Entertainment. The golden resource of italian cultural and media industries

Entertainment is a platform for communicative innovation, able to reveal some anthropological changes of the modern subject. Starting from a sociological analysis of the concept of entertainment, the chapter highlights the most important characteristics of the Italian entertainment market, focusing on the Italian free-to-air TV model (duopoly Rai and Mediaset), and on some characteristics of the Italian digital transformation. In the first part, the chapter examines the dynamics and speed with which entertainment has grown exponentially in modern times at the expense of the other two containers through which we usually read the contemporary communication triptych: fiction and journalistic information. In the second part, the chapter offers a detailed analysis of the so called “Italian anomaly” (Morcellini 2005; De Domenico, Gavrila, & Preta 2003) (the fact that television tended to cannibalize resources to the detriment of the development of other media industries), also considering some potential factors of change, such as the bringing in of the law “Discipline of the cinema and the audio-visual” (November, 2016). Finally, the chapter analyzes the digital transformation in Italy and its consequences for the entertainment market, focusing on content, distribution and business models (Sigismondi 2011). In terms of content, digital technologies have allowed not only the modification of some production processes related to analogue media, but have also imposed new standards of audio-visual representation (i.e. 3-D animation), and determined new media objects, such as videogames. As for distribution, the most significant changes are related to the availability of broadband networks capable of enabling the terminals of private individuals to use streaming services. As for business models, enabling digital transformations has led to a significant acceleration of the time horizon in which a specific business model is able to function.