If you look back on the state of the world before the iPhone’s release, things looked very different; it has only been roughly 17 years since its release, and it has changed countless industries, some for the better, but also some for the worse. One industry that has been disrupted by mobile devices is the filmmaking industry. Prior to mobile devices like the iPhone, people had to physically attend a movie theatre if they had any hopes of watching a new movie. While that is still sometimes the case, almost every big filmmaking studio has had to alter its distribution methods to include streaming and downloading services as well. On top of that, we have seen disruption in the form of digital streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube; each with roughly at least 50% of their content being streamed on mobile devices like the iPhone (Forbes Article).

In my mind, this is more a positive thing for filmmaking companies than a negative one. After all, mobile devices are really just another medium for them to promote their products, and when it comes down to it, mobile devices are so engrained into our society that pretty much everyone has one, and anyone with access to the Internet or cellular data can access their content anytime, anywhere. We can see the same trend in the music industry, where apps like Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud reign supreme. (Second Article) However, with that being said, the people who don’t have access to the luxuries the Internet provides us all with will not benefit from this transition at all. Although the spread of information is so fast with the Internet that these kinds of products could in theory spread across the world in mere seconds, not everyone in the world has access to mobile devices, let alone the Internet.

In regards to the possibility of the “old ways” disappearing, I believe the future of the filmmaking industry in particular would look like an expanded version of what this article is referencing in our current time (Third Article). With the use of mobile devices, creativity is literally in the palms of our hands; filmmaking is no longer reserved for big filmmaking companies, and anyone can really make and subsequently view films from their smartphones or tablets. This democratization of filmmaking, as it is called, is something that I predict will only expand in the future, and we will be seeing many more independent filmmakers making their way onto the scene as “traditional gatekeeping” is no longer a factor.