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Destinee Montoya

COMM 1500-502

Final Paper

30 April 2019

A History of Competing Technologies in the Mass Media Marketplace

Throughout the history of technology, whenever a new medium reaches the critical mass,

it threatens to and often does, displace existing media to some degree. According to “How TV

Killed Hollywood’s Golden Age” by Erin Blakemore, a prime example of this happening is with

the upstart television industry taking consumers and advertisers away from the film industry in

the 1940s and 1950s (Blakemore). In the 1920s, the organization of network radio brought a

greater competitive threat to magazines (Randle). Even the VCR threatened the television and

movie industry with its home video format (Smith). What most of these examples have in

common is that they all competed against the mass media in their time, but now have been

defeated by newer technologies in the mass media marketplace. The new media eventually

becomes the old, and it’s only there to promote the new, it’s a vicious and never-ending cycle.

According to “How TV Killed Hollywood’s Golden Age” by Erin Blakemore, during the

1940s and 1950s, the success of Hollywood’s Golden Age, which was a wildly creative era in

which movies dominated mass entertainment and their glamorous stars entranced the public, had

suddenly evaporated (Blakemore). The rise of television caused once mighty studios to shut

down and some of Hollywood’s greatest actors, directors, and screenwriters stopped making

films altogether because of its new technology. To give some context, we need to talk about what

made Hollywood so great before it was taken down by the television industry. Part of the
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winning formula of Hollywood’s Golden Era had to do with the studio system. On lots of the

“big eight” studios, which were 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, MGM, Paramount

Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures, United Artists, Universal Studios, and Warner Brothers, pools of

incomparable acting talent on long-term contracts and hordes of talented artisans helped to turn

screenplays into striking films (Blakemore). Since the studios in this time were so profitable,

which was in part due to their iron grip on movie distribution, they could afford to gamble on

creative writing and art direction, and their careful management of actor’s personal and

professional lives meant that they had plenty of beloved movie stars (Blakemore).

But as the good years wore on, their luck started to run out and they developed what was

then a potentially destructive rival: TV. By the 1930s, technological leaps/advances and a series

of high-profile experimental broadcasts made it clear that one day television would be broadcast

directly into people’s home. Although only a few stations with experimental licenses began to

broadcast things like baseball games and early news programs in New York in 1939, TV sets

were pretty expensive and the programming was limited (Blakemore). When World War II

began, material shortages halted the expansion of TV in the United States, so the threat had been

put off, but only momentarily (Blakemore).

Then the war ended, and social changes turned a trickle of demand for television into a

tidal wave, which led Americans to start spending the money that they had saved since the Great

Depression on houses in the suburbs, which meant that these newly built areas weren’t all that

close to the downtown movie palaces that lacked mass transportation options (Blakemore). This

led people to begin to seek entertainment inside of their homes, which meant that they found it

on their new TV sets that contained broadcast television that was free, and it made it difficult for

studios to convince people to look away from a cheap medium that was already in their homes
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(Blakemore). This meant that by the 1960s, more than half of all American homes contained

these TV sets, and TV had done away with almost everything that made major motion pictures

so great, like the ability to take creative risks. The movie industry fell into despair, fewer feature

films were being made, and studios had to often rely on sales of their back catalogs for

televisions syndication for profit instead of their own current-day films (Blakemore). Thankfully,

this competition between the two didn’t kill popular entertainment, it just made it migrate to a

smaller screen.

After the entrance of the motion picture as a competitive threat to magazines, the next

best medium to enter the marketplace was radio. Unlike motion pictures, the new mass medium

relied heavily on consumer time and advertising sponsor revenues, which led them to rapidly

grow in popularity, with NBC forming the first formal network in 1926 and made them a much

greater competitive threat to magazines (Randle). This lead magazine publishers to go as far as

seeking the advice of university faculty because they were so concerned about the loss of

advertising to radio as well as the effects of the Great Depression, but surprisingly, the answer

that they got at the time was to improve their editorial focus and quality (Randle).

Radio was able to reach its own “Golden Age” during the 1930s when by about 1934 half

of all homes in the United States had radios, and by 1940 there were more than 28 million

households with radios, a penetration of just more than 80 percent (Randle). The difference

between the competition among television and the film industry and the competition among

radio and the magazine industry is that while radio was reaching high penetration levels,

publishers began to capitalize on new print technologies that would be able to enhance what they

could offer to readers and advertisers. Magazines grew to rely on and would differentiate

themselves from competing media for the next several decades, and the specific impact of the
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radio medium wasn’t substantial because, by the mid-1930s, publishers saw that radio wasn’t

eating into their share of total advertising appropriations (Randle).

According to “VCR Revolution Changes Entertainment” by Randall D. Smith, the VCR

revolution of the 1980s was able to threaten the television and movie industry with the home

video format (Smith). Due to their growing popularity, they were expected to be in 90 percent of

American households by 1994 (Smith). VCRs allowed the consumer to control their personal

entertainment, which is what made them so popular and appealing and there was no way that TV

networks could compete against that type of format. The VCR continued to help deflate national

network advertising revenue and led to reductions in creative staffs, but it was also able to pump

up the efforts to help improve programming (Smith). Something else to consider in this is the

influence that the VCR had on businesses. During this time, the VCR had meant growing profits

for several highly competitive electronic, entertainment and retail businesses and was able to

help develop some significant trends in a variety of industries. For example, advertisers were

seeking new ways to reach a national audience. Network programming’s market share,

particularly in prime time, was expected to diminish and was going to result in an increase in

advertising in metropolitan newspapers and in nationwide publications (Smith).

VCRs had a pretty significant impact on the movie industry as well. At this point, the

movie industry was supposed to see the VCR movie business outstrip the box office, and as a

result, growth was expected in programming made especially for the VCR, specifically special-

interest categories. Movies, which were made for the 18-to-35-year-old audience, were going to

be redirected at the aging baby-boom generation that would compromise the largest segment of

the population (Smith). The result of this was that there would be fewer horror flicks and more

films for wider audiences, and there would also be a much larger selection of entertainment. At
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that point in time, the number of dramatic productions had increased by 50 percent since 1985,

and the cable industry, which penetrates half the market place, may have had to start

experimenting with its own network programming (Smith). Like the competition between radio

and the magazine industry, this competition/threat didn’t last for too long. In retrospect, the VCR

spawned the direct-to-video industry and in some cases that saved the studios’ bottom line by

being so cheap and easy to manufacture and ridiculously priced for rental. After that point, the

competing technology in the mass media marketplace became DVDs and practically killed VCRs

dead in the water.

What we can see from these examples throughout history is that when one traditional

technology rises to popularity in the mass media marketplace, there will always be a newer

technology there to compete with it and potentially replace it. The new media eventually

becomes the old, and it’s only there to promote the new, it’s a vicious and never-ending cycle.

Based on the examples that I’ve provided; this type of trend has been happening since about the

1920s and can probably be dated back even further, which most likely indicates that it’s not

going to end anytime soon, and why would it? There’s always going to be newer and better

technology that’s going to compete with and threaten the traditional/standard media, it’s just the

continuous cycle that we’ve grown to accept.

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Works Cited

Blakemore, Erin. How TV Killed Hollywood's Golden Age. 1 September 2018. Web. 30 April

2019.

Randle, Quint. "A Historical Overview of the Effects of New Mass Media Introductions on

Magazine Publishing During the 20th Century." First Monday [Online] 6.9 (2001). Web.

30 April 2019.

Smith, Randall D. VCR Revolution Changes Entertainment. 30 October 1987. Web. 30 April

2019.