Over the Horizon

This chapter looks over the horizon – at a major emerging global dynamic in screen culture in which Australia is beginning to be embedded. This nascent screen ecology is being shaped by a set of increasingly global online screen entertainment platforms, most prominently Google/YouTube, Apple, Amazon and Netflix. One of us has previously examined the global contours of this phenomenon (Cunningham & Silver, 2013). Here, we focus on how Australia fits into the explosive growth of arguably the most challenging and innovative element of this new screen ecology: a very low-budget tier of advertising-supported online channels driven mainly by the professionalisation and monetisation of previously amateur content creation. This part of the ecology consists predominantly of previously amateur creators, using platforms such as YouTube (but also others such as Facebook, Vine, Instagram, Snapchat, Vimeo, Vessel and increasingly cross- and multi-platform strategies), to develop subscriber/fan bases of significant size. These bases are always transnational in composition, often generating, as a consequence, significant advertising and sponsorship revenue and, increasingly, the attention of mainstream media.