When The World Is Your Market: Globalized Media from a Canadian Perspective
The CMF white paper titled Adjust Your Thinking: The New Realities of Competing in a Global Media Market maps today’s global media landscape and implications for Canadian companies.
Globalization—the flow of goods, ideas and people across international boundaries—is nothing new. It has existed for centuries, enabling the movement of everything from tea in cargo ships to cultural and social phenomena.
What is new is the expansion of these globalizing practices to the world of media production and distribution. In the music world, the combination of globalization and the Internet means pop hits from South Korea and Puerto Rico can freely cross national borders and become the most watched videos in YouTube’s history.
In television, it means that instead of thinking in terms of the infrastructure required for cable TV and fixed broadband, producers ought to consider new options for content delivery such as over-the-top (OTT) and mobile.
Globalized media from a Canadian perspective
What does globalized media look like from a Canadian perspective? It can take on the form of homegrown YouTube personalities with global followings in the millions, such as Michael McCrudden (Before They Were Famous), Mitchell Moffitt and Gregory Brown (ASAP Science) and comic actress and musician Lilly Singh, whose Superwoman channel now has over 2 billion views.
Another example is The Indian Detective, a co-production shot in Cape Town, Mumbai and Toronto starring Russell Peters as a Toronto cop of Indian descent who finds himself at the heart of a murder investigation while visiting his father in Mumbai.
Navigating in a post-broadcast, post-border world
The white paper Adjust Your Thinking can help Canadian TV, film and game producers understand the shifts currently afoot in a post-broadcast, post-border world.
The white paper is both a standalone document and a companion piece to the series of seven fact sheets released by the CMF in the fall of 2017 that analyze key regions in the media entertainment industries of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and India from the perspective of their potential as export markets or production partners for Canadian companies.
Commonplace today are the border-straddling streaming platforms operated by Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, as well as mobile multimedia devices used by billions daily to both capture and consume media, everywhere from the streets of the world’s largest and most sophisticated urban centres to the planet’s remoter and more underdeveloped regions.
Such developments are behind Vice’s push into 45 African markets. Vice, which recently partnered with African telco and pay TV operator Econet and French telco Orange, now serves over 100 million customers in 19 African countries and has recently added a VOD (video on demand) platform to its offering which it bills as a mini-Netflix with local, national and international content.
Fast facts regarding the actual global media landscape:
- Facebook: a social network with 2 billion users worldwide
- YouTube: an online video-sharing platform, open to anyone, with over a billion hours of video viewed daily, half of which is viewed on mobile devices
- Netflix: a streaming video service with over 100 million subscribers in 200 countries
- Close to two thirds of the world’s adults own smartphones whereas, in the developing world, 8 out of 10 own mobile phones
For more information on the global state of the media, tech, and entertainment industries, you can download for free Adjust Your Thinking: The New Realities of Competing in a Global Media Market.
