ABSTRACT
The competition among producers and distributors of media material also extends to exhibitors. Recall from chapter 1 that exhibitors present distributed materials to targeted audiences for them to choose. Before the digital media era, for many types of media materials, competition among exhibitors within a particular area was fairly limited. As an example, a neighborhood might have just one or two video stores, one newspaper home-delivery firm, a few newspaper and magazine stands and pay boxes, a couple of bookstores, and a cable system that competes with two TV satellite operators. With the rise of the web, all that has changed. Now the video stores (if they still exist) compete directly with digital streaming-movie sites such as Netflix and Amazon. The bookstore (if it remains in business) must compete with Amazon and Barnes & Noble online. The newspaper vendors must worry that people who live in the area will access local, national, and even international newspapers on the web. And the cable and satellite operators, apart from competing with one another, must face sites such as Netflix, Hulu, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and YouTube that offer many of the same programs.
