Digital Media

The digitization of media content — including but not limited to film, music and gaming — is fundamentally transforming the entertainment industry.

Userss demand content on the device and at the time of their choosing. Growth of broadband and piracy is challenging the traditional distributional and pricing arrangement in these industries.

The iLab Digital Media team is conducting groundbreaking research to answer many timely and critical questions for companies and other organizations that deal with digital media content. The goal is to inform billion-dollar revenue streams for an industry experiencing rapid changes. The research is heavily data-driven, which can answer questions that are useful and important to the business and policy-makers, as well as create new methods and scientific knowledge.

The following are selected research projects currently being pursued by DMRC faculty:

  • Does digital distribution cannibalize physical sales such as DVD’s? Does legitimate digital distribution reduce the demand for digital pirated content? How does information diffuse when content is introduced in one channel?
  • How does pre-release movie piracy affect movie revenues?
  • How is broadband affecting media sales? How is piracy and Internet reshaping music concert industry?
  • How is digitization and piracy affecting innovations?

iLab’s research program is synergistic with the research program of iLab’s Social Analytics team. The Social Analytics team studies the ways in which people collaborate, communicate and conduct commerce over online social networks including cell phones, blogs and other forms of media.

iLab’s digital media research projects are guided by two highly acclaimed Heinz College professors, Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang. They have been studying this industry for last few years and have published many papers in this domain in leading management science, economics and marketing journals. This research is supported by many industry partners.

Key Faculty

Contributing Partners