Many people fantasize about royal life, but the reality is quite different. In order to maintain the luxurious and prestigious tradition, the royal family, an opportunity cost must be incurred. Royal members must obey rules, protocols, and regulations every day, and they always have to show politeness through what they wear, how they eat, and their way of speaking. When considering all of this, marrying into a monarchy has a high cost.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s marriage illustrates how difficult it is to live within the reality of the royal family since they have decided to leave the family.At the time of their departure in 2020, Queen Elizabeth II acknowledged “the challenges they have experienced due to intense scrutiny over the last two years”. She also supported their wish for a more independent life. Harry and Meghan’s leave for pursuing independent life was an unprecedented move in the British royal family, which has become a continuous controversy.

The reason why Harry and Meghan’s leave has become such a controversy is because there is a complicated irony between the internal and external controversy regarding their leave. In the Netflix documentary, “Harry & Meghan”, Prince Harry and Meghan who now became the Duke and Duchess of Sussex share the details of their lives, and Harry hints that there was an internal conflict between the royal family as he says there was jealousy from other royal members towards Meghan because of the media attention she received.

It is ironic how the other royal members were jealous of Meghan because she received more media attention. However, they were not aware of how much Meghan and Harry suffered from media attention. After marrying Prince Harry in 2018, Meghan continued to face public vitriol. Social media was flooded with the hashtag #MeghanMarkleGoHome, and Meghan had to experience racial discrimination from anonymous trolls on social media. To prevent the media from spreading biased and distorted information about their situation, Harry and Meghan decided to make a documentary about themselves on Netflix. This was to tell the real story behind all the controversy.

With the release of the first volume, the series was met with mixed reviews from both the U.S. and U.K. media. The majority of media outlets tackled the fact that the audience is left with "exactly the same story we always knew, told in the way we would expect to hear it from the people who are telling it." This was followed by outlets criticizing the show’s pace, stating that there was a serious lack of original and interesting content that wasn’t made public prior to the show’s release. Some have also called the show “slick propaganda”, as the story is told exclusively from the perspective of Harry and Meghan. This was the same for the release of the second volume, with many pointing out the narcissism of the royal family “trapped inside a soap opera of their own creation”.

Undoubtedly, it is quite reasonable for many viewers to express their unwillingness to be fed the same repeating story over and over again. This is especially when it is a story about the richest and most powerful family in all of Britain, talking about their struggles against mainstream media and whatnot.

In today’s world, most acquisition of political information has shifted from physical campaigns towards streaming services and social media. As such platforms evolve rapidly, the conscious and unconscious influences they have on their uses become increasingly evident.

The development of various social platforms has been associated with greater freedom of expression and speech. The newfound opportunity for anyone to unilaterally present information regarding any subject, notably politics, has opened up access to an unlimited range of knowledge. Separated from the clutches of the government authorities.

Such criteria presented as benefits, however, resulted in significant consequences. Algorithms expose people to the information catered to best meet the user’s interests–this establishes an absence of counter-arguments, reinforcing users’ existing views through disallowing alternative perspectives. Subsequently, society becomes politically polarized, leaving all users vulnerable to manipulation as they perceive distorted news as absolute truth.

Public ignorance and the inability to distinguish true from false information contribute to the delusion. In particular, the new generation approaches news sporadically and engages briefly, blending entertainment with social news. It consequently dissipates the line between fact and gossip, leading users to approach political content without consideration or doubt. Further, society must work towards reducing misinformation through education in regard to media literacy and critical thinking, leading the population to question authorship.


The Shift in Sources of Information and Media Consumption
As conventional media forms shift, Netflix, an online streaming service, is criticized. In April, Netflix lost its subscribers for the first time since 2011, and its stock price plunged more than 60% this year. CNN reported that this is a sign that Netflix is becoming a more traditional media company (Traditional media includes all outlets that existed before the internet, such as newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and billboards), not the start of a downward spiral.

Like many tech companies, Netflix focused on increasing its subscriber growth. However, its subscriber growth was based on films and TV shows that people wanted to watch and pay for. As traditional media companies like Disney, Comcast, Paramount, or Warner Bros start to resemble Netflix more and more, the OTT platform is adopting strategies from its competitors. For example, it will soon begin serving advertisements and has begun releasing some series over weeks and months rather than all at once.

Experts predicted that Netflix's move implies a shift from tech companies to media companies in many ways. CNN reported, "Netflix looks like a traditional media company every day due to marquee shows such as introducing advertisements, cracking down on password sharing, and experimenting with staggered disclosures."

The streaming service provides video content such as movies and TV programs that consumers want in an on-demand manner, breaking away from the one-time and unidirectional nature of existing traditional broadcasting. Next, since it uses a general-purpose Internet network rather than a broadcast-only network, it provides services at a relatively low price compared to pay-TV operators.

The global streaming service market is dominated by the United States. Companies like Netflix and Hulu threaten traditional pay-TV providers. However, it has a very low market share compared to pay-TV or terrestrial broadcasting, which are traditional broadcasting services. The global online video market is expected to grow rapidly at an average annual rate of 14.4% from $5.5 billion in 2011 to $21.2 billion in 2021.

As smartphones penetrate and information technology (IT) infrastructure continues to develop, the United States is well prepared for the growth of streaming services. Therefore, if only high-quality and excellent content is continuously supplied, streaming services can be said to be a promising field with high potential for future growth. To this end, streaming service providers need to systematically nurture content-related professionals on their own and form close partnerships with traditional content providers such as terrestrial broadcasters and pay-TV companies.

On the other hand, the government needs to look at streaming services in the broad framework of the broadcasting and telecommunications industry’s growth. Streaming services are becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. due to competition between Internet video companies such as Netflix and existing paid broadcasting companies. Competition between paid broadcasters and streaming service providers, which can be summarized as cord-cutting, has positive aspects such as advancing technology and stimulating service improvement. However, the contribution to the national economy is not high because it is a zero-sum game in which fierce fighting is done to seize a given market rather than to create the next market. Using the U.S. case as a starting point, the government should adjust the system and regulations so that the streaming service and the commercial broadcasting service can develop mutually and complement each other to increase the size of the entire broadcasting and communication market.

Easy access to information has propelled us into an age of globalization, mass marketing, and an age wherein consumers can have more symmetrical information. What does this mean for the operation of our markets? Beginning with globalization, we can see the imprint instant communication and information have had on the population with the existence of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the aforementioned non-governmental organizations have had a large impact on macroeconomic mechanisms.
Mass marketing has become significantly easier with social and digital media. Media platforms allow companies and governments to broadcast advertisements on a larger scale than ever before. Because of social media’s algorithms, companies now have the capacity to push ideas or products to people who are more likely to subscribe to or buy them. This majorly influences consumer behavior, for the better and the worse. It can push them to act in ways that cause deficits for society, by, for instance, promoting demerit goods; however it can also do the opposite with merit goods advertising.
Finally, with the media comes the opportunity for consumers to acquire more information on prospective goods, which allows them to act in more economically desirable ways by being rational consumers instead of irrational consumers who make decisions that don’t reflect traditional economic theory and cause gaps within the economy. Though entirely “rational consumers” do not exist, access to more symmetrical information encourages buyers to act in ways that are not self-destructive and potentially destructive to the economy.