Expansion of the core business of traditional media companies in Spain through SVOD services

The strategic importance of the internet for television became evident in the early 2000s, even destabilizing its very concept and finally resulting in convergence towards a profound transformation of the sector. The introduction of global over-the-top (OTT) media services into local markets has led to strategic changes in multimedia groups. This study considers the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services of Atresmedia and Mediaset España, the two main traditional media organizations in Spain that form a duopoly in the country’s commercial television sector, with the aim of understanding and evaluating their positioning strategy in this market and the results obtained through the diversification of their core business. Based on an analysis of their content, price, and promotion policies and the results in terms of subscriptions and revenues, slight differences emerge regarding the strategy and scope of these two groups in their own environment in the sector. They compete for customers to achieve growth in the audiovisual market while seeking to retain a cross-media, multiplatform audience, as well as expand their core business of commercial linear television against a background of a reduction of advertising spend on television and the expected increase of hybrid financing models.

Mediatization of the Media as Industrial Transformation

The article implements the idea of mediatization as a process of transformation of the mass communication industry. Nowadays, the current system of mass communication is under the pressure of digital transit, which is transgressive in nature and breaks traditional business patterns, requires business administration to make mental changes in thinking and management practices, and creates the highest level of tension among media managers. The article attempts to conceptualize (through the analysis of industrial points of tension: between television and online video - players of the cross-media dimension) some aspects of the digital transformation of the media industry and industrial management practices. Behind this transformation is the conflict between the digital environment generated by the relatively free development of the Internet and the purposefully organized and institutionalized state-controlled media.

The Trans/national Cultural Economy of Latin American Film Musicals (1930s-50s)

This essay traces the tensions between national imaginaries and transnational global media flows of tango, samba, and ranchera film musicals, taking into account their cross-media and intercultural configurations as well as interconnections between these three “transgenres.” From a comparative perspective and by means of a “histoire croisée,” or crisscrossing history, it touches upon developments in early Latin American sound film, Hollywood’s Spanishlanguage films and its Pan-Americanism, Spain’s cinematic Hispanoamericanismo, and Pan-Latin American film productions. The essay makes a case for the multifaceted trans/national cultural economy of the tango, samba, and ranchera film musical productions during their main phase, in the 1930s and 40s.

Class and Complex Transmedia Character in the Early Victorian Period: Jack Sheppard (1839-40)

The reception of William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel, Jack Sheppard (1839-1840), was contemporaneously deemed a mania and has been described by critics today as a moral panic over the influence of fiction. Several adaptations of Ainsworth’s novel across media ambiguously depict Jack’s hanging, and the adaptations that most clearly show his survival occur in those versions that are least legally defensible and most clearly targeted toward the labouring classes. In this essay, I analyse Buckstone and Greenwood’s melodramas at the Adelphi and Sadler’s Wells, respectively, in autumn 1839; two penny press novelisations of Jack Sheppard published in 1839 and 1840; and an anonymous melodrama staged at the City of London Theatre in 1845, which was shut down due to violating the licensing ban on Jack Sheppard titles. From contemporary accounts of the mania, I argue that audience members treated historical and fictional accounts of Jack as describing the same entity, which created the space for specifying new facts and thus claiming new meaning. I therefore see Jack Sheppard as a transmedia character. For the labouring classes, claiming new meaning sometimes inhered in Jack’s defiance of capital punishment. This transmedial extension of Ainsworth’s character by working-class audiences in the penny press and cheap theatre pointed to the inadequacies of Victorian copyright law to protect the creative property of originating authors across media, and thus disturbed Victorian middle and upper-class literary critics because they saw the lower class’s celebration of a criminal as threatening to undermine their social order. Using the concept of transmedia in this period allows us to see how enthusiastic audience members in the working classes created what I term character complexity as they built a palimpsest out of the panoply of cross-media character representations. This transmedia character complexity matters because it is an avenue for oppressed communities to reclaim their dignity through narrative meaning-making.

Bagging Based Cross-Media Retrieval Algorithm

It is very challenging to propose a strong learning algorithm with high prediction accuracy of cross-media retrieval, while finding a weak learning algorithm which is slightly higher than that of random prediction is very easy. Inspired by this idea, we propose an imaginative Bagging based cross-media retrieval algorithm (called BCMR) in this paper. First, we utilize bootstrap sampling to carry out random sampling of the original training set. The amount of the sample abstracted by bootstrap is set to be same as the original dataset. Second, 50 bootstrap replicates are used for training 50 weak classifiers independently. We take advantage of homogenous individual classifiers and integrate eight different baseline methods in our experiments. Finally, we generate the final strong classifier from the 50 weak classifiers by the integration strategy of sample voting. We use collective wisdom to eliminate bad decisions so that the generalization ability of the integrated model could be greatly enhanced. Extensive experiments performed on three datasets show that BCMR can effectively improve the accuracy of cross-media retrieval.

Development of Popular Science Journalism in the Cross-Media Context

The development of information and communication technologies and the digitalization of the media space create new opportunities for the popularization of scientific knowledge. There is an objective need to study popular science journalism as an activity that develops a multimedia network format and various media content distribution channels. The work is aimed at analyzing the features of the development of popular science journalism on the Internet in the context of cross-media. The study employed general scientific methods (analysis and synthesis), a method of studying documents with elements of content analysis, a comparative method that includes a comparison of different types of content, as well as data from social network and messenger analytics services. The authors studied media channels and ways to promote media content, its ideological, thematic, and structural characteristics, the features of its transformation on high citation index ratings scientific-oriented platforms Nplus1.ru and Naked-science.ru. As a result of the conducted research, it was discovered that the audience involved in the studied online media is carried out through a differentiated cross-media presence, the use of rewriting, and reposting processes. Particular attention was focused on the comparative analysis of the media content of official websites, accounts in the social network VKontakte, and Telegram messenger.

Infografia digital

Os ataques terroristas do dia 11 de setembro de 2001 nos EUA são apontados por jornalistas e infografistas como o evento propulsor para a emergência da infografia digital enquanto género jornalístico do início do século XXI. Este artigo reflete sobre as circunstâncias dessa emergência e procura identificar o seu impacto no género, no jornalismo e nas audiências, recém chegados ao mundo digital. É analisado um curto período da história recente do jornalismo digital (2001–2002), que se revelou transversal aos diferentes países do mundo ocidental, inclusive Portugal. Esta reflexão emana do projeto de investigação (PTDC/COM-JOR/28144/2017), desenvolvido no ICNOVA, com o objetivo de traçar a história da Infografia Digital em Portugal nas duas primeiras décadas deste século. Para tal foi feito o mapeamento de trabalhos infográficos digitais identificados como inovadores em dois certames que premeiam o género (os Obciber e os Malofiej), foi feita uma análise a trabalhos não incluídos no certame, mas produzidos pelos jornais considerados à época como os mais inovadores no meio digital, e foram ainda realizadas várias entrevistas a infografistas e editores online nacionais que testemunharam o percurso evolutivo deste género. Este artigo em particular, analisa seis trabalhos de infografia digital produzidos entre 2001 e 2002 sobre os atentados do 11 de setembro, por dois dos jornais mais premiados nos Malofiej nos anos iniciais da infografia digital: o elmundo.es e o nytimes.com. Para a realidade nacional, foi escolhido um trabalho sobre o tema, publicado pelo jornal português que mais cedo introduziu o género na sua versão online: o publico.pt.Os resultados indicam que as circunstâncias do nascimento da infografia digital jornalística, sob a pressão do primeiro evento traumático de repercussão global da Era Internet, deixaram marcas profundas na história das primeiras experiências de produção de conteúdo visual original para a web. Essas circunstâncias determinaram as sinergias que mais tarde abriram caminho para as formas multimédia, cross-media e transmedia do jornalismo digital e são um testemunho claro de um processo de mediatização da história que colocou pela primeira vez a internet lado a lado com os atores principais habituais (TV, rádio e jornais). Foi o impacto, emocional e político, à escala global do evento do 11 de setembro de 2001 que garantiu que jornalistas e audiências reconhecessem a internet como meio de comunicação social informativo de pleno direito e coube à infografia em versão digital - dinâmica e interativa - ser um agente privilegiado desse reconhecimento, o que lhe garantiu, ainda que temporariamente, o título de formato bandeira para um jornalismo em busca do seu papel principal no novo meio.