Digital innovation has changed the way we consume entertainment over the past decade, while creating challenges

Ripples from the #MeToo movement have produced an irrevocable shift across the entertainment industry, elevating women, writes Adam Sherwin

When 2010 dawned, Netflix had delivered its billionth rental DVD. An “on-demand” option, allowing viewers to watch over the internet old movies recommended to them by a personalised computer algorithm, seemed an intriguing experiment.

About 158 million subscribers later, Netflix is the most powerful manifestation of a digital revolution that has upended the creative industries, from TV to music, publishing to film.

Netflix and Amazon Prime Video alone have amassed 240 million subscribers worldwide, with almost 20 million in the UK. No longer merely a platform to rewatch classic shows, the streaming platforms, now including Apple and Disney, are funnelling billions of dollars into original content and poaching the biggest names with the promise of total creative freedom.

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The kind of character-led, novelistic dramas favoured by streaming viewers are a product of another trend of the decade – the rise of “box-set dramas”. Audiences no longer had to wait a week for another episode of Breaking Bad when all five seasons were available to download and binge.

Cinematic transformations

With TVs morphing into large-screen, HD home entertainment systems, there was less incentive for viewers to drag themselves away to cinemas. Superhero blockbusters filled multiplexes as Disney bought the Star Wars brand via Lucasfilm and then gobbled up 20th Century Fox and its Marvel assets. Action movies fed the soaring Chinese market at the expense of the kind of thoughtful, socially engaged films favoured by Oscars judges.

The £60bn sale of the Fox studio and TV business to Disney marked another feature of the decade – the eclipse of Rupert Murdoch and his family. The simmering phone-hacking scandal exploded, prompting News International to close the News of the World in 2011, a panic move designed to protect the parent company’s bid to buy all of BSkyB.

‘Murdoch, now 88, could not match the financial firepower of Google and Apple’

For all his wiles, Murdoch, now 88, could not match the financial firepower of Google and Apple and chose to end 60 years of expansion, selling most of his entertainment business, leaving the family with book publishers HarperCollins, Fox News and newspapers including The Sun, The Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Opportunity knocked for James Corden, who followed the success of his BBC Gavin and Stacey sitcom into an unlikely move Stateside as presenter of the CBS Late, Late Show. Will the Hollywood-bound Phoebe Waller-Bridge be his successor?

Music industry shaken

After entering the decade in decline, the music business continued to stumble as Apple’s iTunes store failed to make paid-for downloads offset the sales lost by the crumbling of the physical CD market. Spotify and subscription streaming eventually provided salvation, delivering record companies billions of dollars again from global hit songs. Kanye West and Beyoncé delivered musical innovation during a period when Adele and Ed Sheeran found the formula for mainstream success. The deaths of David Bowie and Prince shocked fans who asked if they would ever see their like again.

Ten years ago, the all-powerful Harvey Weinstein was cranking up his next Oscars campaign for The King’s Speech. As the producer awaits trial on sexual assault charges, which he denies, the ripples from the #MeToo movement have produced an irrevocable shift across the entertainment industry, elevating women, and minority ethnic groups, into the positions of influence which have been abused for years by many male gatekeepers.