In the television and film industry there are only a couple of large companies. These conglomerates as they are called are so large they tend to own a wide variety of other companies. Take Viacom for instance, which owns and operates such TV channels as MTV, VH1, BET, Comedy Central, and much more. The uniformed and uneducated consumer may and highly likely thinks that these channels are competing with one another for the similar programming and time of the consumers.
Benefits to conglomeration to the studios include cheaper production costs given that they have several in house companies doing a lot of the production. They are able to sign contracts with sponsors and use those sponsorships and a variety of programming. It makes things easier for advertisers, celebrities, the production houses, and a variety of others. This is why smaller studios may generally have a much harder time, and larger expenses then their conglomerate competitors.
Today conglomerates can advertise programming on a variety of shows that seem independent to drive sales, profit from merchandising, and develop hype for a variety of programming and films and open amusement parks to profit enormously. Consumers beware of little freedom within conglomerate viewpoints and expression.
I also agree with this post. This was somehting i had brought up in class where I didnt know that Viacom owned so many of these companies. I had always thought that different music ch would compete against eachother to get you to watch them. While in fact they are all one big company. Its much easier and cheaper for these companies to all be one. If there going to have a concert and sponsor it they could say its sponsored by three different companies when only one is really giving them money to do this. Anther thing is production costs go down. One editing team can work on three different shows without anyone knowing.
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