Today, every single form of media is owned by a company that has the right to produce, exhibit, and distribute that product. This ownership can cause a lot of problems within these media and have a strong effect on them. A big example of media ownership includes 20th-century fox, a huge film company in America that has distributed many popular and successful tv-series and movies.
One of the largest ways a form of media can be affected by the company whom it is owned is piracy. Piracy is known as illegally distributing a form of media with the owner or company’s permission. Advances in technology have now allowed piracy to become an easier and cheaper process. The internet used by billions of people worldwide, allows pirate films to leak and spread very quickly around the world. The biggest effect of piracy is how much money these companies lose from it. Streaming services such as Netflix lose around 50 billion dollars a year because of content that is pirated. Another effect on film is piracy happening directly from a cinema. This allows for these films to be easily accessed for free online meaning movies would not be able to meet their budget and less and less films will be created since profit will not be good. Examples of films that have been pirated include Transformers, Star Trek, and The Incredible Hulk. In order to prevent Piracy, Films have begun being displayed in 3D. 3D cinemas cannot be filmed properly on cameras and are harder to Pirate. Watching a good 3D quality movie can have a high cost which means huge audiences are not interested yet.
Hollywood is an American film industry that is known to be one of the oldest and most powerful. They include production companies such as Universal, Sony, Warner brothers which are considered multi-million-dollar industries. This power allows them to dominate the entire world’s film industry as they can release many products and carry a lot of money for marketing and distributing. This makes it easy for them to put out tons of average films that are only created for the money and actors’ names that will play more in movie theatres than small independent films. Lack of good movies causes the theatres to lose an audience and the film industry to lose more money. One industry taking action in order to solve this problem caused by Hollywood is the UK film council. To generate money, they have a deal where 1 pound of lottery money, allows them to generate 5 pounds at the box office.
For the past few years, a huge discussion going on in society is news channels and papers being biased. Whether it's political, social, or economic, no two news sources will ever be on the same page about a certain issue. Part of this has to do with the ownership of the specific news channel. The ownership of a news company greatly affects the content and the volume of what the news covers. Owners have the power to fire anyone, hire anyone, set budgets, and stop certain topics from being covered just to keep a good image of the news company. One of the biggest issues with this is politics. The owners’ political views will always contribute to what the specific news channel stands for, making them a biased source of information. One big example of this is CNN and Fox news. Both channels are argued by audiences to be on two different political sides. This causes arguments that involve their owners, workers, audiences, and even politicians.
In conclusion, the media controls almost everyone but barely anyone knows who is controlling the media. Media ownership causes a lot of problems for media, the audience, and the economy. Although these industries' goal is to help distribute media, their top, and hidden priority is to get to the top and take over the world.