In business and life, necessity sometimes drive innovation. Efficiency and cost-savings sometimes drive innovation. Lastly, inventive accidents and revenue-driving sometimes drive innovation.
The following three items are the results of innovation. For various reasons, each was developed or changed. Here is the breakdown.
One of the more under the radar, but innovative ideas to come out of the relationship between Hollywood and the technology industries is film cloud-based distribution. In the past, actual film reels were delivered to movie theaters for distribution. Today disk (hard drive) delivery is still on-going (about 50% of the business), but the remaining 50% (in America) is digital through satellite delivery. Cloud-based delivery is arguably the wave of the future because it is seamless, immediate, less-expensive, and more secure. There is also potential for the development of cloud-based content delivery for churches, concerts, and drive-ins.
Hollywood is no stranger to innovation and often looks to technology to streamline and improve processes and operations. It was in fact inventor Thomas Edison’s motion picture kinetograph that forced the movie industry’s move to California to use that technology. And the rest is history.
In the past, out-of-home viewership numbers were not considered in the ratings. This means that all the people consuming sports content in a restaurant, bar, or at work (basically anywhere else but home), were not counted towards the ratings collected by Nielsen and similar data and analytics companies. As much as a 10% increase in measurement from out-of-home ratings will mean an increased bottom line in revenue for those who sell copyrighted broadcast content (think sports teams and leagues). This means that the distributors (streamers (Amazon) and networks (FOX)) will have to pay more for such content because the viewership ratings are 10% higher, but those same businesses will in turn charge a higher cost for advertisers to sell product and services during those broadcasts. With the increased viewership from home numbers during a pandemic, it was an interesting time to make the change, but with everyone focused on at-home viewing maybe the time was right from a negotiation and visibility standpoint.
Sports betting was once an anomaly. However, when the United States Supreme Court opened the door to legal gambling, nearly every state in the Union has rushed to pass, introduce, or discuss some legislation to allow sports betting. For an activity that was once limited to places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City, at race tracks, and on Native American reservations in casinos, today colleges like Arizona State University offer 50/50 raffles from the comforts of peoples’ home, individual teams are signing sports betting brand partnerships, and athletes are doing the same. Sports betting initially hit a slump during the pandemic, but has since grown and will likely continue to do so as at home options are increased and the economy goes for an uptick. In some sense, the normalization of sports betting and has led to its concentration.
