Intro to Media Industries is the course where you learn about how the so-called "biz" works.
If you're in "the business," that means you work in media in some capacity, often in the entertainment industry.
You'll learn about the studio system, the TV systems, the movie industry, video games, media law, the effects of media, Nielsen ratings, the importance of advertising, etc.
The media research firm plans to announce on Wednesday that it is working with Facebook to include conversations about TV programs on the social network in its measurement system. Now called “Social Content Ratings,” the metric will also include TV-related chatter on Twitter.
The deal is part of a broader effort at Nielsen to improve its methods for measuring how people watch television today.
The company has faced harsh criticism in recent years from TV and advertising executives, who complain that Nielsen has failed to keep pace with the digital transformation that has reshaped the industry. As a result, they say, it is not accurately capturing the real audience for shows. Last week, for instance, television network executives expressed frustration over the lack of measurement of programs on the streaming service Netflix.
Nielsen has tried to fight back, introducing a series of services that track digital viewing. About three years ago, Nielsen struck a deal with Twitter to measure television-related conversations on Twitter. For example, the companies released data for the Republican presidential debate on Fox Business Network last week. The program elicited 1.2 million Twitter messages, written by 247,000 unique authors, that were seen by a total of 6.4 million people.
The new ratings will measure programs on both traditional television and streaming services during the time period when the show is televised. It will also monitor conversations about television programs round the clock.
With the new offering, Nielsen is building a stronger force in the so-called social listening market. That includes companies like ListenFirst Media that monitors activity on more than a dozen digital media outlets for more than 40 television networks.
To date, media companies have tapped Nielsen’s Twitter TV ratings as a tool to develop and market shows. Advertisers have used them to help decide where to spend their budgets. Executives said that the goal is for the expanded social ratings to become even more integral to the industry.
Millions more are likely to flow from a possible deal to stream all three London games next season. Eventually, streaming rights will become a very big profit center.
The money magic has, of late, come from the “Thursday Night Football” package, and more will soon flow with a new deal, for at least the 2016 season, to be announced before the Super Bowl.
For eight years, the N.F.L. put its Thursday night games solely on NFL Network rather than sell them to an established network that was willing to pay bundles.
Still, having the games enabled the channel to raise its profile and allowed it to increase its monthly subscriber fees.
But when the league felt compelled to reach a wider audience and turn Thursdays into a pro football night (college football had already done something similar), it solicited broadcasters that could promote the games to a general audience far larger than the cable niche that NFL Network serves.
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CBS bought the rights in 2014 for $275 million and renewed them in 2015 for $300 million. The network televised eight of the games and simulcast them on NFL Network. The remaining eight games were exclusive to NFL Network. CBS produced all 16 and put its lead announcers, Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, on the broadcasts.
The deal has worked. The eight games CBS carried averaged 17.6 million viewers in 2015, up from 16.1 million a year earlier. The comparable games on NFL Network had eight million watching in 2013.
Now CBS is facing off against NBC and Fox to win a one- or two-year contract that may cost $350 million to $400 million annually. Fox was reported to have made a “stiff” offer but has never commented publicly on it. ESPN dropped out because it wants nothing to do with the simulcasting and recognized that the N.F.L. wants a broadcast network. The networks and the league declined to comment.
CBS deserves consideration to retain the Thursday night deal, having marketed the games as promised and more than doubling viewership. It used its Thursday night stalwart comedy, “The Big Bang Theory,” to strengthen its Monday night schedule. Making sure the free world knew it had Thursday night games became a major companywide priority at CBS.
But there is logic in the league’s shopping it to another buyer to see, if nothing else, which one it might sell a long-term deal to, whenever that happens.
NBC seems to have a strong case to succeed CBS because it would be able to use the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, which start Aug. 5, as a promotional platform for the games on multiple channels and online. That heavy promotion would end in 17 days, a few weeks before the N.F.L. season starts. Still, if the league wants to keep building preseason awareness, the Olympics would be a valuable tool. And NBC is familiar with Thursdays; it televises the opening-night game on Thursday, so adding eight games would provide continuity through late October.
NBC and CBS are strong in prime time. NBC is ranked No. 1 among viewers 18 to 49. CBS is the most-viewed over all.
If any of the networks has a reason to overbid for the Thursday night games, it would be Fox. It is the least viewed of the Big Four networks and is ranked third this season in the 18-to-49 demographic.
There is another option that the league is exploring, said two people familiar with the negotiating who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Expand the package to 10 games and split them between two networks. In that way, two networks would be marketing Thursday nights, just as two networks promote and televise Sunday afternoons.
It has been clear since 2014 that the league has used the sale of Thursday night games as an annual experiment in which it declined to commit to a long-term solution as the media landscape changed, between cord-cutting and myriad digital alternatives.
The league’s Sunday and Monday deals with CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN cannot be changed through the early 2020s, but the Thursday package is an evolving project that could be sold to a nontraditional outlet like Google.
As Brian Rolapp, the league’s executive vice president for media, said in 2015, “In this day and age, to lock into one model isn’t the smartest thing anymore.”
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After a negative reaction to the way it presented an NFL Films reconstruction of Super Bowl I that included a panel talking during the action, NFL Network will replay the game Friday at 8 p.m. Eastern without interruptions for analysis or ancillary programming. The network had built a three-hour program around the game last Friday, with pregame, halftime and postgame shows and as many as seven commentators talking over the original NBC radio call by Jim Simpson and George Ratterman.
