MCNs and the Long Distribution Revolution

• In Event: Television’s New Intermediaries: The Rise of Multichannel Networks (MCNs)

Abstract

How ‘new’ are MCNs? Where do they fit within the existing constellation of TV and screen industry institutions, including sales agents, talent agents, managers, and marketers? How can we historicise their recent emergence and their increasing centrality? This paper offers a comparative perspective on the MCN phenomenon from the point of view of screen distribution history. Drawing on a tradition of media industry research around the role of distribution intermediaries in content delivery -- from early cinema exchanges to streaming aggregators -- and putting this into dialogue with current developments in the MCNs field, the paper argues that MCNs are simultaneously novel, in terms of their specific mix of functions, and continuous with longer industry traditions, in terms of how they form part of a layer of ‘middle men’ intermediaries that tends to thicken in all distribution systems in times of market expansion.

Ramon Lobato is a research fellow at Swinburne University, Melbourne. His research explores how screen media circulates -- both legally and informally. He is the author of Shadow Economies of Cinema (BFI 2012) and The Informal Media Economy (Polity 2015, with Julian Thomas).

Author

• Ramon Lobato, Swinburne U of Technology