Ownership and Funding

Ownership and Funding

Concepts of Ownership

Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) -
Public service broadcasting is a service purely for the public rather than for commercial purposes. An example of a PSB is BBC, which is funded through a licence fee and doesn’t have any advertising time.

Commercial Broadcasting -
Commercial broadcasting or private broadcasting is the exact opposite of Public Service Broadcasting and is funded through advertising profit. One example of Commercial broadcasting is Sky 1, which profits off adverts.

Corporate and private ownership -
Corporate industries are have shareholders in the stock market, companies such as Apple would be an example of this as they have a stock market. Private owned companies are usually figure-headed by someone or don’t have shares in the public.

Global Companies -
Global Companies are companies which exist and have invested in more than one country. An example of this within the media environment is Walt Disney, which is both present in the United Kingdom and the USA, and many other places.

Vertical Integration -
Vertical Intergration is where companies allow for competition within their industry. Within the film and TV landscape, Netflix create, distribute and provide their own original TV shows and films, but they allow other films and TV companies to provide their content on their platform. This is a healthy relationship.

Horizontal Integration/Monopolisation -
Horizontal Intergration is monopolisation so companies like Disney where they allow little to no competition within the industry. This is unhealthy for the industry as smaller or new companies will struggle to make money and the content that one company produces could cause all other content to be similar.

Forms of Funding

The Licence Fee -
The Licence Fee is a system of funding used in the United Kingdom which is required to be paid for if the household has a device which can receive transmissions in. It is primarily collected by the BBC and is their source of income, of which is used to pay for the radio and television transmissions.

Subscription -
A subscription is a form of payment over periodic time to receive a product or set of products over time, so long as these payments are paid for, which is decided by the company selling said subscription (weekly, monthly etc.). Subscriptions were commonly found in newspapers and magazines but have now been made commonplace on the internet. One of the biggest subscription services is Netflix, which provides users with films and TV shows to stream (or download now on mobile devices) to view as much as they like. This has dominated both the Film and TV markets, which has caused people to call it the “death of TV”. Netflix had a reported 2.64 billion dollars in revenue in the first quarter of 2017 alone.

One-off payment to own product -
A one-off payment to own a product is a simple sales procedure, where the consumer purchases a product once and keeps it. This is common in terms of DVD and Blu-Ray, where going out and buying the film means you can watch it as many times as you want. If you purchase something online to stream or download, so long as you have the account, you can access and download the product as many times as you want.

Pay per View -
Pay-per-view is a system where when the consumer purchases a “view” they can only watch it that one time unless the company releases it fully, either online, DVD or both. It is mostly common for sporting events, for example, the Floyd Mayweather VS Connor McGregor fighting match.

Sponsorship -
Sponsorship is providing money to a television show, film, radio etc. In return for advertising the brand and/or product. Product placement is a common form of sponsorship, where in a film, a character could be holding a Samsung Mobile Phone, and showing it to the camera in a scene for a few seconds.

Advertising -
Mostly found on television channels, radio stations and the Internet, advertising is the simplest form of brand and product name being shown to the public for a cost to the company advertising. It’s extremely common to see adverts on TV, for example, Sky 1, where every 15 mins a set of adverts is played, usually between 30 second and 60 seconds.

Product Placement -
As stated previously, product placements are a form of advertisement where a company’s product is seen in a film or TV programme for a few seconds, with just enough time to show off features of the product. One of the most common forms of product placement are technology and vehicles, for example, the iPhone is a very common product placement in media.

Private Capital -
Private capital is money given to a business through loan, however it is not acquired from government or the bank, and isn’t sourced from the public, it is from private individuals or groups of individuals.

Crowd-Funding -
Crowd-Funding is a common form of income for small time projects, also known in the media environment as Indie Projects. Crowdfunding sites are a very popular tool for people with great ideas and planning but without the income themselves to create such a project. They usually give out special rewards for people who helped fund the project.

Development funds -
This is a form of funding given to help the development of projects. The British Film Institute or BFI has a development fund to help people who are unlikely to be commercially financed at the early stage and require funds to help create the product.