with newspapers and then branched out to radio services. Television came into the picture a few decades ago, and now there has been a shift to online streaming services as the main source of entertainment media.
A major shift was noted in the year 2020- during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several research papers indicated that there was a shift from cinemas and television to streaming platforms at the time and this change appears to be here to stay, even post-pandemic.
The statistics from the UK cinema association (2023) showed a pre-pandemic cinema attendance of 176 million which then dropped to only 44 million in the year 2020. This has now picked up to 117 million in 2022 but has not gone back to the pre-pandemic attendance. People had to be getting content from somewhere during the pandemic as this was the period of time when people spent the most time at home with not much else to do. It was found that people tended to subscribe to more online streaming services during the pandemic period. The percentage of consumers that subscribed to more than 4 streaming services went up from 4% to 10% from 2019 to 2020. (Wallenstein, A. 2021) Streaming services have broadly retained their share of viewing after achieving a surge in subscriptions in 2020.
However, time spent watching TV by broadcasters, which had already been declining over a period of time and picked up during the pandemic period, has again started to continue its decline.
A survey revealed that 87% of people had increased screen time during the pandemic. 28% of the participants reported that this was due to a lack of other entertainment options and 32% stated that it was due to the growing content availability on OTT platforms. 75% of participants preferred OTT content over Television and 54% of people felt this was due to better content availability on OTT platforms. (Garima, S.N. and Dr Surbhi, D. 2020)
Another reason stated by survey participants for preference OTT platforms over television appeared to be due to the telecasting of old and repeated episodes during the pandemic lockdown period. (Sunitha, S. Dr, Sudha, S. 2020)
Among the trends and counter-trends gathered in the study, it was noted that there was a steady increase in the importance of home (and other alternative) movie watching over movie theatres. The availability of better quality methods and devices to watch movies in the home environment (and on consumer portable devices) has caused this shift away from cinema visits. The emergence of these consumer trends and special demands had begun years ago, but due to the COVID situation, its previous slow rise turned into a rapid acceleration: while digital content providers and the movie-producing companies themselves shifted relatively smoothly (or increased their capacity) towards new broadcasting models, brick and mortar movie theatres had their operations halted in such a manner that their resumption after the pandemic also became uncertain. (Ádám, H and Balázs,G. 2021).