Web Documentary as a New Multimedia Format

<p style="text-align: right;">&nbsp;<strong>Anna Zmanovskaya, 743j</strong></p><p align="right"><strong>Faculty of Media Communications </strong></p><p align="center"><strong>Web Documentary as a New Multimedia Format</strong></p><p align="center"><strong>Summary</strong></p><p>This work is about web documentary as a new multimedia format. The purpose of the study - to find out what factors influence development of web documentary, and what future this new format will have.</p><p>We supposed that web documentary will not be able to get mass distribution among the audience and will remain a niche product. It was hypothesis of the work.</p><p>During research we used such methods as analysis of literature on the topic of research, systems analysis, comparative analysis, method of typology and scenario forecasting method.</p><p>In accordance with the tasks, we learned the essence of the concept of new media and the main characteristics of new media : convergence, multimedia , hypertextuality, interactivity ; defined the notion of web documentary and its main characteristics; considered web documentary in the context converged culture; estimated examples of web documentary on platforms ARTE and NFB; amounted typology of these examples; identified the major trends affecting development of web documentary on the basis of expert interviews, and finally, outlined directions of further development of web documentary, using the scenario forecasting.</p><p>During the work, we have identified the most significant positive factor that influences development of web documentary (driver of industry) - change in business models and emergency of new business models, as well as the most significant negative factor (threat of industry) - the absence of a request for web documentary consumers . Based on these factors, we have compiled various scenarios of development - explosion sources of funding, simplification and fading, commercial &quot;obtrusion&quot; and transition to art.</p><p>So, hypothesis, that was launched at the beginning of the study, is partially confirmed, since only one positive scenario for web documentary (financing explosion) can provide distribution to mass audience, the other three scenarios assume that it is niche format.</p>