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The entertainment industry encompasses diverse aspects of entertainment including cinema, television, radio, theatre, music etc. and includes a large number of service providers which contribute to this sector. The media and entertainment industry represents a significant component of the economy of any country.
While there are myriad forms of exhibition entertainment, and live entertainment, this manuscript primarily focusses on the mass media and electronic entertainment industry. The mass media sector includes Television, live entertainment (musical shows, theatre and plays, drams and sports), films, broadcasting, radio, music industry (concerts, bands, choirs, singers, music composers), new media (web and social media), and the electronic entertainment industry includes video games etc.
The proliferation of communication and entertainment devices, and the era of smartphones, smart TVs and tablets has created a period where consumers have on demand access to specific content that they want to consume. Additionally, social media has brought in a dimension of social sharing to the erstwhile entertainment consumption experience and TV show ratings and popularity are impacted by audience reviews and comments on social media networks, which are becoming the pillars of content credibility (Kang, 2010). The last decade has brought about tremendous change. The advent of digitisation has changed the way M&E companies produce and share content with consumers. The consumers have also evolved and become more digitally savvy. This manuscript attempts to answer some very important questions like-
- (i)
What are the most significant transformations in the M&E industry over the last decade?
- (ii)
How have M&E players evolved?
- (iii)
How have the consumers evolved? Are they able to adopt the changes in technology at the same pace as the M&E companies? Do the M&E companies need to take some special measures to ensure that the consumers are comfortable with the adoption of digitisation? Do they need to segment the consumers and cater to them separately?
- (iv)
How are M&E players using the vast volumes of data that they are able to collect about their consumers now? Can they use the same for enhanced profitability as well as enhanced consumer experiences?
The manuscript moves forward with a literature review followed by a section which discusses the changing landscape of the Media and Entertainment world and subsequently comments on Media Consumption and the consumers of today. In this section, a consumer segmentation methodology is discussed which can enable the M&E players to understand the consumer psyche. This is followed by a discussion on the social media practices of the newage M&E consumers. Subsequently a case based approach is used and three case studies are used to demonstrate how some new techniques, best practices or methods have been successfully adopted by 3 M&E players from India. These include-
- (i)
The Indian Entertainment channel, Colors which has been successful in making use of online video streaming platforms, social media and Mobile Apps to reach out to consumers.
- (ii)
Netflix, India, its use of social media and its data analysis efforts and subsequent learnings for other M&E players.
- (iii)
NDTV Social and the usage of social media and mobile apps for the consumption of news
After evaluating these case studies, the manuscript proceeds to identify some important social media content objectives for M&E players. New technologies and methods will be successful only when all the stakeholders-organisations as well as consumers are able to use digitisation and social media to their maximum advantage.