Abstract

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the Internet on media and mediated content industries. It explores and discusses the changes this emergent communications platform is engendering for the media and content industries and the implications of those changes. Its contents are drawn from the findings of a five-year EU sponsored research initiative, the 'Cost A20 Programme on the Impact of the Internet on the Mass Media'. Its authors include Europe's leading scholars in the field. The book's standpoint is simultaneously multi-lens, interdisciplinary, and cross-national. By approaching a common topic and single industry from a number of different theoretical and geographical standpoints it provides rich and comprehensive insights and thus equips scholars, policymakers, media practitioners, and social observers with a strong explanatory and interpretive overview of how the Internet has affected the media. The chapters look at the impact of the Internet on technology, platforms and innovation, content, users, and media organisations' strategies, structures and business models.