UPDATED chapter 3

Social media has become a platform for video and picture distribution, and overall socialising. 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.

Facebook; with its 2.3 billion users, and its variety of countries that use it such as India, the US, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Philippines, Vietimen, Thailand, Egpyt, Turkey and the Uk (Clement, 2019), Arguably has a broad demographic of users.

With a vast age range, the youngest users (legally allowed to use it) being 13 (Facebook, 2019) and the oldest known user being 114 years of age (Rivera, 2014). 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 broad 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. 

 Social media is an excellent 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 standard technology such as smartphones, computers or any kind of mobile device; it allows one to record moving image and upload it online within minutes, 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 freelance producer, social media becomes an excellent opportunity for those starting in the industry. A freelancer 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 fanbase, and even so get noticed by larger media companies. 

Social media sites are now taking advantage of this by developing new websites that are made explicitly 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. 

 Okay for the prosumer creating non-professional content. Using current technology of smartphones and other mobile devices, may upload raw footage or videos edited on free or inexpensive software. 

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 an 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 Profesional 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.)

From the conscious of an audience, social media has significant advantages.

McFadden (2018) argues that social media is vital for our need for socialising, From the way we consume social media, it has become eco-system we are dependant on. Predicted that our current consumption will make traditional media go extinct (McFadden, 2018). Future possibility for our primary source of all media to be relied upon by social media, including film and tv. 

Different social media sites all offer various features, pros and cons- some more popular than others. 

'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 conventional display 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 monetising 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). 

Advertisers economically support the TV industry. For Facebook Watch, this is also the case, as producers will earn their money by consumers viewing the adverts in their videos, similar to other social media sites. Facebook encourages entrepreneurs with the feature 'Brand Collabs Manager' (Graham, 2019), which helps the collaboration process. This feature allows advertisers to 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 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 on Facebook compared to other social media sites is because of past issues with monetisation on 'Youtube'. There have been arguments, and complaints about YouTubes ads 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; 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, while ads are an excellent way for content creators to make money, they tend to be off-putting to audiences. Audiences videos may be interrupted halfway through by an add, 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. 

 Inferring that videos lack respected for being well-made or high-quality; they are just used for social interaction to get more views, for ads. Which from the perspective of a producer, is a tremendous negative if you value your work.

I think the future of Facebook Watch as a distributor looks bleak. Once used as a lure to content-creators to join soon will change; on will take a cynical twist with facebook taking 30% off content creators earnings (Graham, 2019), displeasing for any creator. Creators already deal with a negatory experiences for their audience with ads interrupting the viewing of their content. 

Facebook Watch is planning to make 12 million US 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 demand; 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 Watch in moderation. Still, 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 nor traditional distributing. 

IGTV is an extension of Instagram, made for video-content. 

Instagram has always been targeted for the prosumer. However, official music videos such as 'Pieces Of Us' by Professional singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, 'King Princess' and Mark Ronson who has been awarded multiple awards and an MTV VMA, collaborative piece has been distributed to Instagram (Holt, 2019).

IGTV is arguably for the prosumer, and not for professional distributing. But with the distribution of music videos from reputational musicians, 

one can argue there is a market for professional video content. 

And undeniably, there is potential for episodic programming to be released this way shortly. Currently, IGTV can show content that is up to 60minutes long (Loren, 2019), where an episode usually is anything between 10-40 minutes in length. Also, IGTV supports modern technology such as 4k, which has a cinematic high-quality (Cohen, 2019) competing against other distributors streaming quality. Additionally, it can distribute in both vertical and landscape videos giving more creative and technical options for producers (Loren, 2019).    

Instagram is already impacting the industry and is shaping the future of Tv, in a way, producers create and distribute content, and the overall exhibiting experience of 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; 'Pieces Of US', 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. 

However, 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).

 Further blurring the lines between 'professional' and 'amateur', prosumers will eventually be able to earn money. 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 who uploads and receives views (Loren, 2019).

Both Instagram and Facebook has a big advantage

as Musburger and Kindem (2009, P. 6) points out, the internet is low costing for producers and is easily accessible. With Youtube also. 

However, Youtube is still the most successful, with some of its creators 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. 

As a whole, social media as a distributor has a lot of out weighting negatives than positives currently, although this could change. 

 One also has to consider audiences.

One thing I noticed from my pool of research is that young adults (18-24-year-olds) often watch video content such as youtube. Overal they (even if not many) consume video content through social media much more then older audiences. When asked how often they consumed video-content on Youtube and Facebook, there was a massive decrease in regularity of watching these by older audiences. A correlation as older the spectators were, the least amount of time they spent watching video content on either platform. One can presume that this pattern proceeds with many other social media sites.

From this, arguably, one should choose where to distribute depending on the demographics of their audience, especially age.

All things considered, social media is a good potential for distribution as it gives access to both the viewer and the distributer. It's suitable for starter-uppers perhaps, but not professionals. Money is earned, but social media takes a percentage.

If a professional company or freelancer chooses new modern ways of distribution, they must research who their demographic target audience are. From my primary research, I discovered that older viewers rarely, if not ever, watch using social media. 
Much younger audiences are the ones who participate in video watching online. However, that is still a considerably small amount watching. For the next decade, social media will be used for sub-content, such as behind the scenes and trailers, teasers, or just additional source of distribution. I, however, do not see one being able to rely fully on social media for main distribution, from both the producer and consumer. 

Perhaps social media will enjoy more success in much greater years. 

As younger audiences are growing up in a social media and internet-connected world; I predict that with in the next thirty years, the growth of using social media to watch tv will significantly increase. However, I still do not think it has the potential to replace broadcasted tv nor streaming services.