Over saturation in the Entertainment Industry

In recent years we have viewed an overcrowding or flooding of aspects of the entertainment industry. It seems that as soon as one idea or method becomes popularized by an individual/company that there are five or more people waiting in the wings to replace the king of the mountain. This is what helps to define capitalism but is also what helps to create a marketplace where users are unsure of where to put their hard earned dollars towards because of the over-exposure of a certain market. Let’s take a look at some of these over saturated industries and take a look at what’s wrong with them.

Poker

There must be something exciting about poker if it can get higher ratings on television than a Stanley Cup Playoff game. ESPN got the ball rolling when their World Series of Poker series became a huge hit and thanks to modern technology; we were able to view the player’s hands in real-time and be able to tell whether a player was just bluffing or actually had a decent set of cards worthy to win it all. Unfortunately, the concept of the World Series of Poker is exactly what was wrong about poker. It was a show where anybody could sit down in front of a table and with a little bit of luck on their side be able to win a million dollar prize. Once somebody had won it all, there was no need for that person to be loyal to ESPN.After all, it was the casinos that ran the poker business and not ESPN. It was then a competition between online and regular casinos to swap up these winners and get them to promote their casinos for exposure. Some players even got wise enough to create their own companies to help promote themselves. Each casino would then try to sway each player with bigger prize money and more lucrative deals if they showed up to their events. We now have a problem where every network now showcases some different type of poker show. Maybe poker people know which ones are better but we have no idea what separates The World Series of Poker from NBC’s Late Night Poker,the World Poker Tour, Ultimate Poker Challenge, Poker Royale and others.

MMA (Mixed Martial Arts)

It was only a few years ago that MMA company UFC declared bankruptcy. Thanks to a cleanup of the sport and strong marketing partnerships; companies like UFC are now one of the leading sports among the popular male 18-49 demographic. We were expecting some strong competition to UFC in this field much like how the wrestling industry’s WWE had to fend off competitors like WCW and ECW. We were a little bit surprised how fast some of the UFC’s competition has been at giving contracts to companies with little or no exposure whatsoever. Cable companies like Showtime were the first to jump at the chance to get MMA on their network after the successful partnership between UFC and the Spike TV network.Sports networks who once bashed the MMA environment and wouldn’t show it on their networks suddenly had a change of heart thanks to advertising dollars and started to showcase MMA on their networks. You had networks like the Fox Sports Network even turning MMA into a league environment with teams competing for MMA championships. How could the UFC prevented this increase in competition from happening? There’s no real definite answer to that question but part of the UFC’s success in marketing has also been its own internal headache. The entertainment aspect of the company has been top-notch but at the end of the day; the UFC is still a sport and loyalists will go to where the highest brand of fighters will be. If fights are over hyped and don’t deliver a big payoff then fans will turn towards a competitor that will offer them a good fight regardless of who is fighting in the ring. UFC now has plenty of competition to battle with them in the form of Elite XC, International Fight League, World Combat League, King of the Cage, Pride Fighting and to a certain extent kick boxing shows like K-1.

Social Networking Networks

When social networking gained exposure in the late 90s; it dramatically changed the way that people interacted with each other like no other concept has since the invention of the telephone. We could have probably made a split between social networking/instant messaging but we’ll lump them into the same category since they both aid people in interacting with one another through the help of the internet. At first, you had ICQ which seemed like a great concept and everyone enjoyed being able to speak with each other until a few people started to lose their contact lists while others got tired of the overall slowdown of the program itself.Computers started to get faster and more and more programmers for larger companies like Microsoft managed to not only duplicate the technology from ICQ but also make it run better and put less strain on the resources of your computer. Every major company then decided to go at it with Microsoft to deal a blow to Microsoft’s monopoly and the result was MSN Messenger clones like AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Google Chat. This technology allowed people to speak to one another but didn’t really help people get to know more information about the person they were talking to.This allowed the creation of the Myspace generation to be born where people could create their very own web space on the internet for people to find out more information about each other. The problem with Myspace is that there was little in the way of customization and regular people had a hard time trying to customize their spaces to give them their own separate identity. This opened the floodgates for other companies like Hi-5 and Facebook to move in and offer better customization of their spaces or simply offer a better alternative to being able to find out information about friends or relatives. Many people now consider Facebook the leader in this area and have been slowly making the migration towards Facebook from Myspace. The problem with social networking is its own technology. As soon as people find a service that has new or better technology then they migrate from one service to the next and leave all of their friends from the previous network behind. If these friends of theirs don’t make the transition to the new network themselves then they get left behind without any knowledge of what their friends have been up to. Even as we speak, there are probably 5-10 new social networking sites popping up hoping to be the ones that will offer something that Facebook can’t offer and knock Facebook off as the leader in the Social Networking hierarchy.

If you want to see some key competitors to Facebook, then look no further at Wikipedia’s List of Social Networking Sites where you can take a look at the 43 sites that are listed and growing by the day.We hope you enjoyed our first look into the over saturation of the entertainment industry and stay tuned for more articles on the subject with such topics as homegrown celebrities, reality television shows, tabloid news shows, magazines and much much more…

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