YouTube And Entertainment Industry: Opportunities And Criticisms

The Booming Entertainment Industry

Entertainment industry also referred as show biz is a part of tertiary sector that connotes to all aspects of entertainment like music, art, theatre, film, radio and television. According to Kevin Westcott, the leader of US Media and Entertainment of Deloitte Consultancy LLP, content streaming and videos will bring revolutionary changes in the entertainment industry in 2018. Due to the increase in the use of mobile phones and wireless technologies, the streaming services have exploded all over the world. According to Burgess and Green (2018), 82% of the millennial in the US stream TV shows every week. According to the Global Entertainment and Media Outlook reports provided by Pwc, the fastest growing segment in the entertainment industry will be digital content followed by E-sports. Contrarily, newspapers and magazine’s revenues will plummet by 2020. Added to this, the popularity of online music streaming has also surged in the recent years. Thus, entertainment industry has witnessed an explosive growth in the last decade and is considered as one of the fastest growing industries in the world.

One aspect the company excels at

Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen who were the former employees of Paypal founded YouTube. The idea has been generated at a dinner party just before one year of its launch in San Francisco. In 2005, YouTube got the highest one “million-hit” for a video that advertised Nike (Wu et al., 2017).

One aspects of the company that it excels at is it provides an opportunity to the people all around the world to start their own channel. People today from various professions use this platform to display their skills and get international recognition. For instance, YouTube starts like Lily Singh, Jake Paul, Mark Fischbach today have become millionaires by starting their own channel. Thus, employment has increased tremendously where people from different background do what they love and reach out to the audience. The best part is that an individual does not require investing huge sums to start the business. Logos, colors, captions and transcripts can also be added while making a video on YouTube. Due to such facilities, even people suffering from hearing issues can understand the messages that are being conveyed. The transcripts can also be translated into different languages so that people all over the world can understand the messages. An annotation editor helps to create pop-up comments to a particular website. One can even delete an offensive comment that can tarnish the brand image because every comment is emailed to the individual (Miles, 2014). All these features of YouTube make it outstanding providing several opportunities to the people all around the world to earn money. If the videos shared by an individual are enthralling and interesting, people around the world, can watch it videos of the particular channel and would recommend the channel to others over Internet.

Not only one can start his own channel and earn profit, YouTube provides an opportunity to share videos with peers and family in several social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Face Book. Added to this, one can also send multiple videos through email. As there are several videos uploaded in You Tube, one can also stay updated about the current issues and the world around them. Even invitation links can be attached to increase more viewers who can even subscribe to the specific channels that they want to (Ensour, 2015). It also provides a chance for the people to blog about anything and then “embed the YouTube videos” on the particular website.

YouTube’s Impact on the Entertainment Industry

YouTube provides opportunity to millions of people around the world to display their talent and get recognition. However, one of the biggest criticism encountered by YouTube is its flag button that removes any unauthentic and inappropriate videos. Even though with such options, there are inappropriate videos in YouTube like “Happy Tree Friends” which has not been discarded or made age restricted (Othman, 2018). People around the world have touted that flag option is a useless service available in You Tube where many unfitting videos are uploaded. Added to this, many proper and non-inappropriate videos are falsely flagged and removed which is unfair and unjust (Ouellette et al., 2018). This has been criticized all over the world where people have commented that flagging words like swear is inaccurate.

Conclusion

YouTube is a platform that provides an opportunity to millions of people to start their own channel and earn profits. People today leave their 9-5 job and begin their channel on YouTube as it provides them international income and a chance to earn exorbitant amount. YouTube has myriad of videos as well as infomercials. Due to this reason, people all over the world are aware of the daily news and recent happenings. It is the best channel where one can express his own creativity and express his own views and opinions (Smith and Sanchez, 2015). Content and videos like “Ten ways to fight depression” or discussion about any health issue are beneficial to a large number of people around the world. Today, even doctors, lawyers and engineers are providing information about their relevant subject on You Tube due to which people come to know about everything just at one click sitting at home. The best part of You Tube is that it is easy to share on several social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and even through emails (Yu et al., 2015). In this way, the person who has his own channel can attract a large number of audiences and invite them to subscribe. Most importantly, YouTube is beneficial to those who lack computer skills. With the help of just a webcam or any video editing software, one can now easily share videos in no time and reach out to a large number of people worldwide.

Despite of having several advantages, YouTube is criticized for uploading inappropriate videos or supporting copyrights. Thus, few recommendations are illustrated below that will help the company to improve-

• The community guidelines of YouTube must be made stringent. YouTube must ascertain that unauthentic and inappropriate videos are removed or age restricted.
• You Tube officials must ensure that appropriate and suitable videos are not flagged as this are unfair and unjust. Added to this, there are many content and videos that are not age restricted. Thus, YouTube must ensure that all fair videos are shown and the unauthentic ones are eliminated.
• Another issue that has been extremely criticized by people is copyright issue. People have found difficulty in posting movies and songs within the respective videos. Thus, it is essential for YouTube to assure that licensed videos are not removed and that the rules and regulation to copyright is maintained.
• Lastly, You Tube must make sure that there are no Community Guidelines or Copyright Strikes as these disables the features and provide restriction to private sharing.

References 

Burgess, J. and Green, J., 2018. YouTube: Online video and participatory culture. John Wiley & Sons.

Ensour, H., 2015. The effect of using YouTube on youth worst and best case. British Journal of Applied Science & Technology, 8(3), pp.286-304.

Miles, J., 2014. YouTube marketing power: How to use video to find more prospects, launch your products, and reach a massive audience. McGraw-Hill.

Othman, F.A., 2018. YouTube as engagement and learning tool in higher education society. Journal of Fundamental and Applied Sciences, 10(4S), pp.137-142.

Ouellette, L., Cearley, M., Judge, B., Riley, B. and Jones, J., 2018. Cooking with cannabis: The rapid spread of (mis) information on YouTube. The American journal of emergency medicine, 36(7), pp.1300-1301.

Smith, P.A. and Sanchez, A.D., 2015. Let’s play, video streams, and the evolution of new digital literacy. In Learning and Collaboration Technologies (pp. 520-527). Springer, Cham.

Wu, S., Rizoiu, M.A. and Xie, L., 2017. Beyond views: Measuring and predicting engagement on youtube videos. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.02541.

Yee, B.C., Abdullah, T. and Nawi, A.M., 2017, April. A Reflective Practice of Using Digital Storytelling During Teaching Practicum. In International Conference of Reliable Information and Communication Technology (pp. 708-715). Springer, Cham.

Yu, H., Xie, L. and Sanner, S., 2015, May. The Lifecyle of a Youtube Video: Phases, Content and Popularity. In ICWSM(pp. 533-542).

Zahn, C., Schaeffeler, N., Giel, K.E., Wessel, D., Thiel, A., Zipfel, S. and Hesse, F.W., 2014. Video clips for YouTube: Collaborative video creation as an educational concept for knowledge acquisition and attitude change related to obesity stigmatization. Education and Information Technologies, 19(3), pp.603-621.