Saturday, 2 April 2011

EVALUATION; Question 4 and5 : What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why? How will we attract/address our audience?


"Spotlight"
To distribute a movie a lot of money is needed, thats why independent movies have such a hard time to get through to the public. There are service that could help with that for free. Sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion are a good start to distribute a short movie or even to promote a movie. Those websites allow to upload and view videos from all over the world which can make it difficult for a particular video to become famous (go viral).
I will concentrate on YouTube because it's the biggest of video streaming websites and if something becomes famous on YouTube, it becomes famous everywhere. For a video to go viral it has to impress the viewers so that people "like" the video (clicking a "Like" button causes friends of that person to see the video). This means that another group of friends see it and their friends see it causing an increase in number of views. The more views you get the more probable it is that you will be displayed on the homepage causing another avalanche of views. 




Youtube is full of people with talents, they can include entertainment/comedy, blogs, fashion knowledge,  editing and SFX as well as music and technology. Different videos become famous for different things. A music video by a talent(less), 13 year old singer Rebecca Black which became a youtube sensation with 76,458,961 views and counting is an example of a viral video that became famous because of it being really terrible. It was spread among friends through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter as well as through the word of mouth. Now the "artist" is interviewed on TV and known among young people.


"Most Popular"
YouTube helps new film produces to become successful by creating contests, showing videos with little views on homepage and showing videos on "Spotlight"(right). 
Contests don't only allow new individual and low budget films to be seen by an audience but also if a movie wins it can get a funding for new equipment etc. 

Click for details
Showing videos on the homepage and "Spotlight" instantly cause an increase in views in videos that are noteworthy but not necessarily popular because they are viewed by every person who uses youtube. 

I personally think that YouTube is one of the best ways to distribute a movie because it's both, beneficial for the filmmakers as well as YouTube. It allows the public to find new talents and earns money for YouTube so it's a win-win situation :)


Here are few other ways of distributing media:



It's quite easy to target specific audience on the internet because we can see the activity of specific genders or age groups on different websites. Also the content that is viewed suggest what is the audience of that particular article, video etc. For example a video of a young(teenage), attractive, female singer would mainly attract female audience between the ages of 11 and 15 (depending on the artists age) and so the adverts often reflect that by advertising online stores with toys or video games. This means that the adverts can be quite precisely shown only to the target audience.

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