chapter 3 draft

Social media has become a platform for video and picture distribution, and overall socializing. Social media already has popular platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat (to name a few). These social media sites have allowed consumers to share videos, pictures, articles, messages, play games and create a video-blogger like experience, often called 'stories'. These have always had the idealism to share personal content with family and friends.



However, with social media beginning to increase in its popularity, there has been a massive expansion in users, in different age ranges, different nationalities and sexes.

For example, Facebook; with its 2.3 billion users, and its variety of countries that use it such as India, the U.S, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, the UK (and many more) (Clement, 2019), Arguably has a large demographic of users, with a vast age range, with the youngest users (legally allowed to use it) being 13 (Facebook, 2019) and the oldest known user being 114 years of age (Rivera, 2014), and an almost equal gender usage, with only a 14% difference globally between the sexes (Clement, 2019), It has become the perfect place for companies and businesses to reach different niche audiences.

With the attractiveness of a large demographic, millions of audiences (Owens, 2016, p.394) and the interest of paying advertisers, social media sites have begun to appeal as a distributing site. With social media being free to distribute too, it becomes accessible to many, the prosumer, the independent producer and additionally even professional media companies.



It can be argued that social media is a good platform of video distribution, for prosumers and independent producers as (Brown and Duthie, 2016, p. 29) states, there are no restrictions to self-distributing: distributing what you want, when you want, to any social media such as Facebook or YouTube or even Google Blogger. It is accessible to everyone with common technology such as smartphones, computers or any kind of mobile device; it allows one to record moving image and upload it online within minutes, where it can then be viewed by anyone with access (Satell, 2013).

As new technology becomes more affordable and better quality, prosumers and independents can begin to produce more professional-looking content (Satell, 2013).



For the Independent free-lance producer, social media becomes a good opportunity for those starting out in the industry. A free-lancer can promote their self, their video, on multiple social media platforms, 'owned distribution' to exhibit their work, all for free (H, 2019).

Furthermore, some social media sites allow distributors to earn money from their videos, create a fan base, and even so get noticed by larger media companies.



Social media sites are now taking advantage of this by developing additional sites that are specifically made for tv-like video content. For example, Facebook has created 'Facebook Watch', Instagram has created 'IGTV' and YouTube has created 'YouTube TV'.



However, despite the free distribution, one has to count that any productions have to be self-funded.

This is okay for the prosumer creating non-professional content, as they can make cheap "productions" for example uploading raw footage or videos edited on free or cheap software, (which both production and post-production can be done using common technology such as smartphones.)

For the media company, although making professional content, this tends to be much less of an issue. Media companies most likely already have funding and supply of high-end equipment.

But for the freelancer, this may be an issue as they want to create professional-looking content, are self-funded, and may or may not have professional equipment already. Thus, being still a high-expense for freelance/independent. Yet, despite the expense, it may be their only opportunity to self-produce content.

It becomes more of a personal question for those trying to Professional self-distribute, "Is this do-able?".



For my research, I have interviewed a self-producer, currently animating their own 'tv' content and self-distributing using social media. (Will be getting answers early November from producer due to language barriers and their schedule.)



'Facebook Watch', a relatively new platform, launched in 2018 (Graham, 2019) is feasibly useful for both consumers and professionals in a variety of ways.

Free and accessible to audiences, to all who have a Facebook account, allows for a more modern viewing experience; where you can share videos, comment and interact virtually instead of traditional viewing. More choice for the viewer with video-content both episodic and non-episodic (Shukla, 2018), options can offer a more traditional viewing or more a YouTube-like experience with these different choices. Also, one can watch both original shows and, network content from 20th Century Fox Television (Levenson, 2019). 

For producers, both professional and amateur, Facebook is making programming more accessible by allowing beginners and professionals to use 'Facebook Watch' as a platform to distribute videos, for anyone with a Facebook account (Castillo, 2018). Moreover, producers can earn money from not only monetizing but also direct payments from viewers, using 'Fan subscriptions' which gives them access to exclusive content (Graham, 2019). Furthermore, producers who use Facebook Watch have more control over their content, unlike on-demand streaming sites and traditional broadcasted tv networks (Castillo, 2018).

Plausibly advertisers drive the business of the Tv industry economically, for Facebook Watch this is also the case, producers will earn their money by consumers viewing the advertisements in their videos; similar to other social media sites. Facebook Watch has made it easier for both advertisers and producers, with the feature 'Brand Collabs Manager' (Graham, 2019), this feature helps advertisers find shared demographics of producers so that advertising is more suited to the right audiences.

Of course, this feature makes it more attractive to advertisers as their content is being seen by their target audience; and could lead to more sales. The more advertisers invested in using their videos for ads, the more potential for revenue to be made for producers (and Facebook.)

Another reason content providers may prefer this feature is because of past issues with on the monetization platform 'YouTube', as there have been arguments and complaints about YouTube ads being placed insensitive to video-content, which could cause some offence to viewers.

Facebook's plan for the new platform is for it to be a breeding ground of discussion and sharing of video content; making it more of a social experience, views are 'social-driven'; the more views increases the income for Facebook and its content creators (Levenson, 2019).

On the down-side, whilst ads are a good way for content creators to make money, they tend to be off-putting to audiences. Audiences videos may be interrupted halfway through by an ad, which disrupts the viewing experience; decreases their attention and if the add is too-long, they may lose interest and skip the entire video without finishing it.

This may infer that videos aren't actually respected for being well-made or high-quality; they are just used for social interaction to get more views, for adds. Which from the perspective of a producer, is a great negative if you value your work.

Personally, I think the future of Facebook watch as a distributor looks bleak, what was once used as a lure to content-creators to join soon will change, Facebook watch creators may still get free distribution and earn money, which seems great, yet soon will take a negative twist with Facebook taking 30% off content creators earnings (Graham, 2019), which may sound very displeasing for any creator who already has adds creating nugatory experiences for their audience.

Facebook Watch is planning to make 12 million U.S dollars by 2022 (Levenson, 2019) conceivably a prediction of great prosperity, I do not believe this represents the same success also for its content creators.

Including, Facebook does not seem to have the popularity that it requires for such success, Facebook as a social media platform has been decreasing its popularity; since 2015 it has gone down by 19% (Shukla, 2018). In more up-to-date research, I discovered that only 5% of the forty people I surveyed used Facebook for watching content daily, with 52% never using it and 25% rarely using it.

One may use Facebook in moderation, but I have high doubts that it will pick up extensively enough that it could ever have sufficient popularity to take over other social streaming sites for online streaming.

Instagram has also produced its own platform for video distribution, called IGTV. IGTV is arguably for the prosumer, and not for professional distributing; however official music videos, such as ‘Pieces of us’ by Mark Ronson, have been released using this new platform.

And undeniably, there is potential for episodic programming to be released this way shortly.

Currently, it supports modern technology such as 4k, which has a cinematic high-quality (Cohen, 2019), it can show content that is up to 60 minutes long (Loren, 2019), Where an episode is normally anything between 10-40 minutes in length, and additionally, it can distribute in both vertical and landscape videos giving more creative and technical options for producers (Loren, 2019). Instagram is shaping the future of Tv, in a way producers create and distribute content, and the overall viewers exhibiting experience of the tv, by Instagram transforming the television experience onto social media, it becomes a mobile experience, for both creators and viewers (Loren, 2019).

An example of this by professionals is the music video by singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, 'King Princess' and Mark Ronson's, (who has been awarded multiple awards and an MTV VMA) collaborative piece 'Pieces of Us' (Holt, 2019); which was not only distributed on social media apps tended for mobile devices, but was also produced using mobile phones; including production and post-production.

By making it a mobile experience, in producing and distributing and viewing aspects, it begins to blur the lines between professional producer and prosumer. It becomes accessible to all, anyone with an Instagram account can contribute to uploading content on to the site, which becomes public (Loren, 2019).

What further blurs the lines between professional and amateur, is that it can become a profession for either, prosumers will eventually be able to earn money off the videos they upload, it is no longer just a profession for the professionals; as the CEO of Instagram comments, "There will be away for creators to make a living" which is not standard to those with qualifications, but anyone whom uploads and receives views (Loren, 2019).

Although, this is arguable between all Internet-based platforms now advancing into distribution, for example, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, as (Musburger and Kindem, 2009, P. 6) points out, the internet is low costing for producers and is easily accessible. And as discussed about ‘Facebook watch’ there is the similar issues with ads, with how producers earn their money.

One thing to note also is that, despite social media platforms producing new video-streaming platforms, YouTube is still the most successful, with some of its creators apparently earning  'millions of dollars every month' unlike Instagram's and Facebooks new competition 'IGTV' and 'Facebook watch', struggling to compete against YouTube's success (Graham, 2019). Undeniably, YouTube has more potential to become a leading distributor, whereas Facebook Watch and IGTV does not. This shows platforms dedicated to this are not so successful.

As a whole, social media as a distributor has a lot of out weighting negatives than positives currently, although this could change. For example, one thing I noticed from my pool of research, is that young adults (18-24-year-olds) often watch video content such as YouTube. Overall they (even if not many) consume video content through social media much more than older audiences. When asked how often they consumed YouTube video-content and how often they consumed face book video-content, there was a massive decrease in regularity of watching these (in both questions) by older audiences, a correlation as older the audiences were, the least amount of time they spent watching video content on either platform. Younger audiences are growing up in a social media and internet-connected world; I predict that within the next thirty years, the growth of using social media to watch tv will greatly increase. However, I still do not think it has the potential to replace other sources of streaming and broadcasting. In current day arguably one should choose where to distribute depending on the demographics of their audience, especially age considering the correlation between age and using internet based platforms.

Overall, social media is a good potential for distribution as it gives access to both the viewer and the distributer. It's good for starter-uppers perhaps, but not professionals. Money can be earned, but social media takes a percentage. It may rely on one’s demographic target audience, as from my primary research I discovered that older audiences rarely, if not ever watch using social media.