Department of Telecommunications Media Arts & Sciences Speaker Series

Friday, Sept. 9, 2011
RTV 180
12:30-1:45 pm

All are invited for coffee/tea/cookies, a presentation and a discussion on the media.

Are the Media Shrinking?

David Waterman

Abstract:
I will present joint work in progress with Sung Wook Ji, Dept of Telecommunications. We find that combined revenues for 10 major media in the U.S. have steadily declined as a proportion of overall economic activity (GDP) from about 1999 to 2009 or 2010, approaching the lowest levels reached since 1950. For individual media, we find the same general pattern, with exception of television and video games, whose revenues have so far kept pace with GDP. We also find a marked overall shift away from advertiser toward direct payment support for the media over the past decade.

We consider 4 possible reasons for these revenue trends: shifts in consumer media usage; more difficult copyright protection; failing advertising business models, and of particular interest in this study:
reduced costs due to more efficient Internet distribution. A preliminary analysis of U.S. Census employment data for media industries since 1998 corroborates the declining revenue trends, but suggests that media production has declined less than have media distribution and exhibition functions.

BIO:
David Waterman is Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is author of Hollywood’s Road to Riches (2005, Harvard University Press) and co-author of Vertical Integration in Cable Television (1997; MIT Press) with Andrew A.
Weiss. . His articles on market structure and public policy toward the media, the economics of motion picture production and distribution, international trade in motion pictures and video products, and other topics have appeared in numerous peer-reviewed communications and economic journals. Professor Waterman has presented his research in testimony before the U.S. Congress, and has served on expert panels or as a consultant for the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice, the General Accounting Office of the United States, and the Competition Bureau, Industry Canada. He served as a Principal Editor of Information Economics and Policy from 2005-10, and was Coordinating Editor from 2008-10. Before joining IU in 1993, David Waterman was a faculty member at USC, where he taught in the Annenberg School for Communications and in the Department of Economics.

http://www.indiana.edu/~telecom/people/faculty/waterman.shtml