Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation/City University Research Seminars
Creative Innovation
A Seminar Series devoted to Creative Industries Research and Policy, based on the partnership between the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (cci.edu.au) and City University (city.ac.uk)
Seminar 6
Prof. Stuart Cunningham:
Rates of Change: Digital Distribution as Disruptive Technology in the Film Industry
Room: AG04, College Building, City University London
Date: Wednesday, 15/04/2009
Time: 13:00-14:50
RSVP to: Anna.Ramberg.1@city.ac.uk by Thursday 8 April 2009
Map and Directions: http://www.city.ac.uk/maps/buildings/college.html
This paper looks at an aspect of the breakdown of business models that have served established media industries like music, film, television, for decades: the eruption of digital distribution into the film industry in recent years.
Much debate in media and communication studies about industry structure and change is based on exaggerated oppositionalism: overly enthusiastic optimism versus determined pessimism over the potential of new technologies; assertions of ‘fundamental crisis’ in the strategies of the cultural industries versus re-assertions of the utter predictability that hegemonic capital will always already triumph. This is a depressing predicament and inhibits the discipline’s claims to providing rigorous insight into industry change which is, after all, continuous. It is based on deep-seated values which often results in ‘glass-half-empty/glass-half-full’ debates which manage the challenging complexity of universes of data by dividing them into selective portions that confirm previously established positions.
Instead, we can ask a range of questions which are subject to at least some degree of agreed empirical confirmation or refutation: what are the models? What are the alternative models? What have been their histories and successes/failures? Is there evidence for more, or less, sustainable business strategies (including not-for-profit strategies)? At what rate is change occurring? With what different impacts in different sectors?
The empirical data on which the paper is based comes from a close examination of 100+ websites which offer digital distribution of film (and other screen) content. The paper will analyse these businesses and enterprises in the context of the historical structure and modus operandi of the film distribution industry, one of the most stable and profitable sectors over the long duree of the twentieth century.
Stuart Cunningham is Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology, and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. He is author or editor of several books and major reports, most recently The Media and Communications in Australia (with Graeme Turner, Allen & Unwin, 2006), What Price a Creative Economy? (Platform Papers, 2006), Beyond the creative industries: mapping the creative economy in the United Kingdom (with Peter Higgs and Hasan Bakhshi, NESTA, 2008) and In the Vernacular: A Generation of Australian Culture and Controversy (University of Queensland Press, 2008).
For details of future seminars, and notes relating to all seminars, please go to: http://www.city.ac.uk/research/resdev/cci/seminars.html
Best
Anna
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Anna Ramberg
Research Development Manager
City Research Development and International Relations Office
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