Entertainment Dynamics

The “Competitor Analysis: Understanding your Opponents” paper mentions the entertainment industry as a dynamic industry and susceptible to many competitors as well as substitution. This industry has changed dramatically over the years and the landscape of the industry has changed as well. I agree with this assertion and wanted to look a little more into it to learn more about the field.

Entertainment is a pretty broad industry and has claimed many avenues today. The entertainment industry technically comprises of a variety of players including businesses that make motion pictures, independent movies, television programs, streaming content, and video games [1]. This immediately satisfies the first criteria for a dynamic industry as defined by the competitor analysis as “numerous products and services offering a similar need.” If we focus on digital entertainment there is a vast number of services offering on-demand streaming services that have completely changed the market.

In the streaming services alone there are multiple players, including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, Youtube TV, Sling and Fubo. Another characteristic of such an industry is the diversity of players in the market. This is very saturated in the entertainment industry as people can get different forms of this from cable tv, internet streaming website, dvds and videos, movie theaters and even phone applications. There is also limited barriers to entry for this market. It is possible for a blogger on the internet to just put a couple of videos and instantaneously gain a viewership that any cable channel might spend thousands of dollars to advertise. The market is fragmented because of the rise in connectivity.[2] One of the huge aspects that streaming companies mentioned above are changing is how to monetize their products and services. There is also many different segments in the market who all want different forms of entertainment.

While looking into this paper and its relation to the entertainment industry it makes a lot of similar points to the porter’s five forces way of sizing competitors. It almost seems as though a dynamic industry as described by the Competitor analysis corresponds to an industry with strong forces in Porter’s analysis. There is a threat of new entrants in the field because of the limited barriers and continually changing nature of the industry. Looking at the industry from that perspective, the threat of substitutes is high because of the rapidly changing technology and requirements from the customer. With the waning out of cable there is also low switching costs for customers to move from one entertainment service to another. It will be interested to see where the future of the industry goes. Many traditional cables are diversifying into online streaming services to compete with the new entrants in the market, but there is definitely room for new innovation and strategies to dominate the industry!

[1] https://www.selectusa.gov/media-entertainment-industry-united-states

[2] https://www.slideshare.net/mgoodman989/succeeding-in-a-fragmented-media-and-entertainment-market-30360015