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Business of Hollywood > Terms and Acronyms > Flashcards

Terms and Acronyms Flashcards

1
Q

What is the WGA?

A

The Writers Guild of America

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2
Q

What is the MPAA?

A

The Motion Picture Association of America

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3
Q

What is the NATO?

A

The National Association of Theatre Owners

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4
Q

What does OTT mean?

A

Over The Top - a streaming media service offered directly to viewers over the Internet.

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5
Q

What does WFH mean?

A

Work-for-hire

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6
Q

What is the AMPTP?

A

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers

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7
Q

What are DTC services?

A

Direct to Consumer services

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8
Q

Why is the discussion of ideology relevant in the media industries?

A
  • Media as a purveyor of the dominant ideology
  • How various ideologies are embedded into media content, how they are framed, organised, silenced, privileged or dismissed by other ideologies
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9
Q

What is circumscribed agency?

A

a concept that conceives of media workers as agents with some degree of individual autonomy, though that autonomy is limited by a range of forces including:

  • the workplace culture
  • industry lore
  • the priorities of their organisations and superiors
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10
Q

What is the information economy?

A

The range of industries included is debated. Expanded reliance on jobs that involve some sort of ‘symbolic manipulation’ for example: jobs involving the design, computing and rearranging of words, images and sounds. Sector of jobs involving the production, collection, processing, analysis, and presentation of information and entertainment

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11
Q

What are distribution windows?

A

The time period during which a movie is made available in a particular form (i.e., movie theaters, DVD, etc.)

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12
Q

What is mass production?

A
  • Emphasized centralisation
  • Standardisation of genre
  • Long term profit horizons
  • Durable goods - physical objects
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13
Q

What is mass customisation?

A
  • Just in time and decentralised production
  • Production for niche markets
  • Prioritised quarterly earnings
  • Private goods, increased reliance on service and information industries to overall economy
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14
Q

What is consolidation?

A

The merger and acquisition of many smaller companies into a few much larger ones.

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15
Q

What is SVOD?

A

Subscription Video on Demand.
E.g. Netflix; Amazon Prime Video
Involves authenticated access for paying subscribers to a library of on-demand streaming content. Pay for blanket access to a library of content without regard to whether they are watching any specific piece or quantity of content.

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16
Q

What is AVOD?

A

Advertising-Supported Video on Demand
E.g. YouTube
Customers get access to one or more pieces of on-demand streaming content which is provided at no charge to the customer but is accompanied by advertisements (can be pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll)

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17
Q

What is PVOD?

A

Premium Video on Demand.
Used to describe a service, that would include content in early windows - for example you would be able to watch a movie using a PVOD service, even when the movie was still playing in movie theaters - or very shortly after.

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18
Q

What is bundling?

A
  1. Bundling by cable/broadcast, etc.
    Subscriptions which provide access to a bundle of goods. Valuable to both industry and consumers - more efficient distribution. TV viewers frustrations about pricey bundles.
  2. Packaging (a practice of bundling by agents/management)
    To bundle talent together for products in the hopes that it will further the project - e.g. bundling a script with a director and actors.
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19
Q

What is industry lore?

A

Offers a historical understanding of agency in which decisions are understood through accepted ways of being successful - e.g. ‘movies featuring people of colour don’t sell well internationally’

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20
Q

What are sunk costs?

A

High expenditure to manufacture at the start of a product’s life cycle. Media companies tend to have a high level of sunk costs.

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21
Q

What are first-copy costs?

A

The costs of making the first copy of the product. Media industries typically have high first copy costs and relatively low marginal or reproduction costs. After the very high first copy costs, the distribution is relatively low.

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22
Q

What is conglomeration?

A

Conglomeration is the integration of previously distinct sectors of media industries under a single corporate umbrella - The Walt Disney company, originally a studio, has expanded into broadcast and cable TV, magazine publishing, radio, recorded music, book publishing - as well as outside of the media industry with theme parks and merchandise. Defers the risk created by the uncertainty of media goods’ success by placing media production within massive, often diversified corporations. Can spread risk by combining media ventures with other, less risky, ventures. Can refer to two different organisational strategies - vertical and horizontal integration.

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23
Q

What is an oligopoly?

A

When a small group of companies dominate the industry. As oppose to a monopoly - when one company dominates the industry.

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24
Q

What is vertical integration?

A

The combination in one company of two or more stages of production normally operated by separate companies. The attempt to control every stage of a media good’s development. Keeps money within the conglomerate rather than getting a smaller percentage of the purchased product.

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25
Q

What is horizontal integration?

A

The acquisition of a business operating at the same level of the value chain in a similar or different industry. A company integrating horizontally might seek to purchase multiple production studios. This reduces or eliminates competition, allowing the entity to charge higher fees or control terms.

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26
Q

What are economies of scale?

A

When the average cost of a commodity decreases with expansion of output. Particularly important because of the high first-copy costs and the public good nature of the products.

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27
Q

What are economies of scope?

A

Decreased costs of production that come from producing a wide range of products. Research and development can be shared across multiple products and integrated or related amrketing campaigns can be used. Can more efficiently create multiple films than if each were independently produced. Conglomerates can leverage the popularity of characters, stories and settings across multiple different media like film, video games, etc. These other parts created by the film help to cross-promote the film.

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28
Q

What are dual product markets?

A

Content is sold - or given - to audiences and audiences are, in turn, sold to advertisers, audiences occupy the unique position of being the customer in one market and the product in the other market. E.g. media supported by advertising

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29
Q

What are demographics?

A

A methodology of characterising audiences into narrow subsections of the population, esp. to advertise to as advertisers desire certain groups of customers (e.g. women over 25)

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30
Q

What is a mixed mandate system?

A

A vital public system remains, but a commercial system has developed alongside it. Nearly all countries have mixed mandate systems. This allows the public media to focus their resources particularly on those underserved by the commercial media - leading to different decisions than in a solely public mandate.

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31
Q

What is a loss leader?

A

a product sold at a loss to attract customers

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32
Q

What are the four quadrants?

A

Companies often aim for 4Q appeal. The four quadrants that have been used to identify an audience are:

  • Men over 25
  • Men under 25
  • Women over 25
  • Women under 25
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33
Q

Who was Lew Wasserman?

A

Was head of the MCA Agency (Music Corporation of America) which was founded in 1924. MCA acquired Universal but incoming regulation forced them to sell one and they sold the agency. Universal continued to grow and Wasserman remained as a figurehead until he died.

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34
Q

What is a dual revenue stream?

A

Revenue comes from more than one stream - advertising-supported and transaction/subscription-supported revenues.

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35
Q

What is disintermediation?

A

The removal of intermediaries from a supply chain, or “cutting out the middlemen” in connection with a transaction/series of transactions.

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36
Q

What are O&Os?

A

Owned and Operated Stations
The major commercial tv broadcasting networks — ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC — air their programming on hundreds of stations across the country, yet they only own a select few.

37
Q

What are affiliates?

A

Two more specific uses in business contexts: In corporate law and taxes, an affiliate is a company that is related to another company, usually by being in the position of a member or a subordinate role, a subsidiary. a subsidiary is a company whose parent is a majority shareholder.

38
Q

What is 1st run syndication?

A

Shows which are not owned by a particular network and are aired at different stations across the US. Includes popular day time television like talk shows and game shows e.g. Wheel of Fortune.

39
Q

What is 2nd run syndication?

A

A rerun. The show was licensed originally and belonged to a network (e.g. NBC and Seinfeld). Every individual station is paying fees and there is ad revenue for each station.

40
Q

Explain the license fees and deficit financing model

A

The license fees are paid by the network to the studio. Deficit financing is when networks use leverage to say that they are not going to cover all of the production budget. They instead produce it at a loss while leaving 30-40% to still be made up. They run at tight margins. The studio need a lot of money to make the product - it might not even be picked up. Therefore, they try to do multiple projects so that one justifies the rest.

41
Q

What is fin-syn?

A

The Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, widely known as the fin-syn rules, were a set of rules imposed by the FCC in the US in 1970.

42
Q

What is the difference between a salary and residuals?

A

A salary is the amount that a worker is paid for the hours they complete. Residuals are about compensating workers for the distribution or exhibition of their work beyond its initial use.

43
Q

What are the differences between broadcast and cable?

A

Technology - broadcast is over the air, cable is wired into the home
Regulation - broadcast is more tightly regulated because it was premised on scarcity and the limited resources of signal disruption and cable is regulated because of its impact on broadcasting and was considered a natural monopoly.
Business model - broadcasting is ad supported and ‘free’ to consumers and cable is subscription and advertising based - made more money than broadcast bc it was bundled.

44
Q

What is a natural monopoly?

A

a regulatory idea that posits that some industries can only operate efficiently and profitably if they are controlled by a single monopoly organisation.

45
Q

What is the day-and-date system?

A

When a film becomes available in theaters, DVD and VOD all on the same day. Does not happen frequently because of the relationships built between media companies and distributors

46
Q

What is technological determinism?

A
  • The potentialities of technology are determinant on their uses.
  • This gives strong, nearly omnipotent, powers to the technologies that surround us.
  • Both technological utopian and technological dystopias are examples of technological determinism – it is the technology that has a huge power of itself rather than by the people or institutions using them.
47
Q

What is cultural determinism?

A
  • The cultural uses of a technology determine how that technology develops and the influences it has on industry and society.
  • Sees technology as an inert force shaped by other, far more powerful forces
  • Disregards the meaningful role played by technology, including the engineers who design it, the corporations that manufacture and market it and the other industrial and regulatory conditions.
48
Q

What is Peak TV?

A
  1. Volume - more platforms and networks producing original content than every before
  2. Fragmentation - the supply of new television series has outpaced population growth, leading to shrinking audiences on a show by show basis.
  3. The TV Blockbuster - more premium programming experiences, higher budgets and production values, more beloved underlying source material, flashier talent in front of and behind the camera
  4. Low budget production and growing nichification - some networks and producers have instead opted for a moneyball approach in which they favour smaller production budgets
  5. Significant disruption and innovation in business and exhibition models - decreased advertising, bundling video subscription with broader package of retail (Amazon, Apple). Binge viewing, on demand viewing, disintermediated relationships.
49
Q

What is the difference between formal and informal regulations?

A

Formal self-regulations refer to the creation of self imposed rules which limit or categorise content whereas informal regulations are not made official but rather are acknowledged ideas of what is or is not commercially viable

50
Q

What are common carriers?

A

Telecommunications network operators that do not originate media content, such as the telephone industry

51
Q

What is linear scheduling?

A

Consumers/audiences watch media content when it is scheduled/broadcast

52
Q

What is non-linear scheduling?

A

Any scheduling in which the consumer/audience control/get rid of the schedule (e.g. streaming services, recordings etc.)

53
Q

Define the legacy media industries.

A

the mass media institutions that dominated prior to the Information Age; particularly print media, film studios, music studios, advertising agencies, radio broadcasting, and television. E.g. The New York Times, Viacom, etc.

54
Q

What is convergence?

A

The merging of mass communication outlets – print, television, radio, the Internet - with portable and interactive technologies through various digital media platforms. The blending of multiple media forms into one platform for purposes of delivering a dynamic experience.

55
Q

What are add-on channels?

A

Channels which can be added on to other subscriptions

- E.g. Showtime can be added to a Hulu or Prime subscription as an add-on.

56
Q

What are marginal costs?

A

the increased or decreased cost of producing one additional unit of a product or service

57
Q

What is retransmission consent?

A

the requirement of cable operators and other multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to obtain permission from commercial broadcasters before carrying their programming.

58
Q

What is the difference between society-making and segment-making media?

A

Society-making media is media based on broad societal appeal whereas segment-making media is based on more niche programming which appeals to segments of the market rather than a citizenry or family.

59
Q

What does it mean to cross-subsidise?

A

the practice of charging higher prices to one type of consumer to artificially lower prices for another group. To spread the cost between systems that would normally be very different in cost due to disproportionate spending necessary to their function.

60
Q

What is a public good?

A

Commodities that are not destroyed or used up in the process of consuming them.

61
Q

What is a private good?

A

Commodities that are destroyed or used up in the process of consuming it. E.g. car, when you buy or lease a car, no one else can benefit from the labour and goods required to manufacture it, making it a private good.

62
Q

What is just-in-time production?

A

A system of production which cuts down on the lag time between incurring production costs and receiving revenues from sales, avoids holding large inventories, by making products to the order which has been placed rather than creating a surplus to be stored and then ordered.

63
Q

What is an MVPD?

A

Multichannel Video Programming Distributor

64
Q

What is a vMVPD?

A

Virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributor

65
Q

What is churn?

A

refers to the rate at which customers stop doing business with an entity - commonly expressed as the percentage of service subscribers who discontinue their subscriptions within a given time period

66
Q

What is the difference between publicly and privately held companies?

A

Publicly held companies = those that anyone can buy stock in. They have a responsibility to stockholders to protect their investment and are subject to governmental regulations that require disclosure of financial details and adherence to particular accounting rules. Privately held media companies are typically managed by a family and are not subject to the same disclosure rules.

67
Q

What are synergies?

A

The combination of entities can be greater than the single sum of their parts. Cross promotion describes a conglomerate’s ability to market content developed for one sector throughout the other media sectors in its organisaiton.

68
Q

Who are the FTC?

A

Federal Trade Commission

69
Q

Who are the FCC?

A

Federal Communications Commission

70
Q

What did the Telecommunications Act of 1996 do?

A

facilitated deregulation within the telecommunications and media industry by:

  1. Opening up competition among local telephone providers
  2. Loosening cross-media ownership rules – e.g. the elimination of network-cable ownership restrictions
  3. Increasing the national audience share limits of individual station groups from 25% to 35%
  4. Extending broadcast license terms from 5 to 8 years; made renewal requirements less stringent.
71
Q

What are antitrust regulations?

A

statutes developed by the US government to protect consumers from predatory business practices - ensuring that fair competition exists in an open-market economy

72
Q

Is the content of the media industry a private or public good?

A

Economies consider most media as public or semi-public goods. The content of the media industry can be consumed by billions, all of whom consume it without preventing anyone else from doing so.

73
Q

What is the A List/B List issue?

A

The issue concerning the fluctuating popularity of actors and directors with and without cause. A popular actor with previous good performances can turn in a bad one or experience a scandal at the same time as the release. As a result, it is difficult to assign value to the status of creative staff in the media industry.

74
Q

What does the long period before profit refer to?

A

Refers to the long period before profit can be made from media content. It is commonplace in TV production for studios to lose money on network shows for the first three to five years. Movies often don’t make money until they are released on DVD or in-home streaming.

75
Q

What is ars longa?

A

Art is long. Refers to the long economic life of media industry products. Companies may continue to make money on a media good for decades after production is complete.

76
Q

How do the media industries respond to risk?

A
  • Intentional Overproduction
  • Artificial Scarcity
  • Bundling
  • Conglomeration
77
Q

What is intentional overproduction?

A

When companies intentionally create a surplus of media content to compensate for the unpredictability of media success. To offset inevitable miscalculations against a broad repertoire of products - so that one success pays for five failures.

78
Q

What is artificial scarcity?

A

A strategy to create scarcity in order to stretch the life of creative goods and allow for price differentiation - e.g. seeing a film when it is released versus seeing it later on iTunes.

79
Q

What is concentration/consolidation of ownership?

A

The extent to which a market or industry is dominated by the largest businesses. US media businesses have become more consolidated (less competitors) as well as highly conglomerated entities with a wide range of media and other holdings.

80
Q

What are the names of the organisations involved in the writers’ suit?

A

CCA - Creative Artists Agency
UTA - United Talent Agency
WME - Endeavor Group Holdings - a holdings company for talent and media agencies
WGA - Writers’ Guild of America

81
Q

What is a prosumer?

A

A producer and consumer. A term said to have come from the widespread availability of computerised media production tools and broadband internet access for distribution which allows for consumers to become involved in the production process.

82
Q

What is basic cable?

A

Ad supported cable (e.g. Cartoon Network)

83
Q

What is paid cable?

A

Cable that is not ad supported (e.g. Showtime, HBO)

84
Q

What is FVOD?

A

Free Video on Demand.
Get access to digital content without a direct charge, subscription charge or requirement of viewing ads. Typically appears, if at all, in the context of promotional exhibition of special feature-type secondary content.

85
Q

What is TVOD?

A

Transactional Video on Demand.
E.g. Apple’s iTunes, Google Play and Amazon Instant Video.
Paid access to content online with purchase and/or rental fees paid on a specific product-by-product basis. Viewed as a successor to the traditional home video market.
EST - Electronic Sell Through (permanent downloads of episodes or series)
ERT - Electronic Rental (temporary time limited download/viewing right)

86
Q

What does ARPU mean?

A

Average Revenue Per User/Unit
A measure used primarily by consumer communications, digital media, and networking companies, defined as the total revenue divided by the number of subscribers.

87
Q

What is a duopoly?

A

a situation in which two suppliers dominate the market for a commodity or service.

88
Q

What is cross ownership?

A

the ownership by one corporation of different companies with related interests or commercial aims.

Business of Hollywood (9 decks)

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