synergy and cross media convergence essay

Chené Harris

Synergy and cross media convergence

Media studies

In media you need to understand synergy and and cross convergence, these terms are there to determine the level of success a film can make. For example, a large conglomerate company such as Disney owns other little companies such as marvel studios. Other terms that would be very helpful to know is monopoly and Oligopoly, monopoly is a small company that has the share of a specific company. Oligopoly is when you have a group of of the conglomerates (big companies) that dominate the film e.g the Big 5 and Hollywood.

Disney as a large conglomerate owned 26% of the studio market share in 2018. Disney has the power to penetrate markets and distribute most of its films; this is done through vertical and horizontal vertagration. Vertical integration (when the conglomerate company has other small companies below it (owned by the conglomerate) and has certain types of products below them e.g a conglomerate would be Disney and the small companies below that would be film studios and animations and theme parks and below that there would be Disney related animations  and theme parks and so on). Horizontal integration, for example, is that Disney is owning and running Disney land. These are also just good forms of advertising the films world wide. 

Disney’s large-scale synergy and cross media convergence has become its greatest advantage. Since 2018 Disney now works with other big companies, creating all those good movies, for example black panther with $700 million box office) and others. 

Indi films have always had lower production budgets and usually less finance is available for them to join up with other companies. The rise of the internet has evolved in such a way that that nearly everyone on this planet is connected to the internet consuming media in almost every website available. 4.388 billion people are connected to the internet world wide providing 

Even though synergy is a advantage, the smaller Indi films are now able to do well despite the lack of synergy, synergistic opportunities. An example of this exact problem is looking at the movie “ what do we do in the shadows” a New Zealand film directed by Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clement. They were unable to reach the amount of $400,000 on their own ( known as the crowd founding method). They had managed to do this process through the crowd funding which then ended up getting the green light. This film then became a huge hype, grossing $6.9 million dollars world wide across the Web 2.0 having their film being advertised on social media throughout new Zealand was a big deal because across new Zealand there is a total of 3.484 billion people connected to every bit of a social media platform. but mainly the I-generation are connected to the social media. 

The directors for this film used the internet to advertise their film by putting it all up on social media, with the marketing team generating all the excitement for the film. The film became a huge hit and became very successful smaller companies such as the Indi films from New Zealand will make a lot more money and be successful if they partner up with the larger conglomerates I.e Disney this will make everything everything much more easier for both companies to succeed worldwide.