People still want the TV and movie experience offered by traditional studios, but social platforms are becoming competitive for their entertainment time—and even more competitive for the business models that studios have relied on. Social video platforms offer a seemingly endless variety of free content, algorithmically optimized for engagement and advertising. They wield advanced ad tech and AI to match advertisers with global audiences, now drawing over half of US ad spending. As the largest among them move into the living room, will they be held to higher standards of quality?
At the same time, the streaming on-demand video (SVOD) revolution has fragmented pay TV audiences, imposed higher costs on studios now operating direct-to-consumer services, and delivered thinner margins for their efforts. It can be a tougher business, yet the premium video experience offered by streamers often sets the bar for quality storytelling, acting, and world-building. How can studios control costs, attract advertisers, and compete for attention? Are there stronger points of collaboration that can benefit both streamers looking to reach global audiences and social platforms that lack high-quality franchises?
This year’s Digital Media Trends lends data to the argument that video entertainment has been disrupted by social platforms, creators, user-generated content (UGC), and advanced modeling for content recommendations and advertising. Such platforms may be establishing the new center of gravity for media and entertainment, drawing more of the time people spend on entertainment and the money that brands spend to reach them.
Our survey of US consumers reveals that media and entertainment companies—including advertisers—are competing for an average of six hours of daily media and entertainment time per person (figure 1). And this number doesn’t seem to be growing.2 Not only is it unlikely that any one form of media will command all six hours, but each user likely has a different mix of SVOD, UGC, social, gaming, music, podcasts, and potentially other forms of digital media that make up these entertainment hours.
We must see things wildly differently. I remember Ross having a lesbian wife, and she had a lesbian partner, and they were always written as strong characters. The closest thing to homophobic is they’d make little jokes among the men about how they appear to others. And then they’d say something like “Oh, don’t do it THAT way!” And then the 3 guys would go “HEY! WHOA! OK!” as if to say that the way they were doing it looked gay, and they didn’t want to appear gay.
Which I don’t find homophobic so much as it is insecure, which was the whole joke. Their insecurities in themself is the joke. Not a hatred of gay people.
I don’t remember any mentions at all about trans on the show. I’m not even sure the word “trans” existed at the time.
The only sexism I remember is the football thanksgiving episode, and the poker episode. But the sexism itself was the joke. And I think they played both sides fairly.
Chandler’s “dad” was trans, but they didn’t use that word. I don’t remember if they ever put a hard label on that character, but his dad wasn’t just a drag queen. Chandler’s growing acceptance over the course of the show was a positive, but the jokes made were not.
Not sure why you used airquotes on dad, but yeah. I totally forgot about that character. I see your point now.