Robinson, M. J. "The Industry: Ritual, Tricksters, Response, and Reification." Television
on Demand: Curatorial Culture and the Transformation of TV. London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2017. 77–130. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 22 Feb. 2023. <http://
dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501300288.ch-004>.
Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 22 February
2023, 19:42 UTC.
Access provided by: February 2023 Collections Authors
Copyright © MJ Robinson 2017. All rights reserved. Further reproduction or distribution is
prohibited without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
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4
The Industry: Ritual, Tricksters,
Response, and Reification
One of the key markers of a liminal period is an upending of the traditional
structures and a suspension of the traditional power structures and hierarchies.
Chapter  2 demonstrated how the power to employ programming
strategies is being shifted to viewers, who, unlike the gatekept period of the
multichannel age, now have unlimited choice of what, when, and where to
watch. Chapter 3 discussed the challenges of quantifying those viewers and
their curatorial viewing behaviors in a way that makes sense for and to the
traditional stakeholders and financiers of the television industry. This chapter
explores the major activities and actors of “the industry” itself: its organization
and revenue streams; its rationalized systems of series development, production
and distribution; the disruptions caused by the entrance of players from
outside the traditional industry into these activities; and the ways in which all
of these televisors are now approaching the distribution of their programs in
screen-agnostic ways that accommodate, seek, and target the contemporary
viewer/curator.
“The Industry” has long been the term used to denote the producers of
televisual content. It is a metonymic term that refers to the companies, technical
workers, talent, sound stages, equipment, and economic, creative, and
cultural processes that lead to the production of an end product designed to
entertain or inform and, for the first sixty-five years of its existence, to be consumed
exclusively via the television “set.” The recipients of this entertainment
“paid” for the programming through their attention (or presumed exposure)
to advertisements and those revenues went back to the producers for the creation
of more content. As cable and satellite systems developed, some viewers
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paid for tiers of additional channels, but as discussed, all, except for specific
subscription channels, carried advertising.
It is important to note that despite the “sky is falling” rhetoric about the
“death of television” that accompanied the “Netflix surge” of 2009–2011; the
traditional economic structure of the oligopolized legacy industry remains
lucrative and entrenched. In Captive Audience:  The Telecom Industry and
Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, Susan Crawford writes “Because conventional
television —a $70 billion a year advertising vehicle —offers such
a lucrative marketplace, the possibility of substituting online video for cable
networks poses risks to both programmers and cable distributors. Cable distributors
and media conglomerates have cooperative arrangements in place
that channel more than $30 billion in fees paid annually by the distributors
to programmers, their largest source of revenue. The distributors, in turn,
charge individual subscription rates that keep going up: a typical cable subscriber
pays more than $128 a month for video, high-speed Internet access,
and phone services, and the average subscription price has increased about
30 percent in the past five years, while household incomes have declined.”1
In
short, the majority viewers still engage in the original economic agreements
that drive the traditional television economy. Magna Global, an ad-buying
and ad-market research firm forecast that 2016 TV ad revenue would “grow
0.5% to $63 billion, excluding special events such as the Olympics and election
spending.”2
While OTT licensing fees, product placement, subscriptions,
and season-pass models are becoming important revenue streams, on-the-box
advertising sales are still a major part of legacy and cable network income and
first run popularity on broadcast or cable remains one of the largest predictors
of the value of “the backend” of a series.
One way to consider the recent liminal experience of “the industry” is to
examine the influx of new producers (the digital tricksters): Netflix, YouTube,
Amazon Studios, Hulu, Yahoo, AppleTV. All of these entities are now creating
(or have plans and agreements in place to create) “original television.” The
similarities are clear: all of these entities were, first and foremost, distributors
of video or televisual content (or, in the case of Amazon, a distributor of
“everything”). In this way their evolution mimics that of the earliest days of
broadcasting. The differences lie in their relationship(s) with the traditional
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industry producers and the ability of producers and distributors to maximize
profits through lifecycle management and windowing.3
On the one hand, this
is an opportunity: “the changes in the industrial norms and conditions of production
... yield substantial implications for the creative possibilities of culture
industries.”4
On the other, it requires traditional broadcasters to reconsider
their identities as well as their practices. Will they continue to conceive of
themselves as “entities bound to previous norms of program acquisition, distribution
and scheduling?”5
Therefore, while liminality allows for the questioning,
subversion, and reconfiguration of traditional forms of authority,
new industry actors have had to grapple with many of the same challenges the
legacy players did in their formative years. What may ultimately come to pass
is the reestablishment and reification of the original fiduciary arrangements in
renewed and transformed forms.
The structure of the linear, legacy OTB industry
As discussed in Chapter 2, the large majority of on the box (OTB) viewers experience
television monolithically—a first run episode of The Big Bang Theory on
CBS, an off net rerun of The Big Bang Theory on WPIX, a cable syndicated episode
of The Big Bang Theory on TBS, it is all The Big Bang Theory to them. “Not
so fast” Sheldon Cooper would respond—“the distributors of those three episodes
are enmeshed in completely different yet related economic relationships
to each other, the viewer and Chuck Lorre ... and Jim Parsons’ residual check.”
These differing relationships depend on which traditional OTB content deliverer
(broadcast, cable, subscription, or satellite) is bringing content to the box.
The structure and system of broadcast television distribution remains the
same as it has been since its establishment in the post–World War II period
because of its dependence upon geographically limited over the air (OTA) signal
transmission. Locally television broadcasters are licensed by the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) to distribute (digitally broadcast) a
television signal in a particular Designated Market Area (DMA) of which
there are 210.6
All of the legacy networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) own and operate
(O&O) locally licensed broadcasters in major markets (New  York, Los
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Angeles, Chicago, among others). Local stations not owned and operated
(O&O) by a network are most commonly part of a Station Group but may also
be owned independently. Station Groups are larger media companies that own
regional collections of local stations and may negotiate network affiliation or
syndication deals for all stations that they own at once. Group ownership was
both made easier and favored by the 1996 Telecommunications Act and is the
more financially efficient form of ownership for companies with the resources
to purchase and run multiple television stations.7
Network affiliation means
that the locally licensed station (or the Station Group that owns it) makes an
agreement with a network to carry its programming during primetime hours
(8:00–11:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 7:00–11:00 p.m. on Sunday).
This agreement means that the local broadcaster is receiving high-production
value nationally distributed and advertised programming in return for access
to its geographically fixed audience. What may be surprising to learn is that
networks pay their affiliates for the time they program (a payment called “netcomp”)
so network affiliates are receiving programming and a payment from
the network in return for carrying the network’s programming (and advertising)
to their audiences.8
In addition to the programming (which carries
advertisements presold by the networks), the local affiliate also receives a small
amount of ad time in the show that it can use for local promotions or sell to
local advertisers.
Cable companies have exclusive contracts (franchises) with local municipalities
to provide cable service to residences in a particular area (and
maintain the physical connections required by these systems). Cable companies
are owned by multiple system operators (MSOs) which are increasingly
owned by the same corporate conglomerates that own the content
producers (Comcast/NBCU, Charter-TimeWarner). Cable operators buy
the monthly service of cable networks (and the programming they contain)
“wholesale” from channel owners based on a “per subscriber” calculation (a
“carriage fee”). The MSO then bundles these channels into collections (tiers
of programming) that it sells to subscribers at a marked up price. Cable
networks have additional revenue streams that broadcast networks traditionally
have not since in addition to carriage fees they receive advertising
revenue.9
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Satellite systems tend to operate regionally rather than locally, but their
fiduciary structure is essentially identical to cable’s in that they are buying
channels wholesale from their owners and then retailing them to subscribers
in tiers of service that contain “precurated” channel offerings. In both situations,
tiers will be curated by the cable or satellite company in such a ways as
to blend popular and less popular channels in a mix that is both economically
fortuitous for the MSO and also encouraging of customers’ subscribing
to higher and more expensive tiers of service to gain access to “everything”
they want to see. (In other words, a subscriber will pay for a particular tier of
service so as to ensure that he or she gets AMC and the Discovery channel,
but will also receive channels that he or she has little to no interest in watching
(and thus does not).
For much of the cable industry’s existence, MSOs could carry the signals
of the local broadcasters in their areas (network affiliated or not) for free.
In fact, they were required by law to carry them (the “must carry” laws). As
of the mid-1990s, those laws have expired and local broadcasters now have
the option to negotiate “retransmission fees” with MSOs or, they may use
the granting of carriage to the MSO in return for other advantages (e.g., the
free carrying of digital subchannels or cable networks that are part of their
broadcast network’s corporate family). This has allowed broadcast networks
an additional revenue stream that has helped boost their income during the
same period of audience movement to other viewing venues. The growth in
“retrans” revenue has been key to the continued solvency of broadcasters
through the post-network era. “It has been estimated that in the 2012–2016
time period TV stations will be paid over $18.2 billion in retrans revenues, of
which the top five broadcast network owners could then be allocated over $9.2
billion. During that same period, we have estimated that TV stations would
generate over $106 billion and broadcast networks could take in $91.8 billion
in advertising revenue, making retrans revenue an important component of
revenue but by no means the largest. By 2016, retrans revenues are projected
to account for 21% of TV station ad revenues and 14% of TV network ad
revenues.”10
Most recently, as can be seen by the Comcast/NBCUniversal and
Charter-Time Warner deals, the distributors and the content producers are
increasingly part of the same conglomerate family, so intricately linked that
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revenue streams from the distribution of properties and the advertising sold
against them flows back to the producers who then put the money back into
the production of additional content.
Pay channels such as HBO, Showtime, and Starz are retailed directly to the
consumer and often subsidized by the MSO which may offer “free months”
of the paid service as a selling point to increase the subscription base of its
other tiers of service (since in order to receive the pay channels one must be
a cable or satellite subscriber). Pay channels do not carry traditional advertising
spots and therefore are more concerned with acquiring or producing
properties that will increase subscriptions due to their scarcity (pay channels
sharply restrict access and do not license first-run content to syndication or
OTT outlets). Several key attributes distinguish these subscription or paychannels
from broadcast and standard cable networks. Most obviously, they
are not advertiser-supported, nor FCC regulated in terms of content. Viewers
purchase their programming as an additional monthly fee on their cable or
satellite bill and thus they pay directly for the entire content of the channel
each month (as opposed to an a la carte episode-based pay-per-view (PPV)
pricing structure). As a result, the pay networks have revenue streams and
financing models that are considerably different from those of a broadcast or
cable network—the range of “targeted programming interests enables the networks
to use the subscription fees of boxing fans to help finance original series,
the fees of those subscribing for original series to buy movie rights, the fees of
those subscribing to see original drama series help supplement documentary
series’ costs, and so on, thereby creating a radically different economic situation
and, consequently, programming environment.”11
The success of a pay network, of course, is based upon its subscription numbers
and the nature of the subscription relationship creates different fiduciary
concerns. “How many or what type of viewers watch specific content takes on
decreased importance for subscription networks; a willingness to subscribe
affords viewers their value rather than the possession of particular demographic
features important to advertisers.”12
Thus, subscription networks are
less concerned with the specific shows their paid viewers watch, and more
concerned that the viewers find sufficient value in “some aspect of the programming”
to maintain the subscription.13
What all subscription networks
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want to avoid is “churn” or seasonal “churn” by subscribers who only subscribe
to a pay channel for the period of time that a new season of a show they are
interested in watching is on and then cancel their subscription once the season
has ended.14
The economic threat of “churn” affects all subscription-based
entities, especially those that do not accept advertising and have no other revenue
streams beyond their subscriber base. Therefore, in the online SVOD
realm, churn is a much bigger problem for Netflix than it is for Hulu Plus
or Amazon Instant Video. Hulu Plus accepts ads and has the additional support
of its industry owners behind it and Amazon Instant Video is a benefit of
Amazon Prime membership which is enmeshed in the etailers other marketing
activities. No one is going to cancel their Amazon Prime membership and
not reactivate it until the new season of Transparent drops.
Television development, production,
distribution, syndication
The system of television production and distribution involves three separate
but linked entities: producers who work directly with teams of artists that create
the shows, studios that finance the shows and networks, which deliver the
shows to the viewers.15
All of these entities operate in fiduciary relationships
with each other that ultimately serve whatever conglomerate/parent company
owns, has a financial interest in, or is in contractual agreement with the entity.
The six major studios (20th Century Fox Television Studios, ABC Television
Studios, CBS/Paramount, Sony Pictures Television, Universal Media Studios
and Warner Bros) develop, finance and own the majority of scripted (meaning
not “reality”) television —in other words, one hour dramas and half hour
sitcoms. Once the shows are completed and “picked up” for distribution by a
broadcast or cable network, the network pays the studio a per-episode license
fee for the right to the “first run” broadcast of the series. This gives the network
exclusive right to the premiere broadcast of the series and a specified number
(usually two) of on-network reruns.16
It is particularly important to note
that because the producing studio and the broadcast or cable network are all
owned by the media conglomerate the money stays “in the corporate family”
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so to speak or, even if it is “picked up” by a competing network, the revenue
stream comes back to the media conglomerate (as do the rights to syndication
or further monetization of the property).
This traditional funding system is one of deficit financing: the per-episode
license fee paid by the network to the studio does not cover the entire perepisode
cost of production. In other words, studios lose money on the first run
deal for every episode of every show they produce. What the studios are banking
on is that the show will be a success and go into syndication on cable, foreign
television systems, OTA channel groups, local channels (and now OTT,
since Netflix and Amazon Instant Video have become part of the syndication
food chain). The expectation is that successful properties will turn a substantial
and lasting profit in the “aftermarket” or on the “backend.”17
Successful
shows pay for themselves many times over—such as early seasons of Law &
Order SVU currently playing on the USA network. The production costs of
these 18-year-old episodes are long paid for so the syndication fee is pure and
lasting profit to Dick Wolf/Universal Television. Additionally, syndication deals
may be geographically exclusive for local broadcast stations or station groups,
but they are not exclusive for off-net cable syndication, internet, and the like.
Therefore, when the fifth season of The Big Bang Theory is in syndication on
the local OTA Fox affiliate in New York, an independent local OTA affiliate in
Phoenix, AZ, national cable syndication on TBS and Hulu (among many other
venues), the producing studio is receiving licensing fees from all of these media
outlets. Other financing arrangements, such as barter time (advertising time
given to the local broadcaster instead of or for a discounted license fee) are
also sometimes negotiated, depending on the projected popularity of the show
and its ability to draw an audience.18
The main point is that when a network is
considering whether or not to “pick up” a show, it is thinking about the show’s
“legs and repeatability.”19
How it does in its first season will be important but
more important will be: will it make it to the all-important 100th episode and
syndication? As will be seen, some genres have more legs and repeatability than
others and some genres seem better suited to the viewing behaviors (bingeing)
encouraged by particular delivery venues (web-based video on demand).
Exceptions and innovations are, of course, present (such as Amazon
Studios “open submission” system); however, the basic way in which network
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or “industry produced” programs were/are developed follows a fairly consistent
process and timetable that was developed by and for linear televi-
sion:  development (July–October); pilot season (January–May); upfronts
(May) premieres—September, or sometime later for shows deemed “midseason
replacements.”20
While the traditional “broadcast season” upon which this
calendar is based (24–26 weeks beginning in September and concluding in
May) has been substantially transformed by the innovations of summer reality
TV premieres in the 2000s and the entrance of non-broadcasters (Netflix,
Amazon Studios) into the televisual landscape, it persists as very entrenched
industry practice.
During the development season, networks plan their “development slate.”
This is the list of projects and properties that the network has determined
will maximize their viewership, reinforce their brand identity, bolster existing
shows’ ratings, and capitalize on the success of similar shows. There are
many reasons for shows landing on development slates and many sources
for ideas. Not surprisingly, many of them will be derivative or from known
entities21
(a practice that supports and is supported by the engagement of
viewers via the “mere exposure” effect discussed in Chapter 2). Several interesting
points to note: networks are not buying shows, they are buying ideas
for shows (pitches). Also, they are not buying ideas directly from writers (or
YouTube stars), they are buying pitches from studios who buy pitches from
producers who buy ideas from writers (or YouTube stars).22
Lastly, many of
these shows are acquired for the following year’s season, so networks may
be attempting to predict what will best position them in the marketplace
12–18 months out.23
The sheer volume is staggering: “In a single year, a network often hears over
1,000 pitches for new comedies and dramas. Of those 1,000 ideas, each network
buys approximately 100 to 130 projects.”24
Of these projects, fifty to sixty
are contracted for pilot scripts (a “sample” episode of the series, usually, but
not always, the first episode to be shot and aired). By January, twenty to thirty
pilot scripts are selected to be produced. The economics of pilot season are
even more staggering as “collectively, broadcasters often spend over $300 million
per year in pilot production.”25
And, clearly all pilots are not “picked up”—
in fact most of them are not. If a pilot is passed on, the producer may try to
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sell it to a competing network but the resale market for pilots is not particularly
strong (why would a network take something a competitor has passed on
when it has already invested substantial sums in its first choice shows?)26
While there may seem to be few guidelines for the choosing of particular
pilots over others, the economies of scale involved in not just the production
of the pilot, but the continued commitment of resources to the production
of a series often supports the success of imitators of recent successes. This is
nothing new in the world of entertainment and is part of what is commonly
called a “genre cycle.” Genre cycles are a way of periodizing television through
an analysis of its most popular programming. What this reveals is that genre
cycles are begun by an innovation which creates a disruption in or change to
existing programming by introducing a show that deviates in a substantially
big enough way to call attention to itself. If that innovative show catches on and
becomes popular, the cycle will take root and imitators of that show will begin
to be developed by competing producers and networks. As the schedules fill
with these similar shows, saturation occurs during which an overabundance
of this “type” of show can be found across multiple networks and distribution
outlets. As the popularity of these shows wane, a new innovation is sought
and the process begins again. I would argue that genre cycles are somewhat
irrelevant to OTT producers, except as a barometer of what other producers
are investing in. However, as will be seen, the long tail created by OTT distribution
may make genre silos rather than genre cycles the more relevant way to
track dramaturgical evolution.
Once a pilot is picked up, the network “commits to paying the pilot’s license
fee, usually about 60–70 percent of the pilot’s budget (the remaining 30 to
40 percent comes from the studio; this is the deficit of ‘deficit financing’).”27
While twenty to thirty pilots may ultimately be shot during each year’s pilot
season, most networks pick up only four to eight new shows per season. Since
they expect about half of the new shows to fail, networks will initially order
six to thirteen episodes including the pilot. If the show does well, the network
will order additional episodes to finish the season.28
If not, it could be replaced
by another as-yet-unbroadcast pilot midseason whether or not its full order of
episodes have been broadcast.
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Taking the shows to market: Upfronts
The primetime upfront presentations are held in May in New York, where
most of the media buyers (and advertising agencies) are located. These advertising
and television industry-only events are presentations where networks
reveal their fall schedules of returning and new shows to advertisers, their
affiliate stations and the press. The goal is to create as much buzz and interest
in their upcoming shows as possible and to sell the majority of their advertising
inventory for the fall season. Upfront presentations are extravagant, usually
attended by current network stars (and known names with new shows to
promote) and are where the networks focus on putting their best face on and
foot forward—regardless of recent or projected performance.
During the upfront buying season (which can last until August), advertisers
can buy commercial time on shows airing during the fall season at a discount
(usually about 15% off). The advantage for networks is that they are able to
sell 65–75 percent of their prime time available spots (called “avails”) and thus
be guaranteed income and advertiser support prior to the fall premieres.29
On
the advertising side, media planners will work closely with media buyers and
account executives to determine the best shows on which to purchase time,
reviewing either past ratings performance (for returning shows) or projected
target audience numbers for new shows based on talent, similar show performance,
timeslot, and network ranking overall.
The agency will tell the network the client’s budget as well as the desired
target audience, including any particular weeks (“flightings”) during which
they would definitely want to run campaigns on certain shows.30
The network
will respond with a package of shows that it believes will deliver this audience
and negotiations begin for a CPM rate—a cost per thousand of viewers
that the network will guarantee the spots will receive.31
Nielsen rankings from
the previous season (of continuing series) are considered, but all metrics for
these shows are scrutinized. As discussed in Chapter 3, since 2014 the C7 rating
(commercial viewing “live” plus up to seven days of time-shifted viewing)
is the primary one upon which upfront CPMs are calculated.32
Negotiations
take place on several fronts. Companies willing to commit to an entire season
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may receive additional discounts, networks may request advertisers to buy
sometime on less-popular shows in return for prominent placement on higher
performing shows. Once the program mix and CPMs have been determined,
the contracts will be drawn up and the network will “hold” that time for the
advertiser. Most deals struck during upfronts guarantee GRPs (gross ratings
points) which are “used to measure the exposure to one or more programs or
commercials, without regard to multiple exposures of the same advertising to
individuals. One GRP = 1% of TV households.”33
If the advertisements do not
achieve the promised number of GRPs, then the network will rerun the ads as
“make goods” to “make up” the missed GRPs. The advertiser has less control
over “make goods” placement as they often comprise less-attractive timeslots
from the scatter market.34
Therefore, accurate audience measurement is crucial
for media buyers since: “a successful agency avoids make-goods by accurately
estimating and buying time in programs for which the anticipated ratings
and the actual ratings are most likely to be similar.”35
If the “make goods” are
unacceptable to the advertiser, the network may actually do a “give back” and
refund the advertiser’s money.36
If, by chance, the program over-delivers on
the GRPs several possibilities arise: either the advertiser is happy and nothing
changes, the network uses the higher performance as a bargaining “chit”
in future negotiations or the network “commits to a specific number of GRPs
for the season, and when the commitment is satisfied, the remaining commercial
time is sold to other advertisers.”37
Of these options, the first is the most
likely to happen as networks want to maintain positive relationships with their
advertisers.
Advertising inventory not sold during the upfronts becomes part of the
scatter market which is not discounted (and can be as much as 40% higher
than the upfront market), does not guarantee “make goods” if GRPs are not
met and does not allow buyers to cancel their ad buy without losing money.38
The last market is the “spot” market which is the least desirable way to purchase
ad time. While the available inventory may include desirable individual
commercial slots, the spot market is limited to unsold time on hand and also
much more expensive, especially for shows that have outperformed expecta-
tions.39
If networks do not sell all of their ad inventory, or they are delivered
an episode that runs short (while the maximum running times of hour and
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half-hour shows are forty-four and twenty-two minutes, respectively, shorter
episodes are, on occasion be delivered to network by the production company)
they will use the left over inventory for “make goods” or to promote their own
shows or shows on their other channels. Traditionally, none of these negotiations
have allowed for advertisers to choose the specific “pod” (commercial
break) in which their ads will air. This is beginning to change in the wake of
the C7 Nielsen which has enabled advertisers “to see not only which pods—
but which positions in those pods—are the most valuable commercial slots.”40
Syndication and the aftermarket
Syndication is a means of program distribution that involves the direct distribution
of a show to a local broadcaster or cable network by the owner of the
property. Syndication takes several forms, but the principle distinctions for our
purposes here are the difference between first-run syndication and “off network”
(now often called “aftermarket”) syndication as it is these practices that
have been most intervened upon by the explosion of OTT viewing options.
Until the mid-2000s, the “lifecycle management” of a show was relatively clear
and relied upon exclusive access through an established set of windows. The
revolution in these practices, which spurred a complete reconsideration and
reenvisioning of licensing deals was TV series video on demand (VOD) and
per-episode downloads, neither of which existed prior to 2006.41
First run syndication
The easiest way to define first run syndication is to name representative exam-
ples: Ellen, Jeopardy, Family Feud, Oprah, The View, The Chew ... these shows
are original productions, often produced daily or with the expectation of daily
viewing which are distributed directly to station groups by their producers.
Local broadcasters use these first-run syndicated shows to fill their nonnetwork
programmed hours. The fiduciary relationship between the broadcast
outlet and the content owner is usually “cash plus barter” so “in exchange for
the right to broadcast particular programs, stations pay some cash but also
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surrender some advertising time back to the distributor.”42
The distributor then
sells national advertising which is inserted into the episodes as delivered to the
local broadcaster. It should be noted that the distributors are also conglomerated
and in corporate families of the legacy broadcasters. CBS Television
Distribution, 20th Century Television, and Disney/ABC Domestic Television
rank among the top five syndicators to the US market.
Off-net/Aftermarket syndication
Off-net syndication is where deficit financing has traditionally paid off—it is
where shows begin to turn a profit for their producers in the licensing fees paid
to their content owners by local broadcasters and cable networks that seek
syndicated content with a track record to fill out their programming schedules.
Shows are generally not syndicated until they have reached 80–100 episodes
which is sufficient for the licensee to “strip” the show five days a week at
a particular time without repeating episodes for at least six months. The offnetwork
rerun, argues Kompare, “has long been one of television’s most essential
program forms. It remains a viable part of syndication, even as the very
nature of both ‘television’ and ‘syndication’ becomes less tangible with every
new digital distribution venture.”43
“The place of off-network drama series ...
has never been stable” writes Kompare, “syndicated hours have historically
been difficult to schedule in daily syndication and have never drawn the size
or makeup of audience that sitcoms demand.”44
One hour self-contained dramatic
narratives (police procedurals like the Law & Order and CSI franchises)
found off-net success on cable networks, although that market shifted as cable
networks began to engage in more original prime time production from the
mid-2000s onward. What is also unique to off-net syndication in the linear
legacy age of television is that the “net” pretty much exclusively refers to a
broadcast network. “Network shows go to cable or syndication, but there are
few if any examples of shows moving upstream from cable to network.”45
The
content needs of OTT television distributors and the licensing fees they have
been willing to pay have expanded the aftermarkets of all television shows
substantially—in ways that devalue certain parts of the syndication market
while opening new venues for series previously thought to have little-to-no
aftermarket besides a DVD release.
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Traditional linear programming strategies: Flow,
daypart, and genre
Network and cable programmers engage in a variety of strategies to arrange their
programs into configurations that they think will encourage viewers to not only
tune in, but to also stay with their channel for more than one show. (This is the
“flow” that Raymond Williams first theorized in 1975, and which has become
a guiding concept in the analysis of television and programming strategies.46
)
Network programmers have always been keenly aware of the role their work plays
in making their networks’ schedule of programming competitive. The strategies
they employ: block booking, counter-programming, hammocking, tent-poling,
and lead ins have relied upon a limited number of clearly identified competitors,
whose offerings at a particular time could be quantified, analyzed, and then strategically
countered. Naturally, the more dispersed the audience, the more ineffective
and in some cases irrelevant these strategies have become. Nonetheless,
programming decisions (where a show will ultimately “go” and what it will be surrounded
by and up against) inform pilot season and pickups and are controlled
and affected by a variety of traditional and new structures and practices all of
which are designed to reach target audiences and strengthen the network brand.
Dayparts
Dayparts are the traditional organizing principle of the linearly scheduled programming
day, and have been since the dawn of radio. They are used not only
to distinguish which parts of the day will be provided to network affiliates by
the network, but also in the setting of advertising rates since certain times of
day have traditionally presumed larger audiences than others. There are eight
major dayparts that divide a 24-hour period:
Time Daypart
5:00 a.m.–9:00 a.m. Early Morning
9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. Daytime
4:00 p.m.–7:00 p.m. Early Fringe
7:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m. Prime Access
8:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m. Primetime
11:00 p.m.–11:35 p.m. Late News
11:35 p.m.–2:00 a.m. Late Fringe
2:00 a.m.–5:00 a.m. Overnight47
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While the particular programming carried by a particular station during
a discrete daypart may be similar, the specific shows that appear on
a station (and therefore, the advertising rates), are, of course, controlled
by a series of interlocking criteria and depend on the individual station’s
relationship with a larger network. For example, WNBC (New York) being
an O&O station of the NBC network, will carry network content such
as The Today Show during the early morning daypart, and The Tonight
Show during late fringe. An independent broadcast station in the same
market may carry off-network syndicated reruns such as Seinfeld or The
Big Bang Theory during the same dayparts. Additionally, the amount of
programming provided during a particular daypart varies from network
to network. Fox affiliates air local news at 10:00 p.m. when their networksupplied
primetime programming ends, and counter program reruns during
the late news daypart when legacy network affiliates are airing their
local news.
Another major function that the daypart has traditionally served is to organize
the broadcast day for viewers. Since the early days of radio, listeners were
conditioned to expect that daytime serials (soaps) would be broadcast during
the daytime, with the programming becoming more family and child-oriented
toward the later afternoon, as children returned home from school, or as parents
returned from work and the family prepared for dinner and the evening
hours. In other words—there is (or has been) a direct correlation between daypart
and genre.
Genre transformation in the post-network post-box era
It is important to consider genre as a part of programming strategy because
the two have historically been linked. Dayparts communicated genre expectations
to linear television viewers—conditioning them to expect first-run syndicated
talk shows, soap operas, or court shows to be scheduled during the day
and higher production value, bigger named star comedies, and dramas during
primetime. Traditionally, genres were bounded by a fairly inflexible set of rules
and characteristics that were used to contain and cohere narrative elements,
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ones that make—the “loglines” of TV Guide Magazine simple for viewers to
understand for instance. This was a logical and efficient way to manage narrative
in an environment with fewer viewing choices.
Genre distinctions range from the broad to the specific to the hybrid—the
most obvious large categories are drama and comedy, but subgenres within
these broader categories (domestic sitcom, workplace sitcom, police procedural,
medical, fantasy, etc.) are often used to describe shows. Beyond contentrelated
characteristics, there are other ways of categorizing genre common to
the television industry. These usually categorize something about the show’s
“form” (half hour, hour, variety), which help programmers classify the show.
And, there are yet other genre descriptors (“quality”) that rely upon either
opinion or a generally accepted, if arbitrary list of attributes rather than being
tied to the narrative or thematic elements of the shows being described.
As the daypart has become increasingly irrelevant and the citizen programmers
take their power, genre has been freed from daypart-based constraints.
As television begins to be originated and distributed entirely off-the-box, it
is also freed from the expectations and conventions of traditional broadcast
forms. What we are now observing is the purported death of the longestplaying
genres (soap opera) conterminously with the development of genrehybrids
and/or popularization of genres that would have been unthinkable
(or commercially unsuccessful) during the traditional network era. These new
niche genres have found sustainable audiences off-the-box and on the internet.
Further transformations in genre and audience expectation have been
fostered by the realization that different modes of delivery and accessibility
encourage different forms of consumption which are uniquely advantageous
for certain genres over others.
Perhaps one of the most interesting situations through which one can discuss
and see the effect of the “death of the daypart” on the perceptions and practices
of television producers, programmers, and their audiences is the decline
of the daytime soap opera genre. Soap operas, which rely upon a consistently
scheduled and continual broadcast of their sequential episodes, and which
have little to no backend or aftermarket syndication revenue streams, have
not negotiated the “platish or perish” transition well. While enjoying some of
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the most dedicated fan bases of any television genres, they have suffered audience
erosion due to demographic shifts in their audiences. While their ratings
performance has been equal to other daytime television offerings, the economies
of scale involved in their production have made them “too expensive”
for the networks to produce. The many schemes suggested to “save the soaps”
have largely operated from either the traditional advertiser-supported model,
or from a fiduciary model that is still traditional in its construction—such
as moving the soaps to a narrowcast cable channel (although Soapnet ceased
operation on December 31, 2013).
The decline of shows categorized as “soaps” has not, however, led to a disappearance
of their defining generic conventions from television. In fact,
I would suggest that the networks began coopting and integrating the narrative
elements of daytime into their nighttime programming as early as the
mid-to-late 1980s, as legacy broadcasters strove to counter a loss of viewers
to an increasing number of cable networks. The resulting genre cycle, which
Robert Thompson, writing in 1996, called “quality TV,” borrowed heavily from
the soap opera and transformed traditional evening genres such as the police
procedural, courtroom story, and medical drama.
Thompson identified twelve attributes of “quality TV,” the most germane for
our purposes being the following:*
●
Usually has a quality pedigree—creatives with track records in other highend
culture industries or, television itself.
●
Attracts an audience with “blue chip” demographics—“upscale, welleducated,
urban-dwelling viewers” that advertisers want to reach.
●
Tends to have a large ensemble cast.
●
Has a memory—characters develop and change as the series goes on,
events and details from prior episodes are referred to or used subsequently
to advance the action. (Another way of saying this would be “seriality.”)
●
Tends to be literary and writer-based.
* So as not to short the “completest” reader, the other four attributes of “quality TV” that Thompson
identified are: “Best defined by what it is not, so Hill Street Blues was not your ‘traditional’ police
procedural that introduced one crime and solved it within the forty-eight minute hour; (In the
1980s at least) The show must undergo a noble struggle against profit-mongering networks and
nonappreciative audiences, or takes a season or two to find an audience; Creates a new genre by
mixing old ones; Is self-conscious – may also be self-referential about being a televisual text.”
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●
Has subject matter that tends toward the controversial or the
contemporary social issue. Tends to have the perspective of liberal
humanism.
●
Aspires toward “realism.”
●
Usually showered with awards and critical acclaim.48
Fully four of these attributes: an ensemble cast, having a memory or seriality,
being writer-based and having subject matter that addresses contemporary
social issues, have inhered in the soap opera form since its inception. The
emphasis on the writer and quality pedigree of its creative team foreshadows
the reification of what we would now call a “showrunner” as a brand, since the
first iterations of this new genre (Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law)
became calling cards for their creator/executive producer, Steven Bochco. The
other qualities clearly describe recent innovations in original programming by
Netflix, Hulu Plus, YouTube, and Amazon Studios.
If we consider the last twenty years or so, since the coining of the term
“quality TV” we see a fall off in the number of shows that could be classified
by this term as the reality television genre cycle came into vogue. At the
same time, quality TV has borrowed at least two generic elements from soap
opera—ensemble cast and seriality—which could be said to be responsible for
the success of the highest rated reality programs, since one can see these characteristics
in shows such as Survivor, Big Brother, Real World, and the like.
As the reality cycle began to wane in the mid-2000s, (and alternative viewing
spaces became available) there was an increase in the production of shows that
could be classified as “Quality TV” by the linear networks such as Brothers and
Sisters, Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Wife and most recently American Crime
Story, Scandal, and Empire.
The main commonality among all of these shows is, of course, seriality. The
importance of seriality is emphasized in the criticism about quality TV and the
connection between the soap opera and literary forms that encompass long
narratives such as the novel. Thompson traces the movement of the serialized
form into primetime series to Dallas which premiered in 1977, and owed its
success entirely to its use of the soap opera form.49
The success of imitators
and spin- offs such as Knots Landing, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, and Flamingo
Road “gave a memory to the entire medium” writes Thompson—so “many
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dramatic shows—even those that weren’t exactly soaps—began employing
ongoing story lines.”50
In fact, writes Thompson, “As the Golden Age of television
(the variety shows and anthology shows of the 1950s) was rooted in the
legitimate stage, quality dramas were rooted in the soap opera.”51
The complexity
of these shows comes from the “slow layering of events, character traits, and
other visual and dramatic details over the entire run of these series” and notes
that “these slowly accruing stories could only be told in the serial form. More
importantly, they could only be told on television.”52
This last point is particularly important—they could only be told on television,
because of the structure of the industry in this period. All major industry
distributors abided by a twenty-six week season which ran September–May
and shows ran according to fixed weekly schedules that, except for mid-season
replacements, were consistent. Reruns were scheduled during summer hiatuses
that gave shows that performed poorly in their first run a chance to build
an audience without competing against new first-run content. This system was
substantially eroded through the growing practice of premiering new content
during the summer, a strategy pioneered by the “fourth network” FOX during
the late 1980s and firmly entrenched when CBS premiered Survivor during the
summer of 2000. The success of highly serialized original programming on the
OTT providers and the new forms of consumption (bingeing) and distribution
(the drop) is perhaps the ultimate confirmation that complex narratives are
extremely viable and desirable program forms with the power to continue to
attract interested viewers to new venues of televisual consumption.
Writing in Variety in 2013, Cynthia Littleton states that The Good Wife,
being a “highly serialized show” was “unlikely to generate big bucks in traditional
off-network syndication.”53
However, this same attribute made it
“tailor-made for the new breed of digital off-network buyers looking for the
soapy, social media-friendly serialized skeins that invite binge viewing.”54
Thus
Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Instant Video provide unique off-network sites
that according to Leslie Moonves, “serve the content needs of best-in-class
partners while realizing the full syndication value for a high-quality series.
In addition, the potential for catch-up viewing across multiple platforms can
provide incremental value to future broadcasts on CBS.”55
While some internet
video deals are emphasizing scarcity and exclusivity (Downton Abbey on
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Amazon Instant Video, the recent South Park-Hulu deal), other deals are considerably
more windowed. “Nowadays, most of the time if they pay a high
ticket price, they will get all the rights, but now you’re looking at deals where
you split it up more. You slice and dice it even more than you did before where
you’ll sell it to a Netflix or an Amazon and then sell it to a cable [network],
then sell it in syndication.”56
From genre cycle to genre silo—the long tail of television?
What appears to be developing now is a situation in which certain “types” of
shows (those that are highly serialized) succeed on certain viewing platforms
(those that encourage and facilitate binge viewing) and other types (procedurals,
stand-alones, low budget slice-of-life reality) on others (OTB viewing).
There is still a demonstrable market for what Kompare calls “banal” or
“habitual” TV—“‘just see TV’ rather than ‘must see TV.’”57
Another way to
look at this is that the increase in productions fostered by a multiplicity of distribution
options and consumption platforms has made room for the production
of content that serves all viewer needs from ambient/company viewing to
focused/immersive involvement. This may result in the replacement of genre
cycles spread across multiple outlets by genre silos found on one particular
viewing destination and the simultaneous production of a variety of viable
shows that will all eventually find an audience on net, off net, or OTT– a situation
that would have been unthinkable and financially impossible during the
network era of broadcasting.
The digital disruptors—interventions and new conventions
Van Gennep, Gregory Bateson, and Victor Turner theorized the mythical figure
of the “trickster” as a bringer of both disorder and culture.58
Trickster
figures actually predate anthropology and exist as far back as Greek myth
(Hermes and Mercury). They are, quite simply “boundary crossers” who are
catalysts for exchange and trade.59
All communities have boundaries and the
trickster is always “at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure
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there is commerce.”60
The trickster stays on the periphery, not the center (for
they can get more done by focusing on change rather than being the center
of attention) and they “might help someone see into the heart of things, and
that they therefore have a touch of the prophet about them.”61
This prophetic
skill is not so much the ability to see into the future and prognosticate how
things will be, but rather to consider the grand possibility of the future—since
the trickster is asocial and often amoral—not bound by tradition or rules.
“Trickster reveals the plentitude of this world; if he then disappears, we see
the same revelation repeated in the multiple ways human beings understand
the plenitude of things once conventional understanding has been lifted.”62
He/she is a liminal figure as well as a cultural hero who continues “to keep
our world lively and give it the flexibility to endure.”63
In fact, argues Lewis
Hyde, trickster is a requirement for a viable and durable culture because his/
her function is “to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based
on.”64
Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and AwesomenessTV/
YouTube’s Brian Robbins do not necessarily embody all of the attributes of
the trickster figure. After all, “actual individuals are always more complicated
than the archetype, and more complicated than its local version too.”65
But
they have functioned in ways that are unique to the trickster in the transformative
effects they have had upon the traditional television industry structures
and practices.
The successful debut of Netflix’s streaming only service in the fall of 2010
resulted in the popularization of the acronym OTT (“over the top”) “to
acknowledge concerns that cable subscribers would use Netflix and other
broadband streaming and downloading distribution services as an alternative
to cable subscriptions.”66
YouTube, Netflix, Vudu, Vimeo, and other early
web-streaming sites acclimated viewers to cross-platform viewing. Amazon
piloted an entirely new pilot season and bundling VOD content with existing
e-commerce products. While legacy OTB programmers attempted to embrace
mobile and web viewing through the creation of transmedia paratexts,
branded apps from OTT platforms that provided uninterrupted streaming of
high-quality long-form content obviated the need to create special content for
mobile, moving clips, and “spreadable media” to YouTube and the realm of
social media portals and platforms.
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Netflix
Netflix was, of course, the first OTT VOD system to begin creating disruptions
for the traditional linear television industry. Netflix began streaming video in
2008 just as residential subscriptions to broadband began to increase.67
Thus it
created a substantial “long tail” of alternative viewing options for US viewers
and a new revenue stream for television content owners and producers—at
that time solely the broadcast and cable networks.*
Netflix licensed entire series
of current and past television shows for streaming distribution via its online
platform. However, in addition to popular guaranteed money makers, Netflix
was also open to licensing shows that had a very difficult time in the traditional
“off-net” market, because they did not have enough episodes to make
syndication fees “worth it” for channel groups and local stations, because they
originated on cable as opposed to broadcast, because they were one-hour long,
serialized, or because their OTB ratings performance had not been suitably
high to guarantee a sufficient traditional off-net syndication audience.
Netflix internationalized the televisual viewing repertoire through deals
with international producers, both English language (three seasons of The
IT Crowd, a BBC sitcom were licensed by Netflix as well as Top of the Lake,
an international coproduction of the BBC2, BBC UKTV (Australia), and
Sundance Channel, shot in New Zealand and directed by Jane Campion)
and producers working in non-English speaking countries willing to provide
English-subtitled versions to the American Netflix market. (Generation War,
a German miniseries that follows the lives of five friends through World War
II was licensed by Netflix as well as Punch and Pinocchio, South Korean television
shows that Netflix has made available to the American viewer.)
In addition to creating an “always on” syndication market and a plethora
of choice for its subscribers, Netflix also demonstrated a vast and lucrative
aftermarket for pretty much all and any televisual content. Freed from the
strictures of the linear daypart, television shows from throughout the history
of the medium were made available to new and old audiences in perpetual
* Netflix, of course, has international aspirations and is now available in 190 countries. Its first intervention
was in the United States which is what I address here. The global impact of Netflix and
other OTT producer-distributors on the internationalization of the television market is addressed
in greater detail in Chapter 6.
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“rerun” as it might be. But, of course, key to this was that these reruns were
now being pulled to interested niche viewers rather than pushed out to a mass
audience. This did not go unnoticed by the legacy networks who began to
stream episodes of their content via their own network websites (where they
could control pre-roll and other unavoidable advertising as well as receive the
revenue from said advertising) and to not renew licensing deals with Netflix.
In 2008, Hulu (the OTT industry venture led by NBCUniversal and FOX then
later joined by Disney) launched, which further eroded the availability of television
streaming licenses to Netflix.
Netflix’s response to the curtailment of television streaming licenses by the
legacy content producers and owners was to begin producing its own content.
This entrance of distributors into production is not only not new, but it is
also the reason the legacy networks were created in the first place. The Radio
Corporation of America (RCA), the major producer of radio sets for the home
in the early 1920s, needed a selling point to convince consumers to invest half
a year’s salary on a “box” for the living room that, from external inspection was
inert and not very interesting looking. RCA’s solution was to form NBC—the
National Broadcasting Corporation which, through its red and blue networks
of affiliated radio stations, broadcast shows (and advertisements) across the
United States. Quite simply, the creator of the distribution platform (RCA)
entered original production (via the creation of subsidiary NBC) in order to
create a selling point for the distribution platform (radio) and to encourage
consumers to buy one.*
So it should have come to no surprise to the OTB networks that Netflix
responded to the scarcity of attractive content licenses by entering the original
content business.68
Netflix’s first forays into original programming
were: twenty-six episodes of House of Cards directed by David Fincher and
starring Kevin Spacey (at a cost of about $4 million an episode); new episodes
of the critically acclaimed but cancelled Fox series Arrested Development ($2.5
* To be sure, I am oversimplifying and sketching out the broadest of broad histories of the development
of commercial radio and then television broadcasting here. The important points for our
discussions are the industrial relationships between content delivery platform owners and content
creators, which explain, in part the movement of digital “sovereigns” into the content-producing
spheres. For substantially more detail on the development of broadcasting in the United States,
I refer the reader to the work of Susan Douglas, Michele Hilmes, Megan Mullen, Erik Barnouw,
James Baughman, Michael Curtin, and Susan Murray among others.
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to $3 million an episode); and Lillehammer, a Norwegian-American coproduction
with Norwegian public broadcaster NRK1.69
Netflix did not “program” nor
“schedule” these shows, it made entire first series available all at once to “watch
instantly” even if the show also ran in other configurations. All eight episodes
of Lillehammer became available for viewing to American Netflix subscribers
on February 6, 2012, while the series ran linearly on Norwegian television.
Audiences (by which Ted Sarandos means “Netflix subscribers”) could
choose to “binge watch” the series, or to view it at their leisure—what they
were encouraged to do, and practically required to by the narrative form—was
to view the eight episodes sequentially. “People need a longer relationship with
a show than one or two or three weeks” said Sarandos. “What we do is provide
a longer time for shows to come to life for the audience.”70
Sarandos believes
that this release pattern allows for shows to find audiences, but also for audiences
to view, review, and engage with the episodes and their narratives—they
are experiencing, exploring, and creating new ways of viewing.
The common generic element of practically all of Netflix’s first original productions
is seriality, which binds the viewer to the show, creates an ongoing
relationship between the viewer and the show and essentially draws upon all
of the narrative and dramaturgic tropes that bound daytime viewers to soaps.
The unique all-at-once distribution pattern of Netflix frees the viewer from a
schedule-driven consumption of the show without disrupting the experience.
Viewers do not need to worry about being “behind” or “missing” episodes—
their consumption pattern (i.e., which order they view the shows in) is dictated
by the narrative form. Their consumption schedule and experience (when,
where, and how) they watch the serialized episodes—is up to the viewer.
The success of this experiment has demonstrated that original programming
available solely behind web paywalls is, at least for Netflix, realistic and
successful, and led to additional deals for Orange is the New Black, Bojack
Horseman, and second and third seasons of House of Cards and Lillehammer.
The “backend” of these shows is different from network in that once created
and made available, they go into immediate and eternal syndication,
remaining accessible and discoverable at Netflix for viewer recommendation
in arguably perpetuity. DVD releases of these series have been timed for just
before the next season becomes available, thus serving as an advertisement
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and enticement for non-Netflix subscribers to view, become intrigued, and
subscribe.
However, the binge-watching consumption patterns for these shows
has both advantages and disadvantages for subscription-based companies.
Showtime and HBO have always had to contend with subscriber “churn” after
their prestige shows have finished their seasons, but can count on the 12–15
week season to be a period of high viewership and structure their promotions
for new programming and other appeals to viewer engagement and loyalty.
An Orange Is the New Black viewer might consume the entire new season in
one day so if the viewer sees Netflix solely as the site of destination viewing of
that particular show, he or she may choose to cancel after viewing. To be sure,
Netflix can start new runs of original programming whenever it wishes as well
as hope that “viewers who liked X also liked” recommendations of titles from
their long tail of programming will keep subscribers engaged in between seasons
of their favorite original programming. This is crucial for Netflix’s continued
viability—while it is less vulnerable to churn than the linearly programmed
Showtime and HBO, its ability to keep subscribers in between season drops of
its most popular shows relies on its library and other offerings—especially in
the wake of its summer 2016 price-hike for streaming-only access.
Netflix pays producers for its content based on how many people it thinks
will watch a show—the success of the show is based not on Nielsen ratings, but
on internal data collected from Netflix servers that show what people watched
and how much of a show they watched as well as the user “ratings” that Netflix
subscribers assign shows they watch to contribute to Netflix’s recommendation
algorithm. Since Netflix is not ratings-driven it “doesn’t have a traditional
network’s gaggle of development executives to supervise productions and
bicker over scripts. It will even take the highly unusual risk of ordering multiple
seasons of a show without a pilot episode.”71
“The worse thing we’ll do”
according to Sarandos “is create mediocre shows.”72
If that occurs, thanks to
the low cost of Netflix’s long tail catalog, the shows could still find an audience
of viewers who enjoy mediocre programming and have indicated this preference
to Netflix’s recommendation engine.
In 2013, Netflix became the first online-only content producer to be nominated
for the Emmy awards. It was nominated in fourteen categories, with its
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“flagship” production House of Cards receiving the majority of these (nine).
Kevin Spacy and Robin Wright were nominated for outstanding actor and
actress in a dramatic series, the show itself was nominated for Best Drama, and
it was nominated for several creative awards Emmys. Ultimately, Netflix won
three of the awards, best Casting and Cinematography at the creative Emmys,
but also the award for Best Directing, which was won by David Fincher. Netflix
also brought a slate of shows to the 2013 Television Critics Association press
tour, further evidence that Netflix’s ultimate goal is “to take its place alongside
traditional networks as a purveyor of original programming.”73
In presenting
the “sizzle” reel to the TCA—arguably the largest gathering of professional
television influencers in the United States, Sarandos said: “We’re leading the
next great wave of change in the medium of TV. We’re not trying to destroy it,
but evolve it for the current generation and those to come.”74
In June 2014, Netflix signed a seven-year deal with Chelsea Handler for
a series of specials and a talk show which will premiere in 2016.75
Handler’s
late-night talk show on E! ran from 2007 to 2014 and averaged 600,000 viewers
in its last season.76
Sarandos said of the deal: “Netflix is looking forward to
reimagining the late night talk show for the on-demand generation, starting
with the late night part.”77
It is unclear how the show will be scheduled but
Netflix insiders have said that “as ‘a topical talk show’ it would not follow the
previous Netflix pattern of posting all episodes at once” and that it could be
“described as ‘in the style of a late-night show,’ if not produced on a late-night
time schedule.”78
In this way, upstart trickster Netflix is experimenting with
traditional structures and patterns, to see how they might and if they should
be transformed. This well could lead to the liminality of liveness.
Amazon Studios
Amazon Studios is a production wing of super e-tailor Amazon and, obviously,
aims to produce content specifically for distribution via Amazon Instant
Video, preferably to owners of the Amazon Kindle, Amazon Fire, or FireTV.
Amazon announced its first “pilot” season in May of 2012 and solicited submissions
of pitches for comedy and children’s shows. It hired Joe Lewis, formerly
of 20th Century Fox and Tara Sorensen from National Geographic
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Kids to oversee the “crowd sourced” development process. In the first round,
Amazon optioned scripts for “$10,000 within 45  days of submission and
awarded an additional $55,000 plus royalties, bonuses and a small percentage
of merchandise” to shows it chose to produce.79
Amazon touted this as a “twist
on the traditional closed-door approach to development in Hollywood” since
decisions would be “heavily informed by feedback its users will provide when
given the option via Amazon Instant Video to view animatics or video excerpts
of proposed projects.”80
In 2013, the first pilot season yielded Alpha House, a
comedy about US senators who become roommates, Betas, a comedy set in
Silicon Valley, Browsers, a comedy about a web startup in Manhattan, Those
Who Can’t, Onion News Empire, Dark Minions, Supernatural, Zombieland,
and the children’s shows Annebots, Creative Galaxy Teeny Tiny Dogs, Sara
Solves It, Positively Ozitively, and Tumbleaf. Alpha House, Betas, Annebots,
Creative Galaxy, and Tumbleaf were “picked up” and went into production
with between six and eleven episodes of each available on Amazon Instant
Video. The second pilot season yielded The After, Transparent, Wishenpoof!
Mozart in the Jungle, Gortimore Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, and Bosch.
Of these, Jeffrey Tambour stars in Transparent, which is the creation of former
Six Feet Under and United States of Tara producer and writer Jill Soloway,
and Bosch is based on a highly successful series of detective novels by Michael
Connelly. While the crowdsourcing of pilot selection and move to more
involvement from “viewers” is an interesting move in theory, it would seem
that Amazon Studios is primarily drawing from the same pool of properties,
inspiration, and producers as traditional television does. In practice, it may
be creating an additional development laboratory for those who have already
established a track record and pedigree within the industry to develop projects
rather than democratizing access to the means of production and cultivating
outsider talent.
YouTube aka Netazon? Amaflix?
YouTube by design presents a challenge of definition as well as analysis—as a
rebroadcaster/repository of professional and amateur created content; as a
“commons” where do-it-yourself (DIY) producers can (and do) exhibit their
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own works; as a media buyer/ad rep for its most successful original producers,
as a social media network with a robust community of commenters and curators.
It also mimics the structure of a cable or satellite provider, offering a tier
of over 300 “paid channels” of international and domestic niche programming
to which viewers may purchase subscriptions. In 2015, it announced YouTube
Red—an original content subscription service where for $10 a month viewers
can get access to original programming developed by YouTube “stars” such as
PewDiePie.81
And, of course, YouTube is owned by Google/Alphabet whose cor-
poratetentaclesreachintovirtuallyeverycornerofthenetworkconnected world.
YouTube never sought to become a replacement for the television
industry—it is what David Weinberger calls a “meta business”—a “new category
of business that enhances the value of information developed elsewhere
and thus benefits the original creators of that information.”82
Ergo, it is a priori,
a curatorial space. Its emphasis has always been on content sharing, even as
it has, in an attempt to monetize its business model, sought production and
distribution deals with industry entities, sold advertising against content it
does not own the copyright to, and struck deals with amateur YouTube stars
to revenue share around half of the advertising it places against their content.
What we see here is a product of convergence and a demonstration that “the
affordances of digital media provide a catalyst for reconceptualizing other
aspects of culture, requiring the rethinking of social relations, the reimagining
of cultural and political participation, the revision of economic expectations
and the reconfiguration of legal structures.”83
YouTube as democratized archive
YouTube has already offered a massive “unfiltered bottom-up cultural
archive.”84
The content that comprises this archive has largely been made available
“as the result of hours of painstaking labor, undertaken by the amateur
collectors and curators of television who are digitizing VHS tapes in their
garages, editing them for upload at YouTube, tagging and describing them,
and arranging them into playlists or groups.”85
In other words, YouTube began
as (and still remains) an explicitly curatorial space to which anyone may contribute,
comment, and engage. On YouTube, one can review the entirety of
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television history—kinescopes of Milton Berle and low-quality but still watchable
episodes of shows that have (and probably will) never be available elsewhere
(PBS’s 1973 series An American Family—arguably the “first” reality
television series—often cited in scholarship but completely unavailable for
study except through amateur or home recordings).
Users have, of course, also uploaded clips of current shows and even entire
episodes, sometimes just minutes after their broadcast or cable premieres.
(A circumstance made possible by the digitization of video content by DVRs
and the ability of tech-savvy viewers to “rip” content from DVRs, or record
content directly to their computer hard drives for compression and uploading
to YouTube). Naturally this caused content owners to cry foul and sue for
copyright infringement. In 2007, Viacom, CBS’s parent corporation, filed suit
against YouTube in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York
claiming that by allowing users to upload and view videos owned by Viacom,
YouTube had engaged in “brazen and massive” copyright infringement.86
Google argued that it was protected by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright
Act’s “safe harbor” provisions and that it was not responsible for its users posting
content to which they did not own the copyright. Ultimately YouTube was
cleared of copyright infringement but required to take down any copyrighted
material that copyright owners found on its site. YouTube also instituted a
Content ID filtering system in 2008, an algorithm that combs through posted
video looking for digital watermarks and other code that indicate the video
is under copyright. Upon being notified of the presence of copyrighted material
or finding it via content filtering, YouTube removes the offending video.
According to YouTube’s terms of service, users agree to not post any material
that contains “third party copyrighted material, or material that is subject to
other third party proprietary rights.”87
Naturally, what happens in terms of service
versus what happens in practice are two different things and many shows
not in the public domain can be found on YouTube.
YouTube has also provided a space for the circulation of video mashups
and/or “fan videos” where fans of series have spent substantial time and energy
recutting favorite clips from a particular show or film often in a music video
style. This video form of remix culture has resulted in DIY “paratexts” which
copyright holders may often ignore as they are, in effect, free publicity and
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help drive new viewers to their original projects in their monetized locales.
Thus, while the onus is on the copyright holder to find and request removal
of the copyrighted content, content owners who find it a benefit to have their
material posted to YouTube may intentionally not request its removal. Jenkins,
Ford, and Green have hypothesized the meaning of this “spreadability” of digital
media, in particular its relationship with mainstream media, suggesting
that these activities could be examined “to track shifts in attention and interest
with greater sociocultural depth than would have been possible in an era of
traditional broadcasting, when they might have counted the number of eyeballs
but not understood how specific acts of reading, viewing or listening fit
into larger patterns of social interaction.”88
Not surprisingly, the professional moving image archiving community
is not pleased with YouTube’s “archive yourself yourself” feature.*
Karen
Gray, a librarian, and Rick Prelinger, a professional film archivist, have both
voiced concern that the erosion of cultural authority caused by YouTube call
into question both the role of the cultural institution “within society and in
regard to cultural heritage” and “questions of persistence, ownership, standards,
sustainability, or accountability that occupy professional archivists
and their parent institutions.”89
Beyond the preservation of professionally
produced (and owned) programs (which, even if in the public domain, probably
exist in numerous enough copies to ensure their survival), who archives
the archive of YouTube? Given YouTube’s reliance on commercial viability
and its terms of service, it is likely that the internet wayback machine will be
the only trace of its user-produced and distributed videos. As Burgess and
Green conclude:  “These controversies reveal competing ideas about what
YouTube is for—a social network site produced by communities of practice;
a chaotic archive of weird, wonderful, and trashy vernacular video; or a distribution
platform for branded and Big Media entertainment. Much of the
discussion about these controversies centers around changes or perceived
changes to the culture of YouTube as it scales up, makes deals with major
* To be fair, Prelinger in particular has a cause for concern about public domain footage being available
(and rippable) from YouTube. Prelinger Archives’ business model is built on his collection of
licensed collections from many archives, and his ability to charge user fees for the provision of public
domain footage or orphan films to documentary filmmakers. YouTube threatens the exclusivity
of access and gatekeeping upon which his archive relies.
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media players and attempts to create revenue from its constantly evolving
business model.”90
YouTube as DIY broadcast platform / video yard sale / video co-op
YouTube’s rallying cry:  “Broadcast Yourself!” is an open invitation for
anyone who has a video camera to become part of the new democratized
televisual environment. However, dreams of the jump from YouTube amateur
to development-deal wielding television industry professional are the
more akin to the dreams of lottery winners rather than the Chuck Lorres
or Shonda Rimes of the world. This is not to say that one cannot get quite
rich by being a YouTuber. It is, instead, to point out that the type of compensation
and fame that YouTube brings favors YouTube in its retention of
a large part of ad sales and encourages success in media forms (publishing,
product placement, in-person appearances, brand ambassadorship) that are
not televisual.
There are many reasons for this, of which the following form a nonexhaustive
and preliminary list:
●
The privileging of professionally produced content either due to its organic
popularity with viewers or promotional placement arrangements between
YouTube/Google and the content producers ensures a professional/
amateur divide in the site’s curated offerings.
●
The genres of content that perform best on YouTube (video game walkthroughs,
makeup how-tos, first person vlogs) either do not translate to
linear television or have reached a saturation level on niche cable channels
(prank shows for instance). One conclusion to draw may be that YouTube
enables the creation of a much different televisual form which, while
still consumed and perceived as “television” by its largest demographic
(millennials and younger), diverges substantially in genre, length,
production values, and frequency of release from linear or traditional
industry-produced television.
● YouTube’s striking of deals with professional showrunners creates new
professional “branded” content from the likes of Jay-Z, Amy Pohler, and
Anthony Zuiker which then competes with amateur talent on an uneven
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playing field. If talent is moving from the professional, gatekept world
of “the industry” to the democratized digital commons of YouTube and
bringing its expertise, name recognition and home page “recommended
video” deals with it, how can amateurs hope to reverse the process? (This
might be called the “Radiohead conundrum”—in 2007, Radiohead offered
its album In Rainbows for direct digital download and let its purchasers
set their own price for the album. While this has been cited as an example
of the viabilty of a democratized digital distribution model, the obvious
point to be made is that Radiohead was successful with its “pay what you
will” pricing for their online-only album release because Radiohead was
already Radiohead and had become successful enough through traditional
pre-internet industry structures to successfully exploit the online market.)
A survey of YouTube’s home page indicates that amateur or even pro-am
video is no longer the privileged content of the site (if it was ever). It should
be noted that most people never see a “neutral” YouTube home page as if one
is signed into one’s Google or Gmail account or has not cleared one’s browsing
history, one will be served an aggregated “recommended for you” array—
previously viewed videos and recommendations based on those previously
viewed videos will be presented, the majority of it professionally produced
(even if uploaded by persons without copyright clearance). The five “Popular
Right Now” videos right now (July 18, 2016, 12:02 a.m., EST) are professionally
produced. One is Katy Perry’s NBC Olympics Video from her Vevo channel.
The next is “We Meet DJ Khaled,” which has been viewed 1.9 million
times since it was posted yesterday. The third is the segment “Blake Lively
Calls Jimmy Fallon her Dada” from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
channel and the last two are promotional “paratexts” for the Star Wars franchise,
one an “official trailer” from Season Three of Star Wars Rebels (from
the Star Wars channel); and the other a teaser trailer for the Electronic Arts
game “Star Wars Battlefront” from the “EAS Star Wars” channel. The rest of
the categories, “Recommended,” “Recently Uploaded Recommended Videos,”
feature predominantly professionally produced material (music videos from
Vevo, sketch comedy from late night, or interview clips from talk shows), and
the rest of the page contains rows of “Recommended Channels” that appear to
be the equivalent of Google’s “sponsored links”: “The Tonight Show Starring
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Jimmy Fallon,” Jimmy Kimmel Live,” “America’s Got Talent,” “Saturday Night
Live,” “Team Coco” [Conan O’Brien], “Britain’s Got Talent,” and “Trailers”
which can be sorted by “movie” or “topic.” The only category on this page that
appears to favor pro-am or amateur content (aka viewers “broadcasting themselves”)
is “The Daily Awww” (kittens and puppies and a hyperactive squirrel,
but also footage from a local New Jersey news affiliate about a bear that’s been
walking around on two legs over there for about a week).
A brief survey of additional pages of pre-curated categories (“Politics,”
“HouseholdHacker,” “Sports Highlights and Great Moments,” “Today’s
Funniest Clips”) reveals that the featured clips in these categories almost without
exception, trace back to a major media company or its subsidiary brands
or, they are part of a collection of internet-based production companies that
are creating content that circulates across their own branded websites (soulpancake.com,
Omaze.com) as well as their YouTube channel; or they are a
YouTube partner with their own YouTube channel (You Suck at Cooking,
GiveBackFilms, Blake Grisby). These entities maintain a multiplexed social
media web presence with YouTube video as the main distribution hub (and
produce genres of video/televisual content that are not financially lucrative to
distribute via broadcast or cable).
The YouTube Partners program allows YouTube community members to
“enable your channel for monetization.”91
YouTube members can apply to
monetize their videos so long as the content (including music) is solely and
completely owned by the member and the video complies with YouTube’s
terms of service and community guidelines. Once YouTube has accepted the
video for “monetization” it places ads “against” the content using the AdSense
auction as well as ads YouTube has presold through DoubleClick and “other
YouTube-sold sources.”92
AdSense ads “are determined automatically by our
system based on a number of contextual factors related to your video” (such
as user-created tags and metadata).93
Users cannot control which ads are
placed against their videos, nor can they determine the type of ads. Among
the types of ads that may display are banners that run along the page either
horizontally across the top or as a “skyscraper” along the right side. “Overlay
in-video ads” appear over the lower part of the video and can be “closed” (if
one can locate the “x” box) (these are essentially the equivalent of a “snipe” ad
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on a traditional television stream).94
“TrueView in-stream ads” are “skippable
video ads that are inserted before, during or after the main video,” and “nonskippable
in-stream ads are video ads that can be inserted before or during the
main video and must be watched before the viewer can continue watching the
content selected. These ads can also be placed after the conclusion of a video,
in the post-roll slot.”95
Partners are paid through an AdSense account (another
Google product) which handles ad sales, serving of the ads (through the use
of Google AdWords), quantification of the advertising views, and ultimately
payment to the YouTube partner.96
The economics of YouTube partnerships remain shrouded in mystery—
the total number of subscribers and views of various videos and channels are
easily seen (and prominently displayed) on YouTube. What is impossible to
determine with any certainty is how much the partners are actually making,
although YouTube’s analytics company SocialBlade does maintain estimated
earnings based on a “lowball and a highball value based on what we know
about what partners earn on average per view and multiply that by the number
of views they get per day.”97
These estimates are based on daily views times a
low cost per thousand (CPM) of sixty cents and a high CPM of $8 (all partners
receive a CPM somewhere within this range for their monetized videos).98
Even though Google takes a 45 percent cut, Forbes’ “first-ever ranking” of
the highest paid YouTubers estimated that the tenth highest paid, Rosanna
Pansino, a “self- taught” pastry chef whose videos are shot in a traditional
cooking show style, made $2.5 million in 2015.99
The highest paid, 25-year-old
Swede Felix Arvid Ulf Kjelberg, known on YouTube as PewDiePie is apparently
making $12 million pretax to provide R-rated video game commentary
and walk-throughs to his over 40 million subscribers.100
A survey of other YouTube reveals some that may be expected (children
reviewing anything, comedic parodies). At the same time, fully twelve of the
top twenty earners are videogame players/commentators who record their
reviews or “walkthroughs” of popular video games (Minecraft, in particular).
Nine countries are represented, speaking four different languages. The Fine
Bros, often thought to be two of the first “YouTube Stars” are responsible for
the internet “series” “Kids React.”101
Therefore, I suggest that the most popular
YouTube stars are those that are engaged in the creation of programming that
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does not fit traditional televisual formats or genres and is not being produced
by traditional television content producers. The short form videos that garner
the most views on YouTube are perhaps unique to webcasting.
Other distribution deals that YouTube signs look very similar to the EST
(electronic sell-through) arrangements content owners strike with Amazon
Instant Video, iTunes, or Google Play, to provide their content for a perepisode
or per-season price. Since all of these “retailers” are priced the same,
there is little competition between them—they are ecosystem driven (if you
have an iPad, you buy from iTunes; a Kindle, you buy from Amazon; an
Android Tablet, you buy from GooglePlay). YouTube’s intervention into this
area is to provide an electronic-sell-through option that is platform-agnostic,
web-native, and app-based.
Other deals are symbiotic partnerships, such as YouTube’s contract with
Vevo, “a music video and content distributor owned by Universal Music
Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media Group.”102
After
months of debates regarding ad revenue splits between Vevo and YouTube,
YouTube invested $40–$50 million in Vevo giving it about a 7 percent stake in
the company.103
In May 2013, “Vevo accounted for 50.2 million unique viewers
on YouTube, making it the top channel partner on YouTube, according
to ComScore’s monthly Media Metrix report. This deal merely formalized a
mutually beneficial relationship—with so many viewers, YouTube could ill
afford to lose Vevo. On the other hand, the vast majority of Vevo’s video views
come from YouTube users.”104
For “independent” industry professionals, YouTube can be part of a synergistic
content delivery system along with “start-up” web communities or viewing
destinations, such as Maker Studios, which built a substantial following
before being sold to Disney for $950 million by its founder, Brian Robbins, a
former child star.105
Robbins’s current project is AwesomenessTV, which “produces
three to five tween-skewing YouTube videos a day” and is owned by
DreamWorks Animation which paid $150 million for it in 2013.106
While distribution
via branded (non-subscription) YouTube channels has been advantageous
for the endeavors Robbins has been involved in, he emphasizes the
need to integrate YouTube into a broader fiduciary structure: “If your only
revenue is from YouTube, yes, it’s impossible to build a business ... You have to
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have many different revenue streams, just like any diversified media company.
It’s harder when you’re an individual YouTuber and that’s how you’re making
your living. YouTube does take a big percentage of the revenue [typically about
45%], but they also provide a big service. If you were starting a YouTube channel
tomorrow without YouTube and you needed all those servers and streaming
capability and stuff, you would spend probably way more money than the
revenue share that you’re paying them. So I appreciate the grumbling, but it
doesn’t apply to us [AwesomenessTV]. We think YouTube is an amazing place
to scale an audience.”107
Many of these content producing professionals shoot YouTube-bound content
at the YouTube SpaceLA in a former Hughes helicopter hangar in Playa
Vista. “Everything [editing suites, recording booths, cameras, lights, mics,
grip equipment, screening rooms] is lent free to those making content for
YouTube—especially the roughly 200 channels the Google-owned site has
partnered with and lent an estimated $250 million in exchange for an ad revenue
split.”108
While Amy Poehler, Matt Damon, and other industry professionals
have used the Space, it is mainly open to YouTube partners who qualify for
the “Creator Class,” a one month program. According to Liam Collins, head
of the LA space “We’ll look at your upload and subscriber base and make sure
you’re open to collaborating with others and are prepared to bring a crew. And
we have residencies for established YouTube channels that understand how to
make full use of a soundstage.”109
As YouTube is now one of a corporate family
of digital businesses owned by the digital sovereign of our times (Google), one
might see it as akin to Amazon’s support of self-publishing authors—they will
carry the book on their site, and as a Kindle offering, but until and unless it
proves its own (monetizable) worth in the commons, they will not feature it.
This is the downside of creative utopianism and yet it also highlights why the
curation of content as well as talent is crucial to the continued operation of the
cultural industries and their reconstitution following these transitions.
YouTube as “cable” system/alternative television distributor
In addition to its YouTube partners and other recommended channels maintained
by professional television producers, YouTube also offers a range of
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subscription/pay “channels” that provide ultra-niche programming to those
willing to pay 99 cents to $9.99 a channel per month. In creating and maintaining
these channels, YouTube is, in effect, testing the economic viability of
cable’s worst nightmare—a la carte pricing of channels. Cable channels count
on using less attractive (and expensive) choices to fill up lower tiers of service
with low-cost programming that gives them the largest profit margin.
A brief survey of YouTube pay channels reveals the following subscription
options:
●
HygroHybrid—devoted to hydroponic marijuana cultivation
●
Oracle apps—“dedicated to oracle apps functional knowledge”
●
Ron Figliomeni—“a channel youll [sic] love to see a channel thatll [sic]
make you laugh until you pee yourself”
●
Bikini G-String Thong—Beautiful Women and Shock Swimsuits
Video Clips
●
Community Trainer—Oracle apps supply chain management
●
ScannerDanner Premium—a chance to be part of my Engine Performance
class at Rosedale Technical College
●
Janis Frank—Learn to knit with these easy to follow knitting videos
●
HereTV Premium—an online outlet of the LGBT cable network HereTV
●
Shroedinger’s Box Quantum Mekanix—“hardcore auto repair”
●
Bunni Channel—twerk videos
●
WWGOA—wood working videos
●
Sesame Street: Monthly Pass—subscribe to watch full episodes of Sesame
Street on YouTube
●
Twenty one different “Zee Channels” ranging from news to sports, to
entertainment, movies, various genres of television shows110
One way to view this is that YouTube is providing a formalized distribution
venue to material that otherwise would find neither an audience nor a revenue
stream without substantial upfront investment by the producers. The
content creators would have to purchase time on local stations or through station
groups as “infomercials” in addition to shouldering the costs of production.
The creation of these channels creates a more formalized relationship
between the subscriber and the viewer than the DIY YouTube partnership—
in this way the content producers get the entirety of the subscriber’s payment
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and can sell their own ads (or opt-in to Google’s ad revenue sharing scheme
as partners).
The smattering of professional content producers offering subscriptions
via the YouTube paid channel system merits further investigation as they may
be pioneers of a new a la carte form of subscription television. HereTV is a
niche pay cable channel that carries programming of interest to the LGBT
community. It was launched as a premium subscription channel in 2002 and
is available via traditional cable and satellite operators. It maintains a website,
but does not deliver any video content via its website. Rather it refers
interested viewers out to either the YouTube subscription channel or (as of
2016)  Amazon Instant Video.111
Thus HereTV is using the technological
streaming capacity of YouTube and Amazon rather than investing in its own
storage/streaming infrastructure and the bandwidth needed to maintain video
streaming via their own site.
Sesame Street’s offering is a lucrative way of reaching and monetizing
parents who want trusted (aka brand recognized) media to entertain their
children via cellphone or tablet while away from home. Creating a formal subscription
YouTube channel (while also keeping a close eye on illegal uploads
of Children’s Television Workshop’s (CTW) copyrighted material) is also a
way to limit loss of revenue in the digital environment. It creates a revenue
stream for repurposed content while saving CTW from having to invest
the substantial resources that the creation of a niche cable channel would
demand. Furthermore, it preserves the advertising-free distribution of CTW
content parents have come to expect from its broadcast home (PBS). Finally,
it acknowledges and directly serves the needs of a particular group of niche
viewers—parents who want a portable, always-on, always-available precurated
stream of portable media.
The twenty-one “Zee Channels” carry professionally produced shows from
Zee Media Corporation Ltd., one of India’s largest television media and entertainment
companies.112
YouTube is thus providing an international subscriber
base with a way of seeing programming that would otherwise be behind the
bundled paywalls of cable or satellite systems, if available at all. This is a situation
that is unique to YouTube which has internationalized itself in ways that
other online viewing sites have not or cannot without substantial corporate
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negotiations. Prior to internet distribution, the Zee channel or any media
company seeking to provide programming to a diasporic community in other
countries would have to lease time on local broadcasters (similar to the infomercial
situation described earlier), or convince regional cable and satellite
providers that there would be enough of a viewership of their content to justify
carriage fees.
What the YouTube pay channels appear to be comprised of are channels of
content that would not garner enough viewing to make their inclusion on any
tier of cable programming worth the cost. Therefore, YouTube follows through
on the promise of providing ultra-niche programming to those willing to pay
for it which is certainly a more honest and direct interchange with the public
than that of cable or satellite “bundling.” It is a tacit acknowledgment that this
content cost money to produce; if you want access to it, you need to compensate
the content owners for the resources and labor it took to produce them.
Since some of them also “may include ads,” these pay channels operate as DIY
cable networks that are going to a direct sell-through market rather than partnering
with a wholesaler (like artisans who sell through stores on Etsy rather
than investing in their own web infrastructure). This might be delivery on the
supposed promise of “narrowcasting” that cable and satellite networks used as
a carrot to encourage new subscribers in the 1970s and 1980s—while claiming
to target underserved parts of the viewing audience with highly specialized
programming, “nearly all of them offered program genres—often actual
programming—already proven successful either on broadcast television or
elsewhere.”113
Ergo, YouTube is filling a lacunae that the broadcast, cable, and
satellite industries have always been aware of, but have been unable to deliver
upon due to their business models.
The immediate dangers to “the industry” are twofold: first, viewers who are
watching these paid channels are not watching other channels; and second,
pricing structures like this (and iTunes Season Pass) are accustoming viewers
to an a la carte payment system on either a show or a channel basis. Even if
the cable company is still receiving a monthly payment from a YouTube paid
channel subscriber for television service and internet access, the broadcast and
cable networks are not receiving a quantifiable viewer to sell to advertisers.
“Furthermore, even though YouTube is offering paid ‘channels’ of content, it is
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not (yet) legally defined as a multichannel video program distributor (MVPD).
Rather, it and any and all of its internet-based video distributing brethren are
classified as online video distributors (OVDs) by the FCC. These are defined,
oddly enough, by their relationship with internet service providers (ISPs)—
OVDs “offer video content by means of the Internet or other Internet Protocol
(IP)-based transmission path provided by a person or entity other than the
OVD” (in other words, an ISP—that the consumer subscribes to from an
entity that is not owned by the website).114
What is curious is that the ISPs are,
of course, owned and operated by the cable, satellite, and telecom companies
that are also MVPDs. (More on this in the next chapter.)
Ultimately the future of YouTube is probably dependent upon the same
factor that all web-based companies face—sustainable growth. “A core challenge
will be to find a balance between mass popularization (which YouTube
has achieved, at least for the moment), innovation, and sustainability (which
requires long-term investment and a stable and socially functioning commu-
nity).”115
YouTube’s major existing contribution to culture is that it showed the
industry what a video sharing site could look like and how it should function
(most viewed, most liked, most recent, and the privileging of interactivity/
comments/community behaviors). Most attempts at creating more curated
video sharing spaces (TeacherTube) riff off of the name YouTube or brand
themselves as “The YouTube for ...”116
(This of course begs the question—“in a
world with a YouTube, why do we need a YouTube for . . .?”)
It will be interesting to see if YouTubers are subject to the same sort of
“innovation, imitation, saturation” content cycles that traditional television
has been and how the relationship between YouTube and “traditional” television
forms (and industry professionals) evolves. YouTube’s Collins says “we’re
not competing with TV, we complement it ... Over the past year, we’ve actually
seen many of our channels partner with TV networks—Fox with WIGS and
AMC with Nerdist’s All-Star Celebrity Bowling, to name a few. But one of the
biggest cross-platform TV successes that we’ve seen is with Ellen DeGeneres
and Jimmy Kimmel, who are building big audiences by issuing user-generatedcontent
challenges and featuring YouTube stars on their shows.”117
Since
YouTube uses skippable ads and advertisers are only charged when someone
watches the ad all the way through (which happens “between 15 to 45 percent
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of the time”); YouTube ads can be an economic adjunct to other media buys.
And, since YouTube is now participating (along with Hulu and Netflix) in the
upfront market, there is a greater awareness and consideration of it as a legitimate
ad buy. Thus, the future may be convergent and symbiotic.
The industry responds
The major concern of the industry is not only the loss of eyeballs to other viewing
options, but also the decline in advertising revenue caused by the dilution
of the broadcast audience and the lower CPM’s online viewing commands.
The oft-quoted call to action (or warning cry) regarding digital distribution
and the television industry is Jeff Zucker’s 2008 statement: “We can’t replace
analog dollars with digital pennies.”118
While he did amend this to digital dimes
in 2009, after Hulu proved to be somewhat successful, the sentiment behind it
remained the same: “‘digital’ would shift audiences and therefore advertising
dollars from a still-profitable medium to a different one of unknown but likely
much lower future profitability.”119
Network sites
All broadcast and cable networks maintain their own branded websites which
are used as promotional sites for current and upcoming programming. They
also all maintain online archives of recently aired shows, teasers for upcoming
episodes, and online players. The making of full episodes available for viewing
on network-owned websites has affected network ad buys overall by providing
additional ad inventory. Viewers are unable to fast-forward through these ads,
but the ad time itself costs about 1/3 that of broadcast spots (leading to Jeff
Zucker’s famous concern about “digital dimes”).
The serving of these ads is also different than it is on broadcast. For instance,
on ABC.com, “Brands are not able to demographically target their ads or insert
them into a specific ABC show on the website. Instead, they buy a bundle of
impressions that are dynamically ad served across all shows over the course
of their campaign flight. An advertiser will never know when or during what
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shows or episodes their ad will run. However, they can ask to be omitted from
certain shows that may not align to their brand.”120
This is standard operating
procedure within the industry for online streaming ad sales, and networks are
beginning to bundle online with broadcast and to offer all packages for sale
during the upfront (or NewFront) period.*
In November, 2015 CBS announced that it would be producing Star
Trek:  Discovery, a prequel to the original 1969 Star Trek series. While the
announcement of another Star Trek television series may be nothing new—
there have, after all been six separate series produced as a part of this brand
franchise, there is something about Discovery that will “boldly go where no
television show has gone before.” The first episode will premiere on the CBS
network in May of 2017.121
Following the broadcast/cable network premiere,
all subsequent episodes will be streamed through CBS All Access, CBS’s
subscription streaming service which currently charges subscribers $5.99
for programming containing “limited commercials” and $9.99 a month for
commercial-free viewing.122
The restriction of access to this obviously “privileged
content” will no doubt result in an uptick in All Access subscribers and
it may prove to be distribution genius for this particular series. The challenge
will be to keep these viewers once all thirteen episodes have rolled out—will
the fourteenth week bring churn or defection to a different subscriber service
as viewers “follow the content” rather than cleave to the brand? The postnetwork
era is characterized by the erosion if not evaporation of the network
as supplier of “branded entertainment.” But, branding remains an important
signpost for consumers since “branding adds personality, distinctiveness and
value to a product or service while also offering risk avoidance and trust.”123
Star Trek, a brand with a fifty-year history of active and engaged viewership
and fans who were on the vanguard of participatory culture when Henry
Jenkins first began to theorize it is probably not a test case from which one can
generalize the success of a less established franchise or an entirely new series.
* “NewFronts” are, quite simply “upfronts” for OTT programming. Begun in 2011, they are organized
by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and take place in the last week of April/first week of May.
Participation is open to any entity that produces internet videos and is deemed an appropriate participant
by the IAB and the “founding partners” of the NewFronts (among them AOL, Google, and
Yahoo). They also need to pony up between $12,500 and $25,000 depending on their presentation
time. (Morrissey, “WTF are the NewFronts?”)
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What could be examined by a longitudinal study of subscriber metrics over the
course of a presumed season two of Star Trek: Discovery would be the investor
psychology of anchoring. Anchoring is when “individuals attribute a value to
an object based on what they paid for it.”124
Therefore, differences in subscription
pricing across seasons, coupled with similar experiments by other content
producers and distributors should enable some predictions about the viability
of individually paywalled distribution platforms and subscription services.
How much is too much for the standard viewer to pay for content? What is the
average number of individual subscriptions the viewer is willing to sustain?
Bridge content
Bridge content itself is nothing new—the carefully planted news stories speculating
about “Who Shot J. R.?” in the summer of 1980 were a nascent form of
bridge content. In the simplest terms, bridge content is any off-the-box showrelated
content devised to keep viewers engaged with a show in- between episodes
or in-between seasons. In the past ten years, bridge content has been
transformed by the interactivity of the web and by social media. Today, the
most common type of bridge content can be found on the series-based website
and series-focused pages or feeds on social media platforms such as Facebook,
Instagram, and Twitter that collate and connect the accounts of the show’s
stars, writers, and showrunners. All of these initiatives are part of overarching
transmedia strategies to keep existing viewers engaged and attract new viewers,
either directly or through existing viewer’s social networks—the digital
word of mouth.
Digital media enthusiasts believe that this sort of fan participation and
interaction will translate to increased viewership and engagement with the
shows themselves as the web corollaries to the shows become less paratextual
and move from extension to experience. Lisa Hsia, Executive Vice President of
Digital Media at Bravo, one of the first innovators with web content, emphasizes
this shift: “In the old days, it was all about digital extensions. We don’t
want to be an extension. We want to be a digital experience that helps drive
overall viewing, whatever the platform, where the digital series is just as critical
as the show.”125
The movement from passive information provider to active
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participatory environment has made the bridge content more important to
advertisers as well as content producers. As a result, web pages will often
include webisode content which may or may not feature the same characters as
the show, and be more intertwined with the show’s storylines, extending them
across media channels and driving viewership back to the show’s airtime.126
While linear television content producers may find the need to create
bridge content a distraction or a necessary evil, it does provide a valuable
service to advertisers and marketers since the value of the content is due to
“choice-based impressions that result from audiences choosing to engage with
it.”127
Therefore, although the percentage of the viewership that engages digitally
with the show may be small, the viewers who choose to engage with the
web-based bridge content identify themselves as opinion leaders and provide
access to their social networks by their opting-in through “likes” (which
helps content producers and distributors identify influential curators in the
public sphere of social networking). By May 2011 over 275 million viewers
had “liked” at least one show on Facebook and seventeen of the top “liked”
Facebook pages are those of television shows.128
While show-specific apps
have also been developed, early data from this transitional phase appears to
indicate that viewers prefer to find their tribes of affinity on large and established
social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and incorporate
their fan activity into their general social profiles.
Hulu and Hulu Plus
Hulu was launched in March 2007 as a joint venture between News
Corporation and NBCUniversal (as content providers), AOL, MSN,
MySpace, and Yahoo! (as internet distribution partners) and venture capital
firm Providence Equity Partners. Currently the site is owned by Disney,
News Corp., and NBCUniversal, but, as part of the FCC’s conditions for the
Comcast purchase, NBCU is a “silent partner” and may not participate in
any discussions or strategies pertaining to the company for seven years. In
forming Hulu, industry players created a “value added” one-stop repository
of all of their shows, which also provided them with further ad inventory in
addition to their network sites where their shows also were available). Hulu is
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a “hybrid business,” composed of Hulu.com, “a free, ad-supported clearinghouse”
and Hulu Plus, which carries next-day programming from its owners
and content partners, as well as maintains an extensive syndication library
of past series.129
“Like many digital cinema and TV ventures, Hulu has marketed
itself both in terms of convenience, promising to allow viewers to watch
‘when, where and how you want,’ while also promoting it as a youthful alternative
to the ‘old’ medium of TV, to the point that Hulu came to represent
an almost generational divide between passive viewership of TV and active
engagement with Hulu.”130
Basic browser-accessed Hulu is free and ad-supported, although its adsupported
model is lighter than the traditional television broadcasting load of
commercials per half or full hour. As it is an “on demand” technology, it is not
beholden to the strict scheduling timeframes that linear television is. Therefore,
it might put only a three minute roll-in of commercials into the beginning of
a twenty-two minute sitcom rather than interrupt the show for eight minutes
of commercials as is standard practice on broadcast. Hulu offers a range of
advertising opportunities at prices currently 25 percent that of broadcast or
cable.131
Advertising on Hulu costs less per CPM than broadcast yet “based on
data from Nielsen/IAG,” the company has stated that its advertising effectiveness
is twice that of broadcast television commercials. Hulu offers advertisers
and viewers advertising choice. Advertisers can choose from in-stream video,
pop-up banners, or they can brand the screen around the Hulu player while
their ads play. They can also choose a “branded slate” which displays a card
with the sponsor’s art on it accompanied by a voice-over stating “The following
program is brought to you with limited commercial interruption by” their
name.132
This is an interesting throwback to the single-sponsorship days of
the early days of television. Hulu viewers can also use an “ad selector” which
provides viewers with a choice of three options of video ads and can even
“swap” ads once an ad has begun to play. The ad selection is based on “relevancy”
to the user’s Hulu profile and these ads are valued by advertisers who
think that viewers “will be more receptive to viewing the ads, since they have
been empowered with a certain level of control over them” and the selected or
swapped ads do yield higher click-through rates.133
Hulu purports the fact that
it generates more ad revenue per half-hour TV episode than cable and DVR
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(but not yet broadcast), and that its ability to better target audiences increases
relevancy and eliminates wasted impressions.134
Hulu Plus is a subscription-based version of Hulu which allows mobile
viewing via apps and application program interface (API) integration for
seamless viewing on smart TVs. It offers next-day viewing of current episodes
on its content partners’ broadcast or cable channels and an extensive archive
of video holdings including shows that were never released as DVD box sets
or ESTs. Hulu Plus carries a smaller advertising load but still places ads against
its subscriber-only content. Ostensibly this ad revenue subsidizes the licensing
costs of the extensive collection of next-day first run programming, thus helping
to keep subscription fees down. Since Hulu Plus is also partially owned by
its major content providers and has revenue-sharing partnerships with a host
of other content producers, this strategy may be more about increased revenue
and revenue streams than concern for subscriber cost. What it also suggests
is that Hulu expects that its Plus subscribers are used to ads in their television
and is proceeding with a cable-like hybrid fiduciary model.
TV everywhere (with us!) and the reification of control
“TV Everywhere” is not the freeing rallying cry that it may sound like—it is,
plain and simple, a marketing ploy and an attempt by the industry “to protect
the last remaining business model in the industry—cable [and satellite]
TV—not yet destroyed by the wrath of digital audiences.”135
“TV Everywhere”
is about “TV Ecosystems” and ensuring that cable and satellite subscribers
stay within their DishTV, Comcast, or TimeWarner cable bundles when they
take their viewing mobile. Technologically, it is the marriage of cable or satellite
content with off-the-box viewing via a mobile device attached to the web
via a home broadband connection supplied by the cable or satellite provider.
While the term “TV Everywhere” was coined in 2009 by then Time Warner
CEO Jeff Bewkes to name a particular initiative of Time Warner Cable, the
term has become generic for any and all authentication-based viewing apps
or technologies. The creation of these technologies was the cable and satellite
industries’ response to the growing popularity of Netflix, YouTube, and portable
devices (tablets, smart phones) that allowed viewers to space-shift. This
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“caused cable operators, satellite providers, and telecommunications companies
to realize that tethering their programming to the set-top box in the living
room was starting to feel archaic relative to consumer expectations.”136
More
importantly, “cable companies were especially alarmed that cable programming,
such as Comedy Central, FX, and the SyFy channel, could be viewed on
the internet by all, subscribers and nonsubscribers, and worst of all, for free.”137
Thus, TV Everywhere apps (Xfinity, the Hopper, CNNgo, sign in protocols
on ESPN viewing sites) put programming behind authentication systems that
permit web and mobile access only to existing subscribers. They allow for time
and place shifting, but only for those who have already paid for the content.
Individual cable networks have taken this a step further by incorporating
authentication protocols in their live-streaming features. For example, CNN
began to include live-streaming with authentication in its iPad app in July of
2011. Users of the app who can authenticate their cable subscription to an
MSO that carries CNN on its system can watch CNN’s live broadcast including
commercials on their iPad or iPhone.138
This extends the reach of Television
Everywhere since it makes the most traditional of the televisual forms (the live
broadcast) portable through the internet rather than the broadcast spectrum
and at the same time, it maintains a paywall that restricts access to those who
are already subscribers to the more “traditional” form of television delivery
(cable). “The genius underlying TV Everywhere is that most pay-TV subscribers
will believe that their cable provider’s online aggregation of content is free,
whereas they will perceive that they have to pay extra for, say, Netflix.”139
While the TV Everywhere/authentication viewing platforms come with
EPGs from the cable and satellite companies, cable companies are beginning
to integrate personalized recommendation functions into these technologies.
This is part of a move to make TV Everywhere/authentication viewing easier
for the viewer since “implementation”—despite the hype—has been slow and
haphazard. Many customers have found it difficult and confusing to get content
on their computers, tablets and phones even after they pay for it.140
New,
easier authentication systems, an increase in publicly placed “Wi-Fi hot spots”
that seamlessly connect authenticated subscribers’ devices and software that
maintains personalized recommendation profiles for all viewers in a subscription
household have been developed. The recommendation engines “learn,”
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based on individualized viewing patterns “what you have watched, what you
have recorded on your DVR, and determines what you like.”141
For those who
think this use of information (that the cable company already collects on you)
is too intrusive, an opt-out option is available. The goal, of course is to “get
customers so involved and integrated into the cable company offerings that it
won’t be desirable to cut the cord or switch to satellite or over-the-top providers
who can’t match the full cable bundle of services.”142
Most recently HBO has launched HBO Now, a “stand-alone” streaming
subscription service which breaks with the paywall/authentication protocol
that restricted “Television Everywhere” access to cable and satellite subscribers.
What is interesting is that subscriptions to HBO Now are handled through
its “subscription partners” who either are, or are enmeshed in paywall/authentication
ecosystems. As of this writing, there are eleven HBO Now subscription
partners, six of which (Frontier, Google Fiber, Liberty, Optimum, Service
Electric (Cablevision), and Verizon) are ISPs/MSOs, three of which (Android,
Apple, and Samsung) are mobile device makers, and one of which (Roku) is
a streaming technology producer. The eleventh is Amazon, e-tailer of everything.
While HBO Now has not sparked an explosion of other stand-alone
direct subscription apps (although one could ask how “stand-alone” it actually
is, given the “subscription partners”) it is clearly an interesting test case of how
much viewers are willing to pay for access to exclusive content.
Second screen apps
Second screen apps are the industry’s attempt to come to terms with the fact
that according to Nielsen, 60  percent of Americans use the internet while
watching television.143
Therefore, if viewers are going to be distracted by
another screen, why not have the content on that screen drive them back to the
first screen, or engage them in active viewing, and possibly social media activity
that will increase viewership among their friends? Interactive television, in
its traditional sense, has never fulfilled the potential industry advocates and
developers long lauded it to have. Smartphones and tablets fulfill the promise
of interactivity as they operate as familiar companions to the viewing experience,
rather than an immersive interactive experience. What distinguishes the
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second screen apps and experiences from network websites and social media
is that they synchronize to the first screen, to provide a true real-time “companion”
to the viewing experience.
Since 2010, three main types of second screen apps have been produced
by various television content providers: series-, event-, and network- specific
apps, and almost all of these are primarily developed for the iPad and iPhone
platforms.144
Lisa Hsia, executive vice-president of Digital Media for Bravo
Networks sees these apps as a way to target particular engaged demograph-
ics: “The most important thing about these products right now is that we can
create a curated important conversation with people of influence versus some
sort of fire hose that provides a less meaningful conversation.”145
BravoNow,
the first network-specific iPad app, allowed users to interact, share, and
engage with additional content during certain Bravo episode premieres. Hsia
emphasizes that these second screen apps have to “offer something that’s really
exceptional—like a filtered community, insider knowledge, or a celebrity that’s
tweeting along with you. There has to be some unique hook.”146
Early research by the creators of second screen apps such as Miso has
revealed that “every type of show requires a unique second-screen experience
in terms of the companion content’s type, frequency, delivery and tim-
ing.”147
Naturally, the issue comes down to market share even of the apps
since what appears to have happened is a “Tower of Babel” with thousands
of series- or network- specific apps that deliver the same “companion experiences”
but do so solely within themselves.148
This sort of balkanization works
against the formation of or engagement with a mass audience as well as the
opening up of viewer experience to other options. It is akin to a museum of
modern art restricting its patrons to only one room in which hang multiple
works by the same artist or, even more confining, only one work by one artist,
displayed in multiple forms. The effect is creation of a “filter bubble” by
the second screen, which, because “app culture” is organized by operating
system ecosystems, is already a possible stricture to wider engagement or
program discovery.
Wider engagement and/or program discovery are not, however, the goal
of second screen apps, so this may be an irrelevant complication. Ultimately,
the goal of the second screen apps is ad interactivity—which then creates the
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traditional challenge of audience opt-out (zap the channel, close the app).
Advertisers and app developers seem to believe that targeted, “relevant” advertising
will yield engaged viewers of the commercial message. Cory Bergman of
Lost Remote calls this the Holy Grail: “to have a feedback loop with television.
So that when I’m watching something, I am able to not only interact with the
TV show; I can also interact with the ads. That’s been what interactive TV has
promised, but has never delivered on. When that happens on a truly scaled
basis, there will be so much new value creation in this business that it will
really be the second coming of television.”149
Among the innovations being
explored is the “sync ad”—which would provide a traditional commercial
“spot” on the first screen to provide “emotion and immediacy” synchronized
to a digital ad on the second screen that provides interaction, transactions and
data collection.150
However, the key to this would be establishing large second
screen partnerships with major advertisers and advertising agencies, which
has not happened. Therefore no second screen experience has yet yielded a
substantial audience or demonstrated mass reach.151
A TV Guide research study reported that half of Twitter users tweet about
the shows they are watching on television while they are watching them, about
one third of Facebook users post about their television watching in real time,
and the average Facebook user has “liked” at least six shows.152
Content producers
have recognized this activity and many have begun to display onscreen
Twitter hashtags to encourage (and also control) the social media backchannel,
as well as to set up official showpages on Facebook in addition to their own
dedicated websites. Twitter reports that there is a two to tenfold increase in
tweets about shows that include onscreen hashtags.153
Some shows have experimented
with “live tweeting” during the premiere broadcast of particular episodes,
or as sweeps week specials in an attempt to increase live viewing—since
“Social media amplifies the feeling of being connected and part of something
bigger when watching television.”154
While social media can be an important
force, it is important to note that “social media cannot and will not save a
bad show or make poor products and services ‘look good.’ But social media
absolutely has a powerful amplification effect in the presence of resonant con-
tent.”155
What it can do is encourage and increase “live” viewing. According to
TV Guide, 20 percent of tvguide.com users surveyed “reported that they are
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watching more live television broadcasts because they do not want the potential
of people within their social networks to ruin the plots of their favorite
shows.”156
The real-time web has, of course always created a dilemma for content
providers and schedulers as it frees content from the “windowing” of time
zones. The social media backchannel knows no geographical boundaries and
a single Tweet could “spoil” a reveal for millions of viewers since its resonance
can be multiplied through retweeting.
A further convergence of web-based technologies embeds viewers within
social sites so as to provide for immediate real-time sharing of viewing choices
as well as community viewing. Facebook is the leader in these innovations,
allowing users to watch television episodes from Netflix and Hulu “within”
Facebook. As a result, these viewing choices are immediately shared with the
user’s Facebook friends and appear in the newsfeed post. Friends can then
tune in to these episodes directly from Facebook by clicking through their
friend’s newsfeed posts.157
Facebook calls this “frictionless sharing” but, of
course advertisers call it a gold mine given the level of data it reveals about
users and the ability to micro-target these viewer/consumers.158
Still liminal or passage complete?
Liminality “refers to moments or periods of transition during which the normal
limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior are relaxed, opening
the way to novelty and imagination, construction and destruction.”159
While
we have definitely seen the traditional understanding of producer, distributor,
and television change throughout the past eleven years, the ultimate power
structures (and strictures) have remained largely unchanged, they have just
expanded to include new participants, also oligopolized and conglomerated
media entities whose creativity and innovation during the liminal stage were
the driving forces of a carnival that has now ended with the reification of the
traditional power structures.160
The destruction of the stranglehold linear television
providers had on the creative structures and activities of the producers
has successfully been achieved, as has the limiting of access to previously
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aired shows—infinity, which “appears in the horizon of the liminal” has been
achieved to provide the curatorial viewer with choices worthy of his or her
curatorial investigation and intermediation.161
Platform agnostic digital distribution seeks not to undermine the traditional
release patterns of “windowing,” but actually aims to completely replace
it with a different fiduciary market that ultimately benefits the same entities
as the old system. Rather than structuring release dates sequentially across a
variety of different largely incompatible or nonsimultaneous venues, digital
distribution results in simultaneous and universal accessibility across multiple
platforms. Therefore it “allows each medium to compete for its share of audience
using the same content, but addressing distinct viewer technology and
lifestyle preferences.”162
Even though it appears to be a digital disruptor, it is
not outside the realm of possibility to consider Netflix as a “next step” in the
evolution of the television rather than the information industries. Its “economic
and narrative structure” is identical to that of premium pay television
channels such as HBO so perhaps it has merely “established a third distribution
track.”163
“There was, in fact, rather little that Netflix depended on from
the digital system of networked traffic and advertising revenue, whereas it was
entirely dependent on its ability to license television content and to attract
top writing, acting, producing, and directing talent” notes Michael Wolff in
Television is the New Television.164
The change, may therefore be driven by viewer behavior, but the industry
response has been to counter lost revenue and opportunity through economic
acquisition, partnerships, negotiation or, as will be seen in Chapter 5, regulatory
protections. When all distribution sites are paying license fees to the
content producers or, in the case of Hulu, are partly owned by the producers,
they remain revenue streams—so long as the viewers stay within these digital
viewing ecosystems, they are still patrons of the legacy television industry (or
of “new” producing and distributing entities that have employed those with
track records in the legacy television industry). Thus, as long as viewer attention
can be captured by a viewing platform that feeds back to the industry
(and all of them ultimately do); the essential health of the legacy television
producers and distributors themselves is not unduly compromised, the back
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end and/or viewing transactions are merely made more complex. The agents
of change—those innovative OTT tricksters—are the ones who, having altered
the televisual landscape and entered the television “market” will now have to
ensure that they can stay relevant and viable in the infinite choice of long tail
syndication.
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