Products in the Media Industry

The Thirteen Product Types

Video

Video is recorded moving image content, typically combining visuals with audio. It is one of the most widely used products across the industry, appearing in film, television, advertising, social media, and online platforms. A single video asset — a promotional clip, for example — might be broadcast on TV, embedded in a website, and shared as a social media post all at once.

Audio

Audio refers to recorded sound content that is not music — think podcasts, voiceovers, radio documentaries, sound design for games, and audio guides for museums. Audio is a discreet product type in its own right: a voiceover artist delivering an audiobook is creating an audio product, not a music product.

Music

Music is specifically the composition and recording of musical content. The music sector produces albums, singles, and soundtracks, but music also feeds into almost every other product type — it is used in video, animation, digital games, websites, and social media content. Understanding that music is both a standalone product and a component of others is a useful distinction.

Animation

Animation is moving image content created by sequencing a series of drawn or computer-generated frames, rather than filming live action. It is used extensively in film, television, and advertising, as well as in digital games and educational software. Types range from traditional hand-drawn animation to 3D CGI and motion graphics.

Special Effects

Special effects, divided into SFX (practical, on-set effects) and VFX (visual effects added digitally in post-production), are used to create elements that would be impossible, impractical, or too dangerous to achieve in real life. A car explosion, a fantasy creature, or a futuristic cityscape might all be achieved through VFX. These effects are most closely associated with the film and television sectors but increasingly appear in advertising and games.

Digital Imaging & Graphics

Digital imaging and graphics covers the creation of still images using digital tools — including photography, digital illustration, photo manipulation, and graphic design. Products in this category include promotional posters, magazine covers, brand logos, infographics, and social media graphics. This is one of the broadest categories: a graphic designer working on a print advertisement and a photographer retouching images for a website are both producing digital imaging and graphics products.

Social Media Platforms & Apps

Social media platforms and apps are the digital tools through which content is published, shared, and consumed on networks such as Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter). In the context of this unit, creating a social media presence — designing posts, stories, or profile branding — is a media product in itself. Note that "social media" alone is too vague a term in an exam context; specifying the type of content (such as a social media post or social media campaign) is always better.

Digital Games

Digital games are interactive software products designed for entertainment or education, played on consoles, PCs, smartphones, and arcade machines. They are the primary product of the computer games sector, but they also overlap with interactive media and are increasingly distributed via the internet. Games combine many other product types — animation, audio, music, and VFX — making them some of the most complex media products to create.

Comics & Graphic Novels

Comics and graphic novels are narrative products told through a sequence of illustrated panels, often accompanied by dialogue and captions. They are produced by both the print publishing sector (as physical books) and the digital publishing sector (as digital editions). The exam has specifically tested the ability to identify graphic novels as a product that does not use audio — worth remembering.

Websites

Websites are collections of interlinked digital pages accessed via the internet. They serve a huge range of purposes: a business website might inform, a news website might publish journalism, and an e-commerce site might sell products. Websites regularly incorporate multiple other product types — video, audio, animation, digital graphics, and more — making them inherently multimedia in nature.

Multimedia

Multimedia refers specifically to content that combines more than one media type — typically some combination of text, images, audio, video, and animation — in a single product. An interactive presentation, a CD-ROM encyclopaedia, or an educational app that combines narrated video with clickable graphics are all multimedia products. The defining characteristic is the combination of formats rather than the use of just one.

eBooks

eBooks are digital versions of books, distributed and read on devices such as e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. They are the primary product of the digital publishing sector and represent the direct digital equivalent of the print publishing sector's physical books. eBooks may be straightforward text-and-image documents, or they may incorporate interactive and multimedia elements.

AR/VR

AR/VR covers two related technologies. Augmented reality (AR) overlays digital content onto the real world — as seen in smartphone filters or navigation apps that display directions over a live camera view. Virtual reality (VR) creates a fully immersive digital environment that replaces the user's real-world view entirely, experienced through a headset. Both are products of the interactive media and internet sectors, with growing applications in entertainment, training, retail, and education.