Big Data in Hollywood: The New Operating Logic of Media and Entertainment

This dissertation traces the role of big data in shaping corporate decision-making, institutional practices, and cultural production in Hollywood’s legacy media industry over the course of the 21st century. Specifically, the project examines the ways in which the major film studios and television networks integrated data as an industrial operating logic in order to navigate the growing influence of Silicon Valley’s technology sector in a shifting digital media environment. While Hollywood has long incorporated data from audience research to inform the business of cultural production, the dissertation focuses on an emerging set of industrial strategies to manage the exponential increase in digital information. In particular, I consider the industry’s use of enterprise application software to access, analyze, and apply data across the media and entertainment value chain, and the resulting implications for film and television production, marketing, and distribution. By combining discourse analysis of trade and popular press reports with close readings of select software applications and a mapping of industry dynamics, this project defines the foundational parameters of Hollywood’s vertical integration with the data economy. In doing so, I demonstrate that Hollywood gradually engineered a data-driven business model that expanded the operational dynamics of the legacy media business