20476 - TELEVISION
Course taught in English
Go to class group/s: 31
Class-group lessons delivered on campus
In the last twenty years the digital revolution, the explosion of internet, the success of social networks and social media have brought a lot of changes to mass media industry and forced it to rethink itself. Someone said that television was going to die, but if the medium has faced a digital disruptive process, it has brought to a new golden age for it, a sort of a a digital restoration of the popular queen of media. Two sides of the moon. On one hand digitalization, the increasingly global scope of the industry and the maturation of new technologies for content consumption brought an expansion of the number of different players involved in TV production and distribution, and a substantial change in competitive dynamics and in value generation models. On the other hand, content consumption is constantly growing, but with radically different pattern if compared with the past, new digital native generations of targets, new tastes and new objectives. The mission of the course is to develop understanding of the television industry in the complex contemporaneity, with a focus on at business strategies, business models, audience dynamics and content production processes. In the long term the course aims to prepare people who wish to develop their professional career in this industry, in order for them to be able to grasp the key emerging challenges and opportunities and to be able to cope with them with both managerial awareness and entrepreneurial proactivity.
The course is divided into four main parts:
- Industry basics: players, mechanisms, strategies, business models, processes and value chain of the industry.
- Audience: typologies, fragmentation, models of attention, interaction and relational engagement, etc.
- Content: editorial processes and content production. ideation and production of new content, dynamics and structures in TV programming, emerging editorial trends, etc.
- New frontiers: new markets, new business business and offering models, new challenges.
The course adopts a broad perspective including the point of view of all the major players involved in the transformation of television at the national and international level (incumbents, emerging players, content producers, advertising players, companies of complementary industries, etc.).
- Recognize and explain the most relevant strategies, processes and business models in television industry.
- Identify and illustrate audience typologies and their consumption models in the contemporary digital era.
- Illustrate and explain the main TV production process from the points of view of content creators and broadcasters.
- Connect and relate industrial processes, content production and audience consumption.
- Analyze and interpret main strategis and business models in current television panorama.
- Examine and predict the on going modifications and trends in the television industrial architecture.
- Face-to-face lectures
- Guest speaker's talks (in class or in distance)
- Case studies /Incidents (traditional, online)
- Individual assignments
- Group assignments
- Guest speaker's talks, that provide focused perspectives on specific side of television industry.
- Case studies, that are used as open discussion topics in class.
- Individual and group assignments, to be developed using the interpretative tools explained in class, that are parts of the exam for attending students.
Continuous assessment | Partial exams | General exam | |
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- Individual partial assignment, about the current situtation of a media corporation (25%).
- Final group project, about on going / new trends in the industry (45%).
- Class participation (30%)
A final written exam on the two textbooks.
Lessons notes, slides, papers and articles.
- A. LOTZ, The Television will be revolutionized, NYU Press, 2014, 2nd edition.
- J. ULINU, The Business of Media Distribution, Focal Press, 2014, 2nd edition (except chapters 4 and 5).