Cross-Platform Distribution

October 24, 2011

Collaboration across Borders: Interview with Seung Bak of DramaFever

Founded in 2009, DramaFever, an English language video site for Asian TV shows is now the largest US-based site of its kind, boasting over a million active users every month. I had the chance to interview Seung Bak, one of the founders of DramaFever about why the site has become so successful. He also told me about some of the collaborations DramaFever has been able to foster between American fans and producers of Asian dramas.


Continue reading "Collaboration across Borders: Interview with Seung Bak of DramaFever" »

October 21, 2011

C. Lee Harrington on Fan-Producer Collaboration

From Chuck fans saving their show by buying sandwiches to the recent news that a couple of cancelled soaps will get a second life on the web, collaboration between media producers and fans has led to some interesting new business models in recent years. I had the pleasure to talk with media scholar and soap opera expert, C. Lee Harrington about her thoughts on fan/producer collaboration.

Continue reading "C. Lee Harrington on Fan-Producer Collaboration" »

June 15, 2011

C3 White Paper: Learning to Share - The Relational Logics of Media Franchising by Derek Johnson

This summer, select 2010/2011 C3 research memos and white papers willl be made publicly available.

Now available for download from the C3/FOE website:

Learning To Share: The Relational Logics of Media Franchising

Derek Johnson (University of North Texas)
Consulting Researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium

franchising image

Download the executive summary or the entire research memo.

Executive Summary

In the contemporary media environment, it has become increasingly commonplace—and commonsense—to refer to successful, long-running intellectual properties as “franchises.” In May 2010, for example, Advertising Age made sense of the sale of Snoopy, Woodstock, and the rest of Charles Shultz’s Peanuts gang to the Iconix Brand Group in these terms, valuating the history of the property and its continuing potential in the global media marketplace by exclaiming “It’s a Great Franchise, Charlie Brown” (Bulik 2010). This metaphor for making sense of media properties extends beyond trade discourse, with popular blogs also participating in the franchise conversation. In a recent post later picked up by Yahoo! News, Life’s Little Mysteries blogger Mike Avila meditates on the media franchise by trying to determine “the most successful movie franchise of all time.” Having decided to make box office revenue the deciding factor, Avila awards the crown to the Harry Potter series and its $5.4 billion in ticket sales—but with the caveat that Star Wars would gain an advantage if merchandising were to be considered, while the James Bond films exceed both in terms of overall longevity.

Such posts contribute to an overall popular understanding of the media franchise as the result of ongoing management of a property across time and various markets, corroborating the perceptions of industry insiders like Disney’s Robert Iger, who similarly defines franchise as “something that creates value across multiple businesses and across multiple territories over a long period of time” (Siklos 2009). The economic meanings carried by this metaphor, however, have also been negotiated by those working creatively with these properties, whose individual interests and energies must be asserted in the face of all this successful brand maintenance. Reflecting on the conclusion of the TV series Lost in 2010, producer Carlton Cuse notes: “We certainly understand and absolutely respect that ABC and Disney has an incredibly valuable franchise and they want to do more things with Lost, but the story we're telling ends in May” (Chozick 2010). Because Lost is understood in this way as one of the most successful television franchises of the early twenty-first century, Cuse finds it necessary as a stakeholder to reassert the role of creative individuality within the perpetual corporate management of the shared property.

This notion of media franchising, therefore, shapes how analysts, executives, creators, and popular audiences each imagine the media industries of the contemporary moment. And as Cuse’s attempt to position his work outside perceptions of franchising demonstrates, this metaphor is a particularly loaded one, often negatively connoting corporate control and exploitation of a cash cow at the expense of independence and artistry. Without a doubt, many of these connotations come from the wider cultural history of franchising. Prior to the industrial revolution, a franchise was conceived primarily in the political terms of enfranchisement. Derived from the French franchir (to free), the word “franchise” conveyed one’s right to participate and pursue one’s interests free of constraint. Within a collective system such as electoral politics, the franchise was, by and large, a freely determined individual vote. However, as historians of marketing such as Harry Kursh argue, this free right to participate took on more economic—and more sinister—connotations by the nineteenth century, as emerging tycoons “slit each other’s corporate throats” in fierce competition to be awarded “franchise” rights over utilities, railroads, and other elements of public infrastructure (1968: 194). According to scholar T.S. Dicke, the term acquired an additional use around 1959, newly deployed to describe business systems in which corporate franchisors operating on a national level develop a trademarked system of doing business enter into contractual relations with franchisees who pay a fee to independently operate outlets on the local level (1992: 2).

It is from this usage that most consumers understand global business operations such as McDonald’s restaurants, Meineke auto shops, or Best Western hotels. Thus, as industry analysts in Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and other sites of trade discourse began in the early 1990s to make sense of media content and its production as “franchising” (moving the term beyond existing usage to describe the assignment of broadcasting licenses and municipal cable monopolies as franchise rights to infrastructure), the term brought with it a great deal of historical and cultural baggage. To think about media culture as franchise is to think about it in the same terms that make sense of fast food. And in the same way that critics like George Ritzer (2000) have lamented the increasing standardization and rationalized control of culture as what he calls the “McDonaldization” of society, the articulation of media to fast food reflects allows the latter to act as cultural shorthand for the inadequacies of the former.

So while media franchising has been frequently invoked in industrial, popular, and scholarly discourse, perceptions of its economic determinism and its lack of cultural value have at least partially sidelined specific attempts to understand what the franchising of media culture actually means. In most accounts, the media franchise is a rather simple effect, figured most often as a product of increasing corporate power and conglomeration or as the endgame for intellectual property management strategies. Even as Henry Jenkins (2006), for one potentially divergent example, considers the franchised intellectual property more productively as a site where new forms of narrative practice and cultural collaboration have emerged, the media franchise is positioned and understood in relation to the larger patterns of convergence culture and transmedia storytelling. Nevertheless, media franchising is a phenomenon in its own right, not confined to specifically transmedia considerations, as properties like Law & Order and CSI have become understood as franchises for their multiplication within the single medium of television. Similarly, in The Frodo Franchise, scholar Kristin Thompson (2007) offers a detailed picture of the Lord of the Rings franchise, but in arguing about its exceptional character, her book offers only a limited perspective on the phenomenon of media franchising at large.

But what can we learn from the logic of franchising itself? What does it tell us about how cultural production and creative collaboration might work? How can we make use of this understanding? With much of this phenomenon remaining to be explored by media researchers, this project aims to directly confront and deconstruct the cultural logics of franchising in order to understand it not as the effected product of other issues and forces, but as a process and set of relationships that have historically produced culture. Though the notion of the franchise carries with it much cultural baggage, those entrenched meanings and values accompany a very specific logic for organizing and making sense of cultural production sustained over time and across multiple market sectors. By developing a detailed, historical portrait of what franchising is and how it has worked, we will deepen our understanding of how culture has been collaboratively produced and consumed across decentralized networks of “enfranchised” stakeholders. To that end, this inquiry combines current research trajectories in media and cultural studies with conceptual models drawn from the fields of marketing and organizational communication to make sense of media franchising as a social practice. This approach demands we consider franchising not solely in terms of texts, products, brands, or properties, but also through power-laden, networked relationships between franchisors and franchisees with distinct interests in the shared cultural resources of the franchise. By combining analysis of trade press with archival research and original interviews with media professionals, this project examines how these shared resources have been deployed, managed, and sustained in specific historical instances by media institutions, creative personnel, and even consumers invested in them.

Key Findings

Ultimately, this study recognizes that any attempt to define the media franchise once and for all is an exercise in futility, as its slippery cultural meanings are perhaps what make it such a versatile means of understanding a wide variety of media practices. Nonetheless, by arguing that franchising offers a cultural structure through which media content, media institutions, and media audiences have been put into productive relations, this study helps point to the relational, collaborative logic that defines a franchised culture. From this perspective, five key findings will be delivered to demonstrate the value of comprehending franchising as a structure for organizing collaborative cultural production:

The Cultural Logic of Franchising is Relational: franchising must be understood as relational given its dependence on sustained, strategic relationships between stakeholders with unequal interest in shared cultural resources; franchises are not reflective of intellectual property monopolies, but instead negotiation of imperfectly aligned interests.

Franchising Drives Institutional Relationships: the cultural networks constituted by franchising have not merely bolstered the power of “big media” institutions, but rather, in driving institutional relationships, have created tensions, cleavages and challenges to be negotiated by conglomerates and upstarts alike. The franchise strategies of companies like Marvel Comics, when most successful, have depended upon institutional partnerships.

Franchising Supports Creative Relationships: franchising must also be understood with respect to creative relationships, in that it has enabled co-creation and collaboration through decentralized, emergent uses of shared story worlds. Users of properties like Battlestar Galactica must negotiate not only the structure of a shared set of narrative resources, but also hierarchies of creative power that encourage and constrain creative uses of them.

Franchising Generates Consumer-Constituent Relationships: as shared cultural resources, franchised worlds have supported what can be described as consumer-constituent relationships. Invited to invest at a variety of productive, affective, and even civic levels, consumers act as defacto franchisees, pursuing their own economic and political interests in the institutional and creative management of programs like 24.

Franchising Extends Transnational and Transgenerational Relationships: franchises support transnational and transgenerational relations through ongoing exchange, transformation, and reinvestment. Franchises like Transformers can be most productively understood not as globally traded products, but as cultural processes in which local innovations feed cross-cultural networks of production over long periods of time.

From these findings, this project theorizes the culture of media franchising to uncover an established tradition of collaborative production in the entertainment industries. As a cultural logic structuring production in relational terms, the media franchise might therefore be considered, despite its more historical, less cutting-edge character, a crucial corollary to any attempt to understand emerging “social media.”

Recommendations

By reflecting on the heterogeneous interests in a shared set of resources implied by the term “franchise,” we gain a much clearer insight into the social, institutional, and creative relationships by which culture has been produced and reproduced in the media industries. To be sure, media franchises are not reducible to the franchise relationships that have structured the retail and service industries over the past sixty to seventy years. Relationships geared toward the expansion of distribution channels and marketing reach function much differently from those aimed at multiplying the production of media culture.

Moreover, the degree to which the cultural logic of franchises (as it has been described in this white paper) is consciously and strategically recognized in the media industries remains to be seen. Many of the executives and creative professionals interviewed for this project disavowed or distanced themselves from the very notion of franchising, claiming ignorance of the term or explaining that such considerations were outside their job description. This likely means that relatively few producers are actually thinking in any real depth about media franchises. While the practices and relationships described here may be in place, a firm structural and strategic logic may not actually underlie them in practice.

Thinking more strategically in terms of franchising—and the cultural logic it implies—has some distinct advantages, and it is here that some initial recommendations can be synthesized:

1. Practitioners should consider franchising in terms of its instructive potential as a historical precedent.

2. The relational logic of media franchising challenges industry insiders to reconsider any strategic logics structured around singular control over the use of intellectual properties.

3. In contrast to prohibitive top-down controls, open and heterogeneous creative experimentation can be relied upon to renew and regenerate existing intellectual property production resources.

4. In developing collaborative productive models, industry professionals should develop greater appreciation of contributions that emerge from outside the top echelons of power. By thinking of licensed creators and fans alike as “franchisees,” license holders can recognize vital stakeholders in the ongoing production of media properties.

Bio

Derek Johnson is an Assistant Professor, University of North Texas, Department of Radio, Television, and Film. His dissertation examined the historical development of the media "franchise" as a form based on shared intellectual property networks, as a specific set of production and consumption practices, and as a discourse used to make sense of media culture. Interested in the organization of culture across media platforms, his research spans a wide range of industries (including film, television, video games, comics, and licensed merchandising) and encompasses issues of narrative theory, audience reception, public sphere discourse, as well as media economics and policy. His recent publications include "Inviting Audiences In: The Spatial Reorganization of Production and Consumption in 'TVIII'" (New Review of Film and Television, 2007), "Fan-tagonism: Factions, Institutions, and Constitutive Hegemonies of Fandom" (Fandom: Identities and Communities in Mediated Culture, edited by Gray, Harrington, and Sandvoss, 2007), and "Will the Real Wolverine Please Stand Up?: Marvel's Mutation from Monthlies to Movies" (Film and Comic Books, edited by Gordon, Jancovich, and McAllister, 2007). Derek can be reached directly at Derek.Johnson@unt.edu.

May 31, 2011

C3 White Paper: Turn On, Tune In, Cash Out - Maximizing the Value of Television Audiences by Sheila Seles

This summer, select 2010/2011 C3 research memos and white papers willl be made publicly available for download via the C3/FOE blog.

Now publicly available:

Turn On, Tune In, Cash Out: Maximizing the Value of Television Audiences

by Sheila Seles
Graduate Researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium (2008-2010); MIT CMS Class of 2010;
Director, Digital and Social Media at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF)

 

seles cover


Download the executive summary or the entire research memo.


Executive Summary

Audience behavior across television platforms is networked, instantaneous, and visible like never before. To maximize the value of the digital television audience, the industry needs to recognize and quantify the cultural value of content—they need to evaluate the reasons people watch TV in the first place. Unfortunately, current business models aren’t up to this challenge. While digital networked culture presents tremendous opportunities to engage with audiences, digital data allows us to see how poorly television ratings reflect actual audience behavior. In this white paper, we’ll see that the ratings system is ultimately responsible for the growing division between the financial value of the audience and the cultural value of content. As long as ratings exist in their current state, publishers and advertisers will miss out on innovative revenue opportunities, and they won’t be able to create programming that reflects real audience demand.

Television ratings are meant to make audiences valuable to publishers and advertisers, but ratings are too narrowly constructed to represent the diverse sites of value embodied in the contemporary television audience. This white paper suggests three key areas that should be re-imagined to maximize the value of the television audience for the digital age.

PART I: Structural Relationships Among Industry Players

• This section argues that the economic structure of the television industry has prevented industry players from maximizing the value of increasingly fragmented television audiences.

• We consider evidence of how industry players are caught in a codependent relationship that privileges the status quo to the detriment of true innovation.

• These relationships functioned best when audiences and programs were aggregated because there was only one way to watch TV—when it was on.

• Today, there are many ways to watch TV—live, recorded on a DVR, online, downloaded—but audiences are still measured like linear television audiences. This method of audience measurement fails to leverage the affordances of the medium and allows a lot of viewers to slip through the cracks. Sometimes viewers take it upon themselves to make sure this doesn’t happen, but most of the time networks and advertisers are guided by their dependence on outmoded conceptions of audience value.

PART II: The Changing Value of Television Audiences

• The second section argues for a system of audience measurement that maintains the value of audience exposure while accounting for the value of audience expression.

• Here, we resist the temptation to look at fans as a model for measuring expression both because fan behavior is anomalous, and because we can measure digital expressions as simple as clicking a mouse or changing the channel on a digital TV.

• Finally, this section deals with the value of viewing context. There are also different behaviors associated with different platforms and different content. Understanding the implications of viewing context makes the television audience even more valuable to advertisers and publishers. Context provides an opportunity to expand advertising strategies beyond showing the same ads on every platform.

PART III: Leveraging Digital Affordances to Maximize Audience Value

• The last section explains how the logic of successful digital companies can be applied to the television business. Both the methodologies and corporate ethos of successful online companies can serve as a model for the television industry, or they can be its undoing. This section uses mini-studies of several Internet companies to argue for the increasing importance of experimentation, networking, taste, organization, and interface in the television business for the purposes of better understanding audience engagement and audience value.

• First, we explore how Google is the leader in online advertising sales by making sense of data and making user behavior valuable.

• Next, Netflix provides an instructive example of how networked culture and progressive corporate culture can lead to success in digital business.

• Finally, Demand Media shows us how digital data can make visible manifestations of user taste valuable.

• Publishers, advertisers, and measurement companies have historically been able to get around the limitations of their codependency, but they are faced with increasing competition from digital companies that understand how to make fragmented audiences valuable.

Finally, this paper concludes that the industry can move beyond its problems by embracing emergent sites of audience value. Digital distribution affords significant opportunities for the television industry to make audiences valuable. By continuing to explore digital data, targeted advertising, behavioral use patterns, and audience engagement, the television industry can revolutionize its ailing business.

Bio

Sheila Murphy Seles graduated with a Master of Science in Comparative Media Studies from MIT in 2010. Her graduate thesis focused on the television ratings industry and the changing value of television audiences. Seles also holds a BA in American Studies and Theatre from Middlebury College. Her work at The Convergence Culture Consortium examined the television industry with a concentration on the changing business of television research. Seles is currently the Director of Digital and Social Media at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF). Sheila can be reached directly at smseles@gmail.com

April 29, 2011

Piracy: Turning Threats into Profit

At CinemaCon few weeks ago Chris Dodd, former US Senator and current head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), called movie theft "perhaps the single biggest threat we face as an industry." The film industry--from studio execs to ticket takers--employs millions, and their jobs are in fact dependent on people going into theaters and paying, sometimes exorbitantly, to see movies.

I love movies, and I don't want to see anyone lose a job, but I have a problem with Dodd's assertion that "movie theft" is the biggest threat to the movie industry. Perhaps the fact that people are choosing to illegally acquire and watch feature films in the comfort of their own homes is partially responsible for the decline in movie attendance, but even if it is, Dodd is missing the point. It's not movie theft that's the problem--it's the opportunities moviegoers have to watch content when, how, and where they want to. People have grown accustomed to getting all kinds of content on-demand, and they're probably not going to change their behavior on moral grounds. Instead of seeing piracy as a threat, we have to learn how to use what we know about file sharing to drive business innovation.

Continue reading "Piracy: Turning Threats into Profit " »

April 7, 2011

Transmedia Hollywood 2 - Registration Still Open!

Transmedia Hollywood 2: Visual Culture and Design can takes place tomorrow (Friday, April 8th). Prof. Jenkins is hosting and moderating the event - along with Denise Mann of UCLA - and many CMS C3 alumni, consulting researchers, practitioners and affiliates will be in attendance.

It promises to be an important event as "Transmedia' fights its way out of its early adoption/evangelist stage - into a broader discourse on what works, what doesn't, what the future language of the medium is and will be - as well as an exploration of the artistic, creative and market-driven pros and cons of transmedia narrative structures.

Registration is still open and is available through:

http://www.ticketmaster.com/Transmedia-Hollywood-2-Visual-Culture-and-Design-tickets/artist/1559777


TRANSMEDIA, HOLLYWOOD 2:
Visual Culture and Design

A UCLA/USC/Industry Symposium
Co-sponsored by
UCLA Producers Program,
UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
and
USC School of Cinematic Arts

Friday, April 8, 2011
James Bridges Theater, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
9:45 AM - 7 PM

Event Co-Directors:
Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School of Communication

Overview

Transmedia, Hollywood 2: Visual Culture and Design is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood 2 turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means.

Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and media research centers in the nation, Transmedia, Hollywood 2 builds on the foundations established at last year's Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story. This year's topic: Transmedia, Hollywood: Visual Culture and Design is meant to move from an abstract discussion of transmedia storytelling in all its permutations to a more concrete consideration of what is involved in designing for transmedia.

The past year has seen the Producer's Guild of America (PGA) embrace the concept of the transmedia producer. The other Guilds have begun discussing the implications of these developments for their membership. A growing number of small production units are springing up across the film, games, web, and television sectors to try to create and distribute transmedia content. Many of today's new transmedia producers are helmed by one-time studio or network insiders who are eager to "reinvent" themselves. Inside the studios, the executives tasked with top-down management of large media franchises are partnering with once marginalized film directors, comic book creators, game designers, and other creative personnel.

The underlying premise of this conference is that while the traditional studios and networks are hanging onto many of their outdated practices, they are also starting to engage creative personnel who are working outside the system to help them re-imagine their business. With crisis and change comes the opportunity for the next generation of maverick, independent-minded producers--the next Walt Disney and George Lucas-- to significantly challenge the old and to make way for the new. So, now, it is time to start examining lessons learned from these early experiments. Each of the issues outlined below impact the day-to-day design decisions that go into developing transmedia franchises. We hope to break down the project of developing transmedia content into four basic design challenges:



  • What does it mean to structure a franchise around the exploration of a world rather than a narrative? How are these worlds moving from the film and television screen into other media, such as comics, games, and location based entertainment?

  • What does it mean to design a character that will play well across a range of different media platforms? How might transmedia content re-center familiar stories around compelling secondary characters, adding depth to our understanding of the depicted events and relationships?

  • What does it mean to develop a sequence of events across a range of different media? How do we make sure that the spectator understands the relationship between events when they are piecing together information from different platforms and trying to make sense of a mythology that may span multiple epochs?

  • What does it take to motivate consumers to invest deeply enough into a transmedia franchise that they are eager to track down new installments and create buzz around a new property? How is transmedia linked to a push towards interactivity and participatory culture?


As with the first event, Transmedia, Hollywood: Visual Culture & Design will bring together comic book writers, game designers, "imagineers," filmmakers, television show runners, and other media professionals in a conversation with leading academic thinkers on these topics. Each of our speakers will be asked to focus on the unique challenges they faced while working on a specific production and detail how their understanding of transmedia helped them resolve those issues. From there, we will ask all our speakers to compare notes across projects and platforms with the hopes of starting to develop some basic design principles that will help us translate theories of transmedia entertainment into pragmatic reality.

The creative personnel we have assembled include many of the key individuals responsible for masterminding the fundamental changes in the way traditional media operates and engages audiences by altering the way stories are told temporally, by exploring how graphic design translates from one medium to another, and by explaining how these visually-stunning worlds are being conceived in today's "connected" entertainment arena.


Conference Schedule

Friday, April 8, 2011

9:15--9:45 am
Registration


9:45--10:00 am
Welcome and Opening Remarks

  • Teri Schwartz, Dean, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
  • Denise Mann, Associate Professor/Head, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
  • Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC


10:00--11:50 AM
Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play": Designing Virtual Worlds--From Screens to Theme Parks and Beyond
Hollywood has come a long way since Walt Disney, circa 1955, invited families to come out and play in the first cross-platform, totally merchandised sandbox--Disneyland. Cut to today and most entertainment corporations are still focused on creating intellectual properties to exploit across all divisions of the Company. However, as the studios and networks move away from the concrete spaces of movie and TV screens and start to embrace the seemingly limitless "virtual spaces" of the Web as well as the real-world spaces of theme parks, museums, and comic book conventions, the demands on creative personnel and their studio counterparts have expanded exponentially.

Rather than rely on old-fashioned merchandising and licensing departments to oversee vendors, which too often results in uninspired computer games, novelizations, and label T-shirts, several studios have brought these activities in-house, creating divisions like Disney Imagineering and Disney Interactive to oversee the design and implementation of these vast, virtual worlds. In other instances, studios are turning to a new generation of independent producers--aka "transmedia producers"--charged with creating vast, interlocking brand extensions that make use of a never-ending cycle of technological future shock and Web 2.0 capabilities.

The results of these partnerships have been a number of extraordinarily inventive, interactive, and immersive experiences that create a "you are there" effect. These include the King Kong 360 3D theme park ride, which incorporates the sight, smell, and thunderous footsteps of the iconic gorilla as he appears to toss the audience's tram car into a pit. Universal Studios and Warner Bros. have joined forces to create the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a new $200 million-plus attraction at the Islands of Adventure in Florida.

Today's panel focuses on the unique challenges associated with turning traditional media franchises into 3D interactive worlds, inviting you to come out 2 play in the studios' virtual sandboxes.

Moderator: Denise Mann
Panelists will include:


  • Alex McDowell, Production Designer for Tim Burton and Zack Snyder (Corpse Bride, Watchmen)

  • Thierry Coup, Art Designer, Wizarding World of Harry Potter

  • Angela Ndalianis, Associate Professor and Head of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Melbourne, Australia (Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment)

  • Bruce Vaughn, Chief Creative Executive, Disney Imagineering

12:00--1:50 PM
Panel 2: "We're Looking For Characters": Designing Personalities Who Play Across Platforms

How is our notion of what constitutes a good character changing as more and more decisions get made on the basis of a transmedia logic? Does it matter that James Bond originated in a book, Spider-Man in comics, Luke Skywalker on screen, and Homer Simpson on television, if each of these figures is going to eventually appear across a range of media platforms?

Do designers and writers conceive of characters differently when they know that they need to be recognizable in a variety of media? Why does transmedia often require a shift in focus as the protagonist aboard the "mothership" often moves off stage as extensions foreground the perspective and actions of once secondary figures?

How might we understand the process by which people on reality television series get packaged as characters who can drive audience identification and interest or by which performers get reframed as characters as they enter into the popular imagination?

Why have so few characters from games attracted a broader following while characters from comics seem to be gaining growing popularity even among those who have never read their graphic adventures?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins
Panelists will include:


  • Joseph Ferencz, Strategy and Marketing Manager, Ubisoft

  • Geoff Johns, Chief Creative Officer of DC Entertainment

  • Alisa Perren, Assistant Professor, Georgia State University

  • Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson, Executive Producers of Smallville

2:00--3:00 PM
Lunch Break


3:00--4:50 PM
Panel 3: Fan Interfaces: Intelligent Designs or Fan Aggregators?

Once relegated to the margins of society, today's media fans are often considered the "advance guard" that studio and network marketers eagerly pursue at Comi-Con and elsewhere to help launch virtual word-of-mouth campaigns around a favorite film, TV series, computer game, or comic book. Since tech-savvy fans are often the first to access Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Second Life in search of a like-minded community, it was only a matter of time before corporate marketers followed suit. After all, these social networking sites provide media companies with powerful tools to manage fans and commit them to crowd-sourcing activities on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere.

Given the complexities and contradictions involved in negotiating between industry and audience interests, we will ask the game designers to explain their philosophy about the intended and unintended outcomes of their fan interfaces. Marketers clearly love it when fans become willing billboards for the brand either by wearing logo T-shirts or by dressing a favorite Madman avatar in the 1960s clothing, accessories and backgrounds on display on the AMCTV.com "Madmen Yourself" and then spreading the content through Facebook and Twitter.

What is the design philosophy behind a video game like Spore, which allows fans free range to create their own creatures and worlds but then limits their rights over this digital content? Who owns these virtual creations once they appear for sale on E-bay? These and other intriguing questions will be posed to the creative individuals responsible for designing many of these imaginative and engaging fan interfaces.

Moderator: Denise Mann
Panelists include:


  • Matt Wolf, Double 2.0, ARG/Game Designer

  • Avi Santos, Assistant Professor, Dominican College and Co-editor, FlowTV.com and In Media Res.com

5:00--6:50 PM
Panel 4: "It's About Time!" Structuring Transmedia Narratives

The rules for how to structure a Hollywood movie were established more than a century ago and even then, were inspired by ideas from earlier media -- the four-act structure of theater, the hero's quest in mythology. Yet, audiences and creators alike are still trying to make sense of how to fit together the chunks of a transmedia narrative. Industry insiders use terms such as mythology or saga to describe stories which may expand across many different epochs, involve many generations of characters, expand across many different corners of the fictional world, and explore a range of different goals and missions.

We might think of such stories as hyperserials, in so far as serials involved the chunking and dispersal of narrative information into compelling units. The old style serials on film and television expanded in time; these new style serials also expand across media platforms.

So, how do the creators of these stories handle challenges of exposition and plot development, managing the audience's attention so that they have the pieces they need to put together the puzzle? What principles do they use to indicate which chunks of a franchise are connected to each other and which represent different moments in the imaginary history they are recounting? Do certain genres -- science fiction and fantasy -- embrace this expansive understanding of story time, while others seem to require something closer to the Aristoltelian unities of time and space?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins
Panelists include:


  • Caitlin Burns, Transmedia Producer, Starlight Runner Entertainment

  • Abigail DeKosnik, Assistant Professor, University of California-Berkeley (Co-Editor, The Survival of the Soap Opera: Strategies for a New Media Era; Illegitimate Media: Discourse and Censorship of Digital Remix)

  • Jane Espensen, Writer/Producer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Torchwood.

  • John Platt, Co-Executive Producer, Big Brother, The Surreal Life

  • Tracey Robertson, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Hoodlum

  • Lance Weiler, Founder, Wordbook Project

  • Justin Wyatt, Executive Director, Research at at NBCUniversal, Inc (High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood).

7:00 PM
Reception
Lobby, James Bridges Theater

Location
James Bridges Theater, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television


Registration
Faculty/Students:
Tickets are $5 for faculty and students of accredited institutions and will only be sold at the box-office of the UCLA Central Ticket Office and at the door on the day of the event (prior registration required). Valid university I.D. is required. Registration includes admission to conference and reception.

General Public:
Tickets for the general public are $30. Registration includes admission to conference and reception. Please register: http://www2.tft.ucla.edu/RSVP/index.cfm?action=rsvp_form


Directions
Directions to UCLA:
http://www.ucla.edu/map/

Campus Map:
http://www.ucla.edu/map/ucla-campus-map.pdf

Parking Info:
http://map.ais.ucla.edu/go/1002187
http://www.transportation.ucla.edu/portal/maps/parkingmap/0206UCLAParkingMap.htm

Bus Info:
http://www.metro.net/
http://www.bigbluebus.com/home/index.asp

Contact
UCLA Producers Program
UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media
203 East Melnitz
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Phone: (310) 206-3761
Fax: (310) 825-3383
Email: producers@tft.ucla.edu
Web: www.tft.ucla.edu/producers

March 1, 2011

Announcing Transmedia, Hollywood 2: Visual Culture and Design

Transmedia registration can now be done through

http://www.ticketmaster.com/Transmedia-Hollywood-2-Visual-Culture-and-Design-tickets/artist/1559777


TRANSMEDIA, HOLLYWOOD 2:
Visual Culture and Design

A UCLA/USC/Industry Symposium
Co-sponsored by
UCLA Producers Program,
UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
and
USC School of Cinematic Arts

Friday, April 8, 2011
James Bridges Theater, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
9:45 AM - 7 PM

Event Co-Directors:
Denise Mann, Associate Professor, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, USC Annenberg School of Communication

Overview

Transmedia, Hollywood 2: Visual Culture and Design is a one-day public symposium exploring the role of transmedia franchises in today's entertainment industries. Transmedia, Hollywood 2 turns the spotlight on media creators, producers and executives and places them in critical dialogue with top researchers from across a wide spectrum of film, media and cultural studies to provide an interdisciplinary summit for the free interchange of insights about how transmedia works and what it means.

Co-hosted by Denise Mann and Henry Jenkins, from UCLA and USC, two of the most prominent film schools and media research centers in the nation, Transmedia, Hollywood 2 builds on the foundations established at last year's Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story. This year's topic: Transmedia, Hollywood: Visual Culture and Design is meant to move from an abstract discussion of transmedia storytelling in all its permutations to a more concrete consideration of what is involved in designing for transmedia.

The past year has seen the Producer's Guild of America (PGA) embrace the concept of the transmedia producer. The other Guilds have begun discussing the implications of these developments for their membership. A growing number of small production units are springing up across the film, games, web, and television sectors to try to create and distribute transmedia content. Many of today's new transmedia producers are helmed by one-time studio or network insiders who are eager to "reinvent" themselves. Inside the studios, the executives tasked with top-down management of large media franchises are partnering with once marginalized film directors, comic book creators, game designers, and other creative personnel.

The underlying premise of this conference is that while the traditional studios and networks are hanging onto many of their outdated practices, they are also starting to engage creative personnel who are working outside the system to help them re-imagine their business. With crisis and change comes the opportunity for the next generation of maverick, independent-minded producers--the next Walt Disney and George Lucas-- to significantly challenge the old and to make way for the new. So, now, it is time to start examining lessons learned from these early experiments. Each of the issues outlined below impact the day-to-day design decisions that go into developing transmedia franchises. We hope to break down the project of developing transmedia content into four basic design challenges:



  • What does it mean to structure a franchise around the exploration of a world rather than a narrative? How are these worlds moving from the film and television screen into other media, such as comics, games, and location based entertainment?

  • What does it mean to design a character that will play well across a range of different media platforms? How might transmedia content re-center familiar stories around compelling secondary characters, adding depth to our understanding of the depicted events and relationships?

  • What does it mean to develop a sequence of events across a range of different media? How do we make sure that the spectator understands the relationship between events when they are piecing together information from different platforms and trying to make sense of a mythology that may span multiple epochs?

  • What does it take to motivate consumers to invest deeply enough into a transmedia franchise that they are eager to track down new installments and create buzz around a new property? How is transmedia linked to a push towards interactivity and participatory culture?


As with the first event, Transmedia, Hollywood: Visual Culture & Design will bring together comic book writers, game designers, "imagineers," filmmakers, television show runners, and other media professionals in a conversation with leading academic thinkers on these topics. Each of our speakers will be asked to focus on the unique challenges they faced while working on a specific production and detail how their understanding of transmedia helped them resolve those issues. From there, we will ask all our speakers to compare notes across projects and platforms with the hopes of starting to develop some basic design principles that will help us translate theories of transmedia entertainment into pragmatic reality.

The creative personnel we have assembled include many of the key individuals responsible for masterminding the fundamental changes in the way traditional media operates and engages audiences by altering the way stories are told temporally, by exploring how graphic design translates from one medium to another, and by explaining how these visually-stunning worlds are being conceived in today's "connected" entertainment arena.


Conference Schedule

Friday, April 8, 2011

9:15--9:45 am
Registration


9:45--10:00 am
Welcome and Opening Remarks

  • Teri Schwartz, Dean, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television
  • Denise Mann, Associate Professor/Head, Producers Program, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
  • Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, Annenberg School of Communication, USC


10:00--11:50 AM
Panel 1: "Come Out 2 Play": Designing Virtual Worlds--From Screens to Theme Parks and Beyond
Hollywood has come a long way since Walt Disney, circa 1955, invited families to come out and play in the first cross-platform, totally merchandised sandbox--Disneyland. Cut to today and most entertainment corporations are still focused on creating intellectual properties to exploit across all divisions of the Company. However, as the studios and networks move away from the concrete spaces of movie and TV screens and start to embrace the seemingly limitless "virtual spaces" of the Web as well as the real-world spaces of theme parks, museums, and comic book conventions, the demands on creative personnel and their studio counterparts have expanded exponentially.

Rather than rely on old-fashioned merchandising and licensing departments to oversee vendors, which too often results in uninspired computer games, novelizations, and label T-shirts, several studios have brought these activities in-house, creating divisions like Disney Imagineering and Disney Interactive to oversee the design and implementation of these vast, virtual worlds. In other instances, studios are turning to a new generation of independent producers--aka "transmedia producers"--charged with creating vast, interlocking brand extensions that make use of a never-ending cycle of technological future shock and Web 2.0 capabilities.

The results of these partnerships have been a number of extraordinarily inventive, interactive, and immersive experiences that create a "you are there" effect. These include the King Kong 360 3D theme park ride, which incorporates the sight, smell, and thunderous footsteps of the iconic gorilla as he appears to toss the audience's tram car into a pit. Universal Studios and Warner Bros. have joined forces to create the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, a new $200 million-plus attraction at the Islands of Adventure in Florida.

Today's panel focuses on the unique challenges associated with turning traditional media franchises into 3D interactive worlds, inviting you to come out 2 play in the studios' virtual sandboxes.

Moderator: Denise Mann
Panelists will include:


  • Alex McDowell, Production Designer for Tim Burton and Zack Snyder (Corpse Bride, Watchmen)

  • Thierry Coup, Art Designer, Wizarding World of Harry Potter

  • Angela Ndalianis, Associate Professor and Head of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Melbourne, Australia (Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment)

  • Bruce Vaughn, Chief Creative Executive, Disney Imagineering

12:00--1:50 PM
Panel 2: "We're Looking For Characters": Designing Personalities Who Play Across Platforms

How is our notion of what constitutes a good character changing as more and more decisions get made on the basis of a transmedia logic? Does it matter that James Bond originated in a book, Spider-Man in comics, Luke Skywalker on screen, and Homer Simpson on television, if each of these figures is going to eventually appear across a range of media platforms?

Do designers and writers conceive of characters differently when they know that they need to be recognizable in a variety of media? Why does transmedia often require a shift in focus as the protagonist aboard the "mothership" often moves off stage as extensions foreground the perspective and actions of once secondary figures?

How might we understand the process by which people on reality television series get packaged as characters who can drive audience identification and interest or by which performers get reframed as characters as they enter into the popular imagination?

Why have so few characters from games attracted a broader following while characters from comics seem to be gaining growing popularity even among those who have never read their graphic adventures?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins
Panelists will include:


  • Joseph Ferencz, Strategy and Marketing Manager, Ubisoft

  • Geoff Johns, Chief Creative Officer of DC Entertainment

  • Alisa Perren, Assistant Professor, Georgia State University

  • Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson, Executive Producers of Smallville

2:00--3:00 PM
Lunch Break


3:00--4:50 PM
Panel 3: Fan Interfaces: Intelligent Designs or Fan Aggregators?

Once relegated to the margins of society, today's media fans are often considered the "advance guard" that studio and network marketers eagerly pursue at Comi-Con and elsewhere to help launch virtual word-of-mouth campaigns around a favorite film, TV series, computer game, or comic book. Since tech-savvy fans are often the first to access Web 2.0 sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, and Second Life in search of a like-minded community, it was only a matter of time before corporate marketers followed suit. After all, these social networking sites provide media companies with powerful tools to manage fans and commit them to crowd-sourcing activities on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere.

Given the complexities and contradictions involved in negotiating between industry and audience interests, we will ask the game designers to explain their philosophy about the intended and unintended outcomes of their fan interfaces. Marketers clearly love it when fans become willing billboards for the brand either by wearing logo T-shirts or by dressing a favorite Madman avatar in the 1960s clothing, accessories and backgrounds on display on the AMCTV.com "Madmen Yourself" and then spreading the content through Facebook and Twitter.

What is the design philosophy behind a video game like Spore, which allows fans free range to create their own creatures and worlds but then limits their rights over this digital content? Who owns these virtual creations once they appear for sale on E-bay? These and other intriguing questions will be posed to the creative individuals responsible for designing many of these imaginative and engaging fan interfaces.

Moderator: Denise Mann
Panelists include:


  • Matt Wolf, Double 2.0, ARG/Game Designer

  • Avi Santos, Assistant Professor, Dominican College and Co-editor, FlowTV.com and In Media Res.com

5:00--6:50 PM
Panel 4: "It's About Time!" Structuring Transmedia Narratives

The rules for how to structure a Hollywood movie were established more than a century ago and even then, were inspired by ideas from earlier media -- the four-act structure of theater, the hero's quest in mythology. Yet, audiences and creators alike are still trying to make sense of how to fit together the chunks of a transmedia narrative. Industry insiders use terms such as mythology or saga to describe stories which may expand across many different epochs, involve many generations of characters, expand across many different corners of the fictional world, and explore a range of different goals and missions.

We might think of such stories as hyperserials, in so far as serials involved the chunking and dispersal of narrative information into compelling units. The old style serials on film and television expanded in time; these new style serials also expand across media platforms.

So, how do the creators of these stories handle challenges of exposition and plot development, managing the audience's attention so that they have the pieces they need to put together the puzzle? What principles do they use to indicate which chunks of a franchise are connected to each other and which represent different moments in the imaginary history they are recounting? Do certain genres -- science fiction and fantasy -- embrace this expansive understanding of story time, while others seem to require something closer to the Aristoltelian unities of time and space?

Moderator: Henry Jenkins
Panelists include:


  • Caitlin Burns, Transmedia Producer, Starlight Runner Entertainment

  • Abigail DeKosnik, Assistant Professor, University of California-Berkeley (Co-Editor, The Survival of the Soap Opera: Strategies for a New Media Era; Illegitimate Media: Discourse and Censorship of Digital Remix)

  • Jane Espensen, Writer/Producer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Torchwood.

  • John Platt, Co-Executive Producer, Big Brother, The Surreal Life

  • Tracey Robertson, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Hoodlum

  • Lance Weiler, Founder, Wordbook Project

  • Justin Wyatt, Executive Director, Research at at NBCUniversal, Inc (High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood).

7:00 PM
Reception
Lobby, James Bridges Theater

Location
James Bridges Theater, UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television


Registration
Faculty/Students:
Tickets are $5 for faculty and students of accredited institutions and will only be sold at the box-office of the UCLA Central Ticket Office and at the door on the day of the event (prior registration required). Valid university I.D. is required. Registration includes admission to conference and reception.

General Public:
Tickets for the general public are $30. Registration includes admission to conference and reception. Please register: http://www2.tft.ucla.edu/RSVP/index.cfm?action=rsvp_form


Directions
Directions to UCLA:
http://www.ucla.edu/map/

Campus Map:
http://www.ucla.edu/map/ucla-campus-map.pdf

Parking Info:
http://map.ais.ucla.edu/go/1002187
http://www.transportation.ucla.edu/portal/maps/parkingmap/0206UCLAParkingMap.htm

Bus Info:
http://www.metro.net/
http://www.bigbluebus.com/home/index.asp

Contact
UCLA Producers Program
UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media
203 East Melnitz
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Phone: (310) 206-3761
Fax: (310) 825-3383
Email: producers@tft.ucla.edu
Web: www.tft.ucla.edu/producers

September 17, 2010

Changing Relationships, Changing Industries (Nancy Baym, University of Kansas)

C3 Consulting Researcher Nancy Baym (University of Kansas) had a busy 2010.

Her new book, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, was released by Polity Press in the Spring.

Also this spring, Nancy contributed one of the first C3 Research Memos distributed to C3 Consortium Members. This C3 Research will be made publicly available via the C3 blog in late November of this year.

This summer, Nancy was here in Cambridge as a visiting researcher at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Danah Boyd's Social Media Research Collective.

While here in Cambridge, Nancy was asked to speak at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. Her talk (in the embedded video below) entitled "Changing Relationships, Changing Industries" addresses her thinking on notions of exchange (economic and social) between fans, audiences, the music industry and the independent music scene - specifically in the case of independent Swedish artists and music labels.

Nancy's insights into how the independent music scene by necessity has embraced new media distribution channels and the audience embrace of these new channels, as well as her insights and metrics on the major label music industry as an inadvertent 'loss leader' in the swift dismantling of the top down corporate music hierarchy (which we are now seeing manifest in film and television) were an early influence on what became 2008 - 2009 C3 research on new consumption patterns, new patterns of value exchange, along with innovative ideas surrounding value and worth - specifically the 2008 C3 White Paper on Spreadability, Xiaochang Li's 2009 C3 White Paper More Than Money Can Buy: Locating Value in Spreadable Media, Ana Domb's 2009 White Paper Tacky and Proud: Exploring Technobrega's Value Network and the CMS C3 FOE4 Panel, Moderated by Prof. Jenkins entitled "Consumption, Value and Worth" (panel video here, liveblogging archive here).


Location
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
License
Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported
Copyright Holder
The President and Fellows of Harvard College

April 16, 2010

The Now and Future of Games in Hollywood

Today, I'm sitting at Microsoft NERD attending the MIT Business in Games conference. This morning, I attended a presentation called Hollywood, Music, & Games (which skewed toward just "Hollywood & Games"). The panel included:

Chris Weaver (MIT & Consulting Researcher for C3)

Mike Dornbrook (Harmonix)
Paul Neurath (Floodgate Entertainment)
Mark Blecher (Hasbro Digital Media & Gaming)
Ian Davis (Rockstar Games)

The panel talked about cross-platform narratives, how franchises span games and movies, and the problems that game creators have faced dealing with Hollywood executives and movie producers (as well as the implications that these problems have had on "good games").

My notes follow after the jump!

Continue reading "The Now and Future of Games in Hollywood" »

April 6, 2010

Notes from "The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized" by Christian Sandvig

Only a few hours ago, I had the opportunity to attend a Berkman Center for Internet & Society luncheon with a lecture by Christian Sandvig on the future of "television" distribution online.

The description from the event reads:

Video on the Internet briefly promised us a cultural future of decentralized production and daring changes in form--even beyond dancing kittens and laughing babies. Yet recent developments on sites like YouTube, Hulu, and Fancast as well as research about how audiences watch online video both suggest a retrenchment of structures from the old "mass media" system rather than anything daring. In this talk I'll argue that choices about the distribution infrastructure for video will determine whether all our future screens will be the same.

Christian argued that online video is more and more resembling old models of television networks, and he talked about everything from the YouTube redesign to a new approach to Chris Anderson's "long tail" model of distribution. He delivered some engaging thoughts on bandwidth monetization and asked critical research questions into how television and online video researchers can go about tackling issues of network algorithms. My liveblogged notes provide some textual takeaways from his talk, but the full lecture will eventually be available on the Berkman website here.

Christian Sandvig is a Fellow of the Berkman Center and Associate Professor in Communication, Media, and at Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds the Ph.D. in communication from Stanford University. In 2006 he received the Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation in the area of Human-Centered Computing. He blogs at multicast.

My notes follow (unedited) after the jump!

Continue reading "Notes from "The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized" by Christian Sandvig" »

March 12, 2010

The Transmedia Potential of Music Videos, Part 1: The Band

With the uneven future of the music industry and its models, I've become really interested in exploring the potential that music has by integrating these old tactics into transmedia storytelling and cross-platform distribution frameworks.

Previously, I've gushed about how the hit television show Glee has experimented with these methods with respectable success. The Glee model takes advantage of the ease of cross-platform distribution as a business model; however, it's a bit difficult to discuss the transmedia storytelling elements of its story. In my Glee article, I attempted to speak to the idea of affective economics, "which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions" (Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture). Glee's story extends beyond its original narrative when expressed by its consumers and especially its fans, by understanding characters better through playing their songs, or by performing favorite dance routines.

Unfortunately, what I can't argue is that the producers of Glee have themselves extended the story across mediums. In response to this basic fact, I've been trying to look for the appearance of other types of stories that span multiple forms of media. Today, I want to discuss the band OK Go and how the story of not the songs but the band has succeeded in with a transmedia model.

And now the story continues... On Wednesday, OK Go announced that they will be leaving EMI to set up their own independent label.

Continue reading "The Transmedia Potential of Music Videos, Part 1: The Band" »

March 10, 2010

The Good and The Bad of Video Game Convergence

Two recent news items that deserve some commentary:

The Good

Steam Comes to Mac, Offers Cross-Platform Gaming Free of Charge

Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service to Mac

The Bad

When Ubisoft takes a break, your games break

Ubisoft DRM Servers Attacked Rendering Games Unplayable

My comments after the jump:

Continue reading "The Good and The Bad of Video Game Convergence" »

February 24, 2010

More Events: Online Video, Giant Robots, and a Personal Talk About Japanese Popular Culture

Today, I'd like to call your attention to a number of interesting, upcoming events that fall into the topic of convergence culture.

Picture 48.png
First, the inaugural Wireside Chat w/ Lawrence Lessig at Harvard Law School.


Second, a talk by Ian Condry about anime and transmedia.


And finally, I'm giving a talk at Ignite Boston 7 about fan engagement with animated characters.


Continue reading "More Events: Online Video, Giant Robots, and a Personal Talk About Japanese Popular Culture" »

February 17, 2010

C3 White Paper: It's (Not) the End of TV as We Know It

2009 C3 white papers are now available for download. Over the next few days, we'll be posting links to them here on the blog.

My white paper about online TV audiences is up first. The paper outlines strategies for understanding how viewership online complements broadcast viewing. Through research and case studies, this paper:

  1. Explains the strategies needed to manage viewer expectations of scarcity in the broadcast space and plenitude in the online space.

  2. Categorizes types of online content in terms of their appeal to viewers.

  3. Outlines strategies for appealing to different types of online viewers.

Download the executive summary or the entire paper and let me know what you think in the comments or tweet @shelila.

February 16, 2010

Points of Converging Interest

Although I tend to avoid doing posts that consist of only links, there has been so much good writing recently that I'd like to spend today on pointing out some of those publications!

Inside the Social Media Strategy of the Winter Olympic Games, by Craig Silverman (PBS MediaShift)

The PBS MediaShift blog takes a look at the integration of online audience engagement with the Olympic brand through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Why Pete Warden Should Not Release Profile Data on 215 Million Facebook Users, by Michael Zimmer

Michael Zimmer, executive committee member of the Association of Internet Researchers, gives his opinion on the ethical implications of Pete Warden's 215-million-user data set of public Facebook profiles.

The YouTube (R)evolution Turns 5, by Rachel Sadon (PCWorld)

PCWorld examines how YouTube has shaped our interaction with online video over the past five years.

The NBCOlympics.com User Experience: Not Likely to Win the Gold, by Liz Shannon Miller (NewTeeVee)

NewTeeVee provides a first-hand perspective from an attempt to watch the Winter Olympics online.

Multitaskers: More Viewers Watched Super Bowl, Surfed Net, by Wayne Friedman (MediaPost)

MediaPost analyes a set of interesting statistics from The Nielsen Company about how many people interacted with social networking sites during the Super Bowl.

Obligatory Google Buzz post, by Jean Burgess (co-author of YouTube: Online Video & Participatory Culture)

Jean Burgess produces her own review of the criticism on Google Buzz's privacy issues evolving on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list.

And, finally, enjoy (or be surprised at) this video:


What is a Browser?

A representative from Google asks 50 strangers in Times Square if they understand what a browser is and does? Given that most of the online hype around Internet development addresses early adopters, here's a look at how the general public perceives the Internet. The results: Less than 8% of those interviewed knew what a browser was.

October 29, 2009

Participation and Crowd Control: Stephen King's Under the Dome promotional puzzle

In build-up to the release of his much anticipated new novel, Under the Dome, Stephen King's UK publishers Hodder & Stoughton have launched what they're calling "the biggest ever game of literary hide-and-seek." For the game, fans across the UK are enlisted to help both hide and find the 5,196 excerpts that makes up the 335,114 word novel both online and in the real world. The found pieces are then posted to Stephenking.co.uk, where people can take a crack at piecing all the parts together.

While the initial description of the project reminded me of Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg's Implementation -- a novel that was distributed across the globe on a series of stickers that was then reassembled online -- the commercial promotional focus of the Stephen King effort seems to have elements intended to control and curb certain types of participation even as it hopes to incite fan engagement and interactivity.

Continue reading "Participation and Crowd Control: Stephen King's Under the Dome promotional puzzle" »

October 2, 2009

Thoughts on Kseniya Simonova's Sand Animation

I originally had another topic planned for this article, but I decided haphazardly to change it at the last minute, because one video made such an impression on me yesterday morning.

My morning routine consists of a few primary objectives, one of which is to browse my Twitter stream to find anything of note or something missed during the night. I noticed that Henry had posted a link to a YouTube video late Wednesday night under the guise of:

Susan Boyle's Legacy?: Winning performance from Ukraine's Got Talent has Drawn more than 2 Million views. http://bit.ly/zDFFT

The link sent me to the video embedded below. While the clip lasts 8 minutes and 33 seconds, I highly recommend taking the time to watch through the entire video. This is storytelling at its finest.

The astounding ability of a hand to shape a story is purely evidenced by Kseniya's work. It's simply awe-inspiring at how simple movements of addition and subtraction, how curves and lines and cuts can craft such simple yet refined art. I find it more beautiful because the scenes flow and crash (literally) into each other. Metaphors become real images. After the planes enter the scene, at 1:47 Simonova scrambles the bench-sitting couple into a blur of sand, a blur that represents fear, but a physical swirl that becomes the scared face of the female onlooker. When the bombs hit at 3:08, Simonova throws a handful of dust onto the baby, eliminating him symbolically and literally from the picture.

This video represents a piece of wondrous art and fanciful storytelling. And by the posting of this article, it has probably reached over 3 million views on YouTube. After the jump, I'll examine some more implications that this video presents about YouTube, transmedia, and cross-platform distribution; how we explain our understanding of popularity online; and how the Internet complicates our comprehension of foreign cultures.

Continue reading "Thoughts on Kseniya Simonova's Sand Animation" »

April 30, 2009

MiT6: Streaming Television

Continuing our coverage of last week's MiT6 conference, I'd like to share a paper from Elisabeth Jones, a doctoral student at the University of Washington's Information School. Jones presented a paper last Saturday on Network Television Streaming Technologies and the Shifting Television Social Sphere.

Continue reading "MiT6: Streaming Television" »

April 28, 2009

MiT6 Recap: Cult Media and Global Fandom

The Cult Media and Global Fandom panel at this weekend's MiT 6 Conference focused a variety of ways that media texts circulate in the global community.

Derek Kompare presented a paper entitled "Time Vortex: Versioning and the Fluid Text," in which he explored the "versioning" that takes place with the arguably "cult" TV series Star Trek and Doctor Who. Kompare graciously made his slides available so we can share them here.

Kompare argues that while US television was once organized around textual reception, it now functions on a logic of versioning, which is based on mobility, scalability, and creativity. Media texts, like Star Trek and Doctor Who, are released in as many versions as the market will tolerate. Versioning does not refer to remakes or adaptations of original series, but instead refers to the ways a single text is remastered, repackaged, and ultimately re-sold to fans.

Continue reading "MiT6 Recap: Cult Media and Global Fandom" »

March 13, 2009

Research Update: Platforms, Audience, and Television's Shifting Landscape

Lately, my research at C3 has been making me think of that Nissan commercial with the tagline, "A shift has been made." Thanks to the passive voice, we don't know who made the shift or why. We only know that it happened and that it's trying to sell us a car. Of course, I'm thinking about television.

The way we understand the "time and space" of the television viewing experience has shifted. Networks once dictated when viewers saw television content, but new technologies now allow viewers to "watch TV" on their own schedules. Similarly, content once existed only on television sets, but now "watching TV" can happen on a phone or computer just as easily.

Continue reading "Research Update: Platforms, Audience, and Television's Shifting Landscape" »

February 24, 2009

Watching the Oscars

Our research at C3 tends to focus on "new" ways to watch TV. We think about platforms, time-shifting, and online video, but we rarely think about that outmoded concept of turning on the television set and watching what's on.

This Sunday's Academy Awards telecast was an example of that "old" way of watching. An average of 36.2 million viewers tuned in to watch the ceremony in real time. Event television--like the Oscars or the Superbowl--seems to be the one type of programming that still makes sense in terms of staid industry models: advertisers don't have to worry about time-shifting audience missing commercials because live viewers can't scan commercials; there isn't a DVD market because people don't want to see the show again; and audiences similarly don't want to watch the ceremony online after it airs because the (only) joy of watching comes from learning who won. In fact, the Academy offered no online streaming video of the Oscars, so broadcast television was the only way to see the whole show.

Continue reading "Watching the Oscars" »

February 10, 2009

Whedon's New Business Model 'Horribly' Awesome

Last week Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania posted an excellent in-depth interview with Joss Whedon that is one of the best pieces of from-the-trenches insight that I've read in ages - especially in how Whedon digs into the emerging business model of independently-produced Internet content. Whedon is best known as the creator of the transmedia franchises Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, as well as the upcoming sci-fi/drama Dollhouse, but it's his recent experiment with independently producing (and monetizing) the superhero-romantic-comedy-musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog that has us currently sitting up and taking notes.

Created during the writer's strike and produced on a shoestring budget (approximately $200,000 and a lot of favors), Dr. Horrible was initially released for free online, then strategically taken down and put up for purchase on iTunes and finally released on DVD (complete with extras including fan-generated videos and Commentary: The Musical!) through Amazon's on-demand DVD authoring system. Although Whedon doesn't divulge actual numbers, he does admit that the project has now earned back over twice its original cost - and he's working on how to make it scale.

Continue reading "Whedon's New Business Model 'Horribly' Awesome" »

February 9, 2009

Gossip Girl and the Value of Snark (Part II)

In my last post, I introduced Gawker and New York Magazine's coverage of the TV show Gossip Girl. I'll continue the discussion in this post and consider the value of non-network sites of TV fandom.

New York Magazine and Gawker both include a lot of non-Gossip Girl content, so it's likely that some readers who come for the Gossip will stay to browse the site. It's also possible that readers who go to New York Magazine or Gawker for other reasons will stumble across Gossip Girl coverage. The entertaining material on both these sites should make the people at the CW, which broadcasts Gossip Girl, very pleased because reading recaps and participating in discussions encourages viewers to stay involved with Gossip Girl long after it airs. Further, Gossip Girl is frequently among the top time-shifted TV shows and in light of these communities that makes sense: viewers who are immersed in the culture of recaps and forums are likely to watch the show early and often.

Continue reading "Gossip Girl and the Value of Snark (Part II)" »

February 5, 2009

Gossip Girl and the Value of Snark (Part I)

Our work at C3 has focused a lot lately on online video platforms as recent blog posts indicate. We also think a lot about fans and the communities they create. But we rarely examine how these two things relate--probably because in most cases they don't. The discussion boards on most streaming video sites are relative ghost towns while hoards of television fans congregate in online spaces that don't stream content (like Television Without Pity ). What can producers, networks, and advertisers learn about their audiences from these online spaces? A particularly rich example of an active non-network fan site lives at New York Magazine's website and is dedicated to none other than The Greatest Show of Our Time: Gossip Girl.

Continue reading "Gossip Girl and the Value of Snark (Part I)" »

January 30, 2009

Boxee Unboxed

Boxee, the much-hyped "social media center," opened its alpha download to Linux and Mac users on January 8. A private version of boxee alpha became available last fall and today it has been downloaded by over 100,000 users. Boxee is an open source application that allows users to play media and share recommendations with friends through the boxee interface or through automatic Twitter updates. Boxee plays media from local and network sources, but its real innovation is a slick interface that allows users to stream video from a popular sites including Hulu, Joost, CBS, ABC, CNN, MTV, YouTube, and even Netflix.

Boxee has been in development since early 2007 and it recently secured $4 million in funding to expand. Boxee is based on XBMC, the open source Xbox product that allows users to turn game consoles into home media centers. Boxee CEO Avenr Ronen saw a need to bring digital media to TV screens and thought XBMC was the perfect platform. Ronen explained in a July interview with CNET blogger Don Reisinger: "We believe it's the best damn media center you can get your hands on today." I've been playing around with boxee for the past week and I have to agree with Ronen.

Continue reading "Boxee Unboxed" »

January 28, 2009

Global Media and Niche Audiences: Introducing Dramafever.com

On of the fascinating results of the increasing speed and accessibility of the present media landscape is that as the global reach of media content broadens, companies are becoming aware of increasingly fragmented, niched, and narrow audience segments. Such as the case with a new online VOD platform, dramafever.com, a hulu-esque service dedicated to providing high-quality streams of television content from East Asia to US audiences with small commercial interruptions from sponsoring advertisers. What makes this site a particularly interesting case to follow, beyond the explicitly transnational dynamic of the media content and audience (though due to licensing, dramafever.com can currently only provide content to users in the US), is the site's ability and willingness to engage in the fandom as well as the history of the circulation of Asian drama content itself in relation to IP.

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October 29, 2008

The DRM Divide: DECE and Wal-Mart

The C3 team has been looking closely at how media spread in our current digital landscape, so it's only fitting to examine mechanisms that prohibit media from spreading, namely digital rights management (DRM). Tech blogs have been buzzing in the past month about the announcement of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), an organization of content, hardware, and software providers who have promised to unveil a universal digital rights management system at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Reuters reports that the DECE consortium is comprised of NBC Universal, Fox, Warner Brothers, Sony, Paramount Pictures, Microsoft, Philips, Toshiba, Cisco, Best Buy, Comcast and Verisign. Apple and Disney are notably missing, but that's most likely because DECE wants a piece of iTunes' mammoth market share.

This "ecosystem" would allow people to watch video from any DECE producer on any DECE device. For example, consumers will ostensibly be able to transfer NBC Universal TV shows from a Comcast Toshiba DVR to a Microsoft Zune. The proposed model would also allow users to keep purchases in a cloud-based "digital rights locker" and make unlimited disc copies of any media they buy. DECE seems to make sharing and inter-operability easier than with Apple's iTunes, which allows DRM-protected media to be used on only five unique devices.

But the kinds of sharing DECE allows are not exactly productive for creating spreadable media. In the end, DECE still relies on DRM and consequently (probably) still prohibits some valuable opportunities for consumer engagement. Though no announcements have been made, it stands to reason that this DRM will function like any other DRM: it will bar user-generated appropriations of content and it will prohibit sharing protected content in social networks. Of course, DRM can usually be broken, but that kind of piracy is exactly what DECE is trying to prevent.

Continue reading "The DRM Divide: DECE and Wal-Mart" »

October 17, 2008

Looking a Gift Economy in the Mouth: Michael Moore's SLACKER UPRISING

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Michael Moore with the subject "'Slacker Uprising' Now Belongs to You (Down/Load, Rise/Up!)." I've spent my first month with the Consortium examining the principles of spreadable media with a special focus on internet distribution of TV and film, so I was more than a little excited to see that Moore made his latest film, Slacker Uprising available to download for free without advertising.

Moore's email goes on to espouse some of the most important tenets of spreadable media--gifting and sharing: "[Slacker Uprising] is available for free as a gift from me to all of you. And you have my permission to share it or show it in any way you see fit." This seems like quite a boon for spreadable media, especially considering the film is available in a variety of formats including streaming video, iTunes download, Amazon VoD, and even BitTorrent.

The film itself is a joint venture between Moore's production company, Dog Eat Dog Films; independent internet TV site, blip.tv; and Robert Greenwald's activist film site, Brave New Films. Slacker Uprising chronicles Moore's 62-city tour to get out the vote before the 2004 presidential election. While Moore's efforts in this campaign are certainly noble, Slacker Uprising has none of Moore's signature liberal message hidden beneath man-on-the-street folksiness. This film meanders through long segments of Moore and various celebrities taking the stage before stadiums of screaming fans; I doubt it has the power to change anyone's mind about politics, but that's not Moore's aim.

Continue reading "Looking a Gift Economy in the Mouth: Michael Moore's SLACKER UPRISING" »

October 9, 2008

Announcing: Futures of Entertainment 3

Ths site for C3's annual conference, the Futures of Entertainment, now in its third year, is now live.

Registration information will be soon to follow, and be sure to check in for updates to speaker lists as we start to finalize our panels in the upcoming weeks. This year promises to be exciting and provocative, as we push our themes of convergence and media spreadability onto the global stage, while not losing sight of central C3 issues such as transmedia storytelling and audience value.

To get an idea of what the Futures of Entertainment conference is like, check out last year's site and listen or view the podcasts.

More to come!

February 11, 2008

Pulling Out the Crystal Ball: Is Streaming the Way of the Future? (2 of 2)

In my previous post, I said, "How prevalent streaming becomes in relation to other methods (DVD, VOD, broadcast, downloads) will ultimately depend on the collective movement of five interdependent forces: content creators (including writers), technological change, cable companies, advertisers and audiences." While I looked at the first of those forces--content creators--in that post earlier today, I wanted to elaborate on each of the other four aspects I mentioned as well.

Technological change

Let's face it, most people still watch television on their TV, and moving content from your computer to the television screen isn't exactly simple at the moment. There are definitely options, but they aren't obvious, simple, or convenient for most people (myself included). They also require high-speed internet connections, relatively new televisions, relatively new computers, and the know-how to set them up.

Continue reading "Pulling Out the Crystal Ball: Is Streaming the Way of the Future? (2 of 2)" »

Pulling Out the Crystal Ball: Is Streaming the Way of the Future? (1 of 2)

There are a lot of lingering questions following the writer's strike. Will TV audiences return? How will networks recoup the lost revenue of the last three months? Will TV meet the same fate as newspapers and see advertisers move to greener new media pastures? Could NBC's reaction be the beginning of the end for the fall premiere season and the up fronts?

These are all interesting questions, but one sentence in this Washington Post article caught my attention Sunday afternoon, referring to the contentious and complicated issue of writers' payment for streaming content online: "[t]he guild, in turn, held fast, arguing that writers had to share in the profits of what may become the preeminent way to view filmed entertainment."

I think this leads to the most interesting question of all. Will streaming episodes online become the primary way that people view television content? And, perhaps equally as important, will that be a viable way for networks and producers to monetize content? I would argue that the shift is is not, as some suggest, a foregone conclusion.

Continue reading "Pulling Out the Crystal Ball: Is Streaming the Way of the Future? (1 of 2)" »

October 17, 2007

"Meet me at my crib . . .": Reading the official "Crank That" video

Last week, I brought up the phenomenon surrounding Soulja Boy and the "Crank Dat" dance craze that propelled him to success and touched upon a few of the things that drew my attention to this particular case. This week I thought I'd dig in a little further, and try to tease out some of the things that Soulja Boy really embodies for me (as a concept more than as a musician or performer) through a closer examination of his official music video, which touches upon a lot of these themes of production, participation, and distribution in the age of convergence.

Continue reading ""Meet me at my crib . . .": Reading the official "Crank That" video" »

October 9, 2007

The Radiohead Revolution?

Last week, the mainstream music industry was (yet again) turned upside-down. British rock band Radiohead announced that it had finished its latest album IN RAINBOWS. Their website says:

RADIOHEAD HAVE MADE A RECORD
SO FAR, IT'S ONLY AVAILABLE FROM THIS WEBSITE
YOU CAN PRE-ORDER IN THESE FORMATS:
DISCBOX OR DOWNLOAD

So why is this such big news? Well, the first clue is in the band's low-key notice: "so far, it's only available from this website." In Rainbows is Radiohead's first album since they concluded their contract with EMI, and, so far, they've decided to release it on their own.

Continue reading "The Radiohead Revolution?" »

October 8, 2007

VOD's Business Model: Need for Advertiser Leadership?

Recently, I was reading a piece from MediaPost by Lydia Loizides, a friend of the Consortium's. Lydia was talking about video-on-demand and some of the problems inherent with the current deployment of VOD, particularly the myriad ways in which VOD advertising has been capitalized on so little.

She points out all the ways in which VOD needs to be revolutionized as a business and calls on the advertisers to be the one to make this happen, since they will drive the VOD business model as it matures. Lydia, who is VP of the new media division at Paradigm, writes, "I have been following VoD technology for close to ten years now, and I can honestly say that while the advances we have made in deployment should be applauded, the lack of technological enhancements that have been developed and adopted in order to grow this into a true revenue-generating business should be admonished."

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September 21, 2007

The Odd Couple: Digital Distribution and Network Television Branding, Together at Last? (2 of 2)

Digital distribution and network television branding may seem like strange bedfellows, but a recent announcement by NBC suggests to me that they might be a better match than expected.

Betting on Business Models - Will It Work?

Is the new NBC strategy a viable model? Parts of it definitely are, but there are some hurdles to jump first.

One that stands out to me is the pay to download model. More and more, media companies are shying away from paid online content, The New York Times recently joining their ranks. Granted, a TV show is more expensive to produce than a newspaper article, but that should not be the rationale for charging consumers a fee, much less setting the price. When the marginal cost of letting one more person see the show is basically zero and it's very easily available elsewhere (albeit often illegally) for free, next to a lot of other content audiences want to see that doesn't belong to NBC, and not tied to a cool device like the iPod, pricing content is a slippery slope.

Continue reading "The Odd Couple: Digital Distribution and Network Television Branding, Together at Last? (2 of 2)" »

The Odd Couple: Digital Distribution and Network Television Branding, Together at Last? (1 of 2)

Digital distribution and network television branding may seem like strange bedfellows, but a recent announcement by NBC suggests to me that they might be a better match than expected.

Eliminating the Middleman and Branding by Association

On Wednesday, the network announced a new service called NBC Direct, which would enable users to download free,copies of prime time content to their PCs. The files would "expire" in a week.

The service would be ad-supported, with an "unskippable" commercial running before each "chapter" of the program, although no sponsors or advertising partnerships have yet been named, according to MediaPost.

Continue reading "The Odd Couple: Digital Distribution and Network Television Branding, Together at Last? (1 of 2)" »

September 16, 2007

Streaming Cinema: Contemplating Hollywood and the New VOD

If the stories about Apple's recent talks with Hollywood studios around providing streaming video "rentals" are accurate, the industry seems to be taking another step toward models of temporary access over ownership of digital film. Does this signal an end (or abatement) of the digital distribution-related fears of the film industry? Will digital video-on-demand become a widespread reality, given the recent series of deals and acquisitions?

Beyond the much ballyhooed need to "do something" in digital distribution channels, particularly in streaming movies over the internet lately, it's already proven to be a profitable way to make money on films post-theatrical release. According to the Wall Street Journal, the DVD sale market is worth about $16B, but it is in decline. Meanwhile, margins on cable VOD are 60-70%, compared to 15-20% on video store rentals. If one assumes that going through iTunes carries a similar per unit cost, likewise without the unease about unauthorized copying, it seems like a very worthwhile route.

Continue reading "Streaming Cinema: Contemplating Hollywood and the New VOD" »

Recent Study Focuses on Swedish Viewing Behaviors

A few weeks ago, I got an e-mail from Pontus Bergdahi, the CEO of Swedish television measurement company MMS. Pontus, a regular reader of the C3 blog, wrote to say that his company had produced a study that might be of interest to our focus here at the Consortium. Unfortunately, the 100-pp. study is not available in English, but I got a chance to look through a summary of the findings, which revealed a few interesting trends.

For instance, the study emphasized above all else that viewers today are watching more television than ever, but it is complicated by the fact that there are a variety of new channels in which they are viewing. In a media environment which values views equally, without bias to which platform they are viewed on, the television industry is stronger than ever, then. As examples like the CBS/Jericho situation reveal, however, the system is not equipped to deal with views on video-on-demand, DVRs, online streaming, downloading or other sources equally, meaning that a viewer really does "count more" when watching on television at the regular time, than they do otherwise...Well, let me amend that: as long as they have a Nielsen box, that is.

Continue reading "Recent Study Focuses on Swedish Viewing Behaviors" »

August 28, 2007

Survey Says Downloading Video an Unsatisfactory Experience

Sure it's cool, but will the general population do it? That's the question that a recent survey asked about consumption of online video. And this particular study found that a wide variety of those who said they had downloaded online video didn't really plan to do it again in the future.

According to the Parks Associates study, only one out of every five Americans who have downloaded video plan to do it again, according to their sample. Their analysis points to the fact that there are a lot of technological barriers in place that impede viewers from getting an enjoyable experience from online video. The lag in download time, lower-quality video, smaller screen sizes for those who don't have the technology to easily transport the video to their television sets, selection of what's commercially available, and a variety of other issues are among the problems people have with online video.

There are a variety of issues to keep in mind. Internet connection is a major one. I don't have details on Parks Associates' study, but one would think that a study of places in which higher-speed Internet connectivity is less prevalent probably makes those who have tried downloading video particularly frustrated.

Continue reading "Survey Says Downloading Video an Unsatisfactory Experience" »

August 16, 2007

New Site: To Aggregate or Not to Aggregate? (4 of 4)

Why partner with FOX, a competing network with weaker web traffic, but consistently strong TV ratings, particularly for reality programs? It may be partly circumstantial; Viacom was originally in talks to join "new site", but pulled out and brought the $1 billion suit against YouTube.

As the Times article mentioned in the first part of this series cited , it may make the project more palatable for the giant conglomerates behind the media companies to be partnered with another conglomerate and an equity firm. But it also signals a willingness of traditional rivals to work together in digital distribution, perhaps a sign of consensus on how concerned the industry is for its long-term health.

To aggregate or not to aggregate? Producers know that content has a way of appearing on the web, whether or not they intend it to be there, as demonstrated by the recent discovery of new pilots circulating on the torrents, and that people want to access content online quickly and conveniently.

Continue reading "New Site: To Aggregate or Not to Aggregate? (4 of 4)" »

New Site: To Aggregate or Not to Aggregate? (3 of 4)

So, what could all of this mean in terms of strategy for NBC? I think the removal of Heroes from the site is a somewhat misguided attempt to get people to buy the DVDs or go to iTunes, when putting them online free of charge weeks before the fall lineup premiers might actually encourage people to join the series in season two and help the programs ratings and following in the longer term.

And people who really want to watch Heroes may now turn to the torrents. A recent study found that most Americans don't like downloading video, so the actions with Heroes may also be a bid to get people who would have watched online in the habit of paying for content directly.

Continue reading "New Site: To Aggregate or Not to Aggregate? (3 of 4)" »

New Site: To Aggregate or Not to Aggregate? (2 of 4)

"New site" may not be a YouTube killer. However, there are two problems facing the networks, in my opinion, that are bigger than YouTube, two-fold, and relate back to an essay I wrote earlier this year about network television branding.

The first problem is that the way that consumer habits and technology have evolved have pushed content advertising to a variety of sources, on-and-off-line.

NBC, which I will focus on because it has a strong network-branded online presence, cross-promotes and airs programs on its cable networks (USA, Bravo, Sci Fi), and has agreements with iTunes, YouTube, MSN and AOL and sells programs on DVD, which are also circulated through Netflix. (See this story from Jon Lafayette in TelevisionWeek last September.)

Continue reading "New Site: To Aggregate or Not to Aggregate? (2 of 4)" »

New Site: To Aggregate or Not to Aggregate? (1 of 4)

"New Site" is not new. The joint, billion-dollar, working-titled venture between NBC Universal and News Corp. was announced almost six months ago. Late last week, however, The New York Times reported that Providence Equity Partners, a "media investment firm," bought a 10% stake in "new site" for $100 million.

In the next four posts, I will first do a quick analysis of NBC's current distribution strategy, then look at each of the two problems facing the networks, and finally examine why NBC has partnered with FOX to ultimately address the question: "To Aggregate or not to aggregate?"

So, why is NBC, which already has a popular network website partnering with FOX, which doesn't, to spend $1 billion (now effectively $900m) on "new site," and why is Providence contributing $100 million dollars to the effort?

Continue reading "New Site: To Aggregate or Not to Aggregate? (1 of 4)" »

August 15, 2007

NBC's Didja To Launch Alongside the New Site

Tomorrow, Eleanor Baird will be providing an in-depth look at NBC's current repositioning of its online content, through its launch of the New Site venture in particular. I wanted to preface that earlier today by pointing toward what we've written about previously regarding New Site, as well as pointing out another new venture launched by NBC that has been getting some press lately.

That new venture is an online channel made up entirely of advertising, where the ads are not just something to support the content, but content themselves. Our partners over at Turner Broadcasting were trendsetters in this regard, with their channel focuses particularly on humorous commercials called Very Funny Ads.

Continue reading "NBC's Didja To Launch Alongside the New Site" »

August 8, 2007

The Battle of the Business Models - Subscription versus Ad-Supported

Yesterday Veronis Suhler Stevenson and PQ Media released a report that predicts that internet or "alternative" ad spending will become the "leading ad medium", surpassing newspapers by 2011. There were a number of interesting findings and projections in this report, such as huge expected growth in blog, podcast and RSS advertising; growth in advertising on so-called "pure-play" sites; record communications spending in 2006 and beyond; and a slight decline in time spent with media and the consumption patterns of audiences.

However, because I am primarily interested in television networks, one finding in particular peaked my interest. The report was that audiences are "migrating away" from ad-supported media, spent less 6.8% less time with this type of product (ie. networks, newspapers) in 2006 than they did in 2001, and more 19.8% more time with products they support directly (video games, and (I presume) subscription based Internet service), while overall media usage declined in the period by about half a percent in that period.

Continue reading "The Battle of the Business Models - Subscription versus Ad-Supported" »

August 6, 2007

CBS' Schizophrenic Response to the Jericho Situation

Seems like CBS has been sending a lot of mixed messages lately. Or else just demonstrating the confused nature across the television landscape. CBS is just a particularly good example, given all the fervor surrounding the cancellation, then renewal of Jericho. (See Nancy Baym's following of the Jericho phenomenon; I link to her here and here.

I've been e-mailing with Lynn Liccardo lately, who pointed out an interesting distinction in the CBS timeline. It was back on June 07 when CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler told The New York Times, "We want them to watch on Wednesday at 8 o'clock, and we need them to recruit viewers who are going to watch the broadcast."

Continue reading "CBS' Schizophrenic Response to the Jericho Situation" »

August 5, 2007

Skype/Metacafe Deal Expands Video Sharing Site's Reach

VIdeo sharing site Metacafe has made the news in the past week by striking a deal with Skype to provide its videos to Skype users, integrated in the newest Skype launch. Among the features are options to allow users to include a video in a chat or as part of their profile. There is also a deal in place for Dailymotion.

What does this mean? It's the latest in a continuing number of cross-platform distribution deals, as more and more it is online channels finding an increasing number of avenues to promote their content. Metacafe, in its effort to be more than just a one-stop destination for Web videos, is trying to extend the Metacafe reach outward, and that includes syndicating into programs like Skype that are becoming more and more mainstream for broadband Internet users.

Continue reading "Skype/Metacafe Deal Expands Video Sharing Site's Reach" »

July 20, 2007

Nielsen Finds Web Video Viewing Up, Not Interfering with TV Viewing

According to a recent study from Nielsen, the number of folks watching online video continues to rise, while a third of those respondents said that watching Web video actually increases the amount of traditional television they watch. Only 13 percent of those surveyed said that watching video online has decreased their watching television.

The study found that 81 million broadband customers reported watching online video, up 16 percent from September 2006 to March 2007. The 16 percent hike has been getting some attention.

See more here.

What might cause a rise in those viewing online video to not necessarily trim viewership away from traditional television? One question is what they're watching online. People engage in user-generated, short-form content, or even clipped and quoted content from professionally produced material, in different ways and for much different reasons than they watch TV.

Continue reading "Nielsen Finds Web Video Viewing Up, Not Interfering with TV Viewing" »

July 18, 2007

NBCU Strikes Deal with Alltel, as the Company Tries to Expand Mobile Reach

Back in March, I wrote about the launch of plans for NBC Universal's mobile plan on Verizon and MobiTV. The deal included television shows from not just NBC but also from USA, Sci Fi, Bravo, Telemundo, and mun2, in addition to CNBC.

Now the network has signed yet another mobile deal to extent the reach of its content into new realms, this time with mobile service provider Alltel. NBC will provide 11 VOD channels, in addition to Web sites, ringtones, wallpapers, and more, featuring content from NBC, Sci Fi, Bravo and the USA Network.

What I like most about NBCU's approach here is that, even as the company has to strike deals individually with various service providers, the plan seems to be to stretch their content offerings across a variety of services, rather than rely on some exclusive partnership with just Verizon or Alltel.

Excerpts from the press release and a link to the full release are available on the Inside Cable News blog.

Continue reading "NBCU Strikes Deal with Alltel, as the Company Tries to Expand Mobile Reach" »

July 12, 2007

New Industry Deals Demonstrate Shifting Media Landscape

I wanted to mention a few news stories that passed my eye over the past few days that I thought would be of particular interest to C3 researchers and readers, especially taking into account links between online initiatives and traditional television and print properties.

The news includes a new deal between TV Guide and Maven Networks for powering broadband video content for TV Guide's Web site, a cosmetic change for the brand of Court TV to the new truTV, Joost's deal with VH1 to show a sneak peek of the premiere of I Hate My 30s online first, and Bravo's deal struck to do its advertising deals minute-by-minute with Starcom USA.

TV Guide and Maven Networks. TV Guide's choice to hire the technology provider to power its broadband video on its Web site indicates an increased effort to make TV Guide a brand based on more than the print product it is most closely identified with, especially as paper guides have become all but obsolete. Find more at The Boston Business Journal.

Continue reading "New Industry Deals Demonstrate Shifting Media Landscape" »

July 5, 2007

NBCU Folding Its Online Syndication Network into New Site with News Corp.

Earlier this week, I saw that the process for launching the Fox/NBC-Universal online video site continues to move forward, as NBC starts to wind down its own exclusive video service that it offered to syndicate sites (National Broadband Co., or NBBC), in preparation for folding those operations into the project, which is apparently being called simply "New Site" for now.

Back last September, I first wrote about NBC's plans to stream entire episodes of shows for free on its own site, bolstered by advertising. I wrote, "The plan is for new fall prime-time shows to be made available through the NBC Universal Video Player, a revamped product that will make its relaunch on Oct. 1."

The decision to scale back the NBCU-specific video offering and start switching over to the new venture is the latest move toward the collaborative video platform effort. I last wrote about this in May, when NBCU and News Corp. were working toward a summer launch by securing advertisers and discussing names. For now, the "new site" moniker stands.

Continue reading "NBCU Folding Its Online Syndication Network into New Site with News Corp." »

June 1, 2007

Apple and Google Working Together with YouTube, Apple TV

Apple created a content partnership that surprised a significant number of people this week, in relation to its Apple TV product. The company will be linking with Google to start providing YouTube content through the computer-to-television linkage device starting later this month, according to an announcement from earlier this week.

Previously, the device would only allow content from Apple's own iTunes to be transferred from a computer to a television set. Apple will be providing a software upgrade that will make such a switchover possible later in June.

The partnership, of course, could be a significant boon to the Apple device, as opening the product up to the massive YouTube user base could be an attractive proposition. This is really about allowing viewers to control the cross-platform distribution proposition rather than service and content providers, by giving viewers a new way to experience on-demand content on their television screens, rather than going through the official offerings of cable and satellite providers.

Continue reading "Apple and Google Working Together with YouTube, Apple TV" »

May 28, 2007

Concepts from the C3 Weblog

For the final post in wrapping up a look at the body of work the C3 team has aided me with in putting up here on the site, I wanted to point the way toward a few concepts that have been articulated publicly here on the Convergence Culture Consortium site through the blog in the past year to direct people to the posts explaining them in further detail, as well as terms or concepts from Henry Jenkins' work, and those of us at the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, that have made their way into our posts from time-to-time.

1.) Immersive Story Worlds. This is a concept that I developed in conjunction with my thesis work on looking at the current state and the future of the soap opera industry. The idea was to outline a category that explains narratives which are serial by nature, which have multiple creators, a sense of long-term continuity, a character backlog, contemporary ties to a deep history, and a sense of permanence. I included portions of my thesis outlining this concept--and how it relates to the Marvel and DC Comic Universes, the world of pro wrestling, and daytime serial dramas--here and here.

2.) Transmedia Storytelling. Transmedia storytelling is meant to indicate texts in which the story develops through multiple media platforms and in which new content in another platform is not simply a redistribution of the same content that has already appeared elsewhere. We have a whole category of posts about the topic here.

3.) Cross-Platform Distribution. As opposed to transmedia storytelling, cross-platform distribution is simply the reappearance of content from one platform in another, such as making broadcast television shows available in VOD, cable shows available on YouTube, etc. We also have a whole category of posts on this topic available here.

Continue reading "Concepts from the C3 Weblog" »

May 26, 2007

Joost Inks a Deal with the CAA

Earlier today, I wrote about VOD and online video platforms and their struggle with each other to establish themselves as places for alternatives to linear channels for television content. Joost has involved itself in a variety of interesting projects, including Lime's shift from a linear television channel to one distributed through VOD and Joost (through Yahoo! Health).

In an increasingly crowded marketplace of potential competitors, Joost has taken an interesting approach: getting an agent.

Continue reading "Joost Inks a Deal with the CAA" »

VOD vs. Online Video: Alternative Methods for Television Content

The approaches to non-linear television content has been a major point of discussion over the past year, both in my own writing and in following the coverage in the industry press, particularly in TelevisionWeek. In particular, there has been an interesting juxtaposition between using more traditional platforms, particularly cable television and satellite, versus using digital methods of distribution, such as working with new video distributors or a network's own Web site.

These questions were raised again this week with Daisy Whitney's story about Concert.TV, the VOD channel which is launching a broadband component to its online services, featuring similar programming to their VOD channel.

One thing is clear: there are a variety of methods that are cheaper and more sustainable for upstart businesses than launching a traditional linear cable channel. The question remains, though, how to make that presence felt. This bifurcated model, of course, solves a lot of those questions, but most companies do not have the resources to launch both simultaneously. Concert.TV launched as a VOD channel and then made plans to expand into broadband.

Continue reading "VOD vs. Online Video: Alternative Methods for Television Content" »

YouTube Expands Role in Providing Branded Channels, Encouraging User-Generated Episodic Content

YouTube has launched two interesting recent initiatives, one encouraging its continuing process to be seen by media producers as a platform for the cross-distribution of extant media footage, and the other encouraging viewers to submit user-generated content for a contest. The two fronts demonstrate the continuing ways in which the Google-owned video platform is trying to deal with its positioning as both a forum for sharing video and a legitimate business model worthy of the hefty investment the company has made in it.

With National Geographic, YouTube has formed a partnership for short videos that the company has created for its Web site and now will allow for sharing among YouTube users as well. The content is available here.

Continue reading "YouTube Expands Role in Providing Branded Channels, Encouraging User-Generated Episodic Content" »

May 20, 2007

Media Industry Jobs in a Convergence Culture

Several of the researchers in C3 have just finished or are in the process of finishing their Master's thesis projects, which means many of us now have the prospect of graduation staring us in the face. Here at C3, we have had the great opportunity to not only work academically as researchers while graduate students but also to interact with the media industry and work with folks at our corporate partners on a variety of initiatives, meaning that a majority of the people coming out of C3 are interested in maintaining a relationship to both academia and the media industry moving forward.

But, as job hunts loom on the horizons and as colleagues start to land jobs elsewhere, we all have to consider what it means, in both the industry and academia, to come away with expertise in issues such as understanding fan communities, transmedia storytelling, new advertising models, and the variety of other focuses that C3 research has taken.

Continue reading "Media Industry Jobs in a Convergence Culture" »

May 19, 2007

Reframing the Text: Television and New Ways of Viewing

Another interesting post I recently encountered that I thought might be of interest to the C3 readership came through C3 Affiliated Faculty Jason Mittell's blog, focusing on storytelling technologies and the relationship to television in particular.

His post is based on a post from Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's blog. Mittell focuses particularly on a comment Bordwell makes--"We can't easily draw conclusions about how films are constructed on the basis of how they're presented and consumed. Changes in viewing practices don't automatically entail changes in storytelling."

But Mittell points out that, while these presentation and consumption patterns may not lead automatically to different storytelling practices in film (although Bordwell points out that the ability to rewatch film does make it easier to draw on prior films and a deeper knowledge now that the texts can be so easily archived by fans), television is another story.

Continue reading "Reframing the Text: Television and New Ways of Viewing" »

May 18, 2007

MySpace Strikes Various New Deals for Branded Content

A couple of interesting business deals were signed with MySpace this week, furthering the development of official deals with content providers and brands and the social networking site.

On Wednesday, news was released that MySpace had signed deals with a wide variety of news outlets and lifestyle brands for content channels through the News Corporation site in the coming months.

These include MySpace Video channels for the likes of The New York Times, National Geographic, IGN Entertainment, and a variety of others. The full list is available in this article from Daisy Whitney at TelevisionWeek.

Continue reading "MySpace Strikes Various New Deals for Branded Content" »

May 17, 2007

ABC/Sprint Deal Pushing for Mobile Content in Linear Channel/VOD

Earlier this week, news was released about a partnership between Sprint and Disney-ABC for an extensive spread of mobile content for that service provider. In short, Sprint will offer what is being described as three "linear" channels through their mobile service which will feature content from the Disney Channel, ABC, and ABC News. This content will also be available through VOD as well.

The ABC channel will be called ABC Mobile, a newly created mobile brand which will feature content from both ABC News and entertainment, including both short clips from the news and full episodes of some of the top ABC shows.

The Disney channel will feature full-length episodes from some of the top Disney content as well.

The VOD option will allow consumers to see shows the day after they appear on television and all the way back to the four most recent episodes in a particular series. According to Beth Duggan of TelevisionWeek, "The Disney-ABC Television Group content can be accessed throug hteh Sprint Power Vision TV Pack, and Disney Channel content will be available as part of the Power Vision Access Pack. Customers will pay an addition fee per month for both services."

Continue reading "ABC/Sprint Deal Pushing for Mobile Content in Linear Channel/VOD" »

May 11, 2007

History Channel's Band of Bloggers

Last week, I wrote about the political lobbying group MoveOn and their VideoVets project protesting the Iraq war. I recently came across another war-related transmedia initiative as well that I hadn't mentioned, through the History Channel.

The initiative is called Band of Bloggers, through the History Channel. The network will feature a variety of user-generated content from soldiers in Iraq, and the content will be distributed through The History Channel's Web site. The plan is to feature both text and video content from these soldiers and package it on the Web, with a television special expected to launch later in the year to help drive interest in the launch of the online project.

Jon Lafayette with TelevisionWeek comments that the channel "is using new media to tell the story of a new war," as opposed to the black and white documentaries the channel would run for historical military conflicts.

Continue reading "History Channel's Band of Bloggers" »

May 6, 2007

Joost Launches with Significant New Content Coming, Amid Crowded Online Video Market

On the first day of May, Joost officially announced the launch of its online video service. According to its initial press, the company will be running advertising from a total of 32 companies in its first month. TelevisionWeek highlights among its initial sponsors Nike, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Coca-Cola.

The online video service made the news a while back through its deal with Viacom, which was announced back in February. Viacom announced that television shows and music videos from Viacom properties would be distributed through Joost online, including "Paramount movies and various MTV Networks properties, including MTV, Comedy Central, BET, VH1, Nickelodeon, CMT, MTV2, Spike TV, Logo, mtvU, and Gametrailers.com."

At the time, I wrote, "If looking at this deal solely as further distribution, it can only be seen as a positive. The more ways that Viacom can make its content available in as many was as possible gives more chances for viewers to connect with Viacom material, which can only be a positive. Ubiquity of availability seems to be the new key for reaching the consumer."

Continue reading "Joost Launches with Significant New Content Coming, Amid Crowded Online Video Market" »

May 5, 2007

NBCU/News Corp. Video Venture Moving Forward with Ad Model, Name

Earlier today, I wrote about recent news that YouTube would be providing some independent video creators with advertising revenue for the most popular videos on their site.

In the meantime, the service that was at one time being touted as the "YouTube killer" is developing their busines plan farther. News Corporation and NBC-Universal is partnering on the online video distribution site, which plans to launch over the summer. The company is in the process of securing advertisers for the video service.

They spoke at the PaidContent conference in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, emphasizing that the company will be figuring out exactly which advertising model would be most appropriate for the service. Daisy Whitney with TelevisionWeek writes, "Advertising options under discussion are the length of commercials, the number of commercials per pod and the number of 'chapters' each show's episode will be split into."

Continue reading "NBCU/News Corp. Video Venture Moving Forward with Ad Model, Name" »

MoveOn's VideoVets Project Puts Faces with a Cause, in Multiple Media Forms

An interesting digital video initiative has arisen in the past few days from that extremely active political group Move On, the political group whose rallying against the war in Iraq has led to an interesting online video project called VideoVets.

The structure of the project is that a variety of military families and veterans are interviewed regarding their views against the war in Iraq, emphasizing that there are plenty of dissenters among these people as well. The variety of interviews are then going to be put together into a television commercial that MoveOn will push put together by the infamous Oliver Stone.

The site says, "The administration tries to call anyone who criticizes their policy in Iraq 'anti-troop,' but the interviews below show that 'supporting the troops' does NOT mean supporting an endless war. The voices of these veterans and military families are missing from the debate in Washington. Together we can make sure they become a vital part of the national dialogue around ending the war."

This type of political mobilization makes sense on several fronts. Showing the images of these veterans and their families emphasizes the point MoveOn is trying to make far more than any text-only quotes could. Further, the process of a plethora of interviews with these critics of the war can be edited down to the most emotionally and logically compelling moments with a renowned director attached to the final product.

Continue reading "MoveOn's VideoVets Project Puts Faces with a Cause, in Multiple Media Forms" »

April 28, 2007

Smallville Legends: Justice and Doom: Integrating Content and Advertising Across Multiple Media Platforms

News came out about a week-and-a-half ago as to an interesting new marketing and transmedia storytelling plan that will be launched across Warner Brothers and through the CW Network with Toyota.

John Consoli with MediaWeek reports on a marketing initiative for CW drama series Smallville which will last for five weeks across several platforms.

This marketing and storytelling initiative across platforms began with the CW episode of Smallville that aired on April 18 and will last through the show's season finale, which will air on May 17.

This cross-platform initiative is being called Smallville Legends: Justice and Doom.

The marketing part of this initiative is called a "content wrap," a model launched by CW this semester which Consoli explains is "advertiser-aligned content that takes the place of typical 30-second TV commercials during programming, targeted to appeal to specific demographic audiences." In other words, the story on the main show is supplemented by original advertiser-based content that airs during what would conventionally be commercial breaks.

However, this Toyota campaign is the first time this wrap has launched around a single advertiser across multiple media forms, driven by the online game, which relates to the final five episodes of the show this season.

Continue reading "Smallville Legends: Justice and Doom: Integrating Content and Advertising Across Multiple Media Platforms" »

April 19, 2007

Google CEO Says Network Video Site Not a YouTube Competitor

In reading Daisy Whitney's story from TelevisionWeek on Tuesday about YouTube's plan for copyright control, I was struck by what I considered a substantial quote from Eric Scmidt at Google.

He said of the News Corp./NBC Universal online video network being planned for launch later this year that, "It's been labeled as a competitor, but it's a different animal. It's primarily targeted at long-form content. YouTube is not television. It's a different phenomenon."

I couldn't agree more. If the media industry looks at YouTube simply as another platform for distribution, they are missing what makes YouTube unique. As a place to watch video on-demand that a user can't get anywhere else, YouTube is only great in its ubiquity, that it's a one-stop shop. Otherwise, though, the video quality isn't great, the copyright issues are taxing, and no long content can be posted in its entirety.

As a site for cross-platform distribution, YouTube is much less interesting. What powers the site, however, in addition to the user-generated content, is its quotability and grabability.

Continue reading "Google CEO Says Network Video Site Not a YouTube Competitor" »

April 14, 2007

Norman Lear Asks Young People to Declare Themselves--in Multiple Media Formats

An old television name has entered into a multiplatform campaign to try to attract young people to participate in one of the oldest forms of interactive engagement in our country: voting.

Norman Lear, creator of the heralded All in the Family television series, among myriad television series, will be once again asking young adults to Declare Yourself to try and get as many 18-year-olds as possible to register and vote for the presidential election in 2008.

Lear has signed up a variety of teen television stars to help be spokespeople for the campaign and has further partnered with the A-list of online sites (Google/YouTube, Friendster, MySpace, C3 partner Yahoo!, Good Search, and Evite). Throw in massive radio conglomerate Clear Channel and C3 partner MTV Networks' Comedy Central and the Lear voter initiative has a campaign that can spread across TV, radio, and Internet to reach voters.

The project will officially launch this summer, and the voter registration drive is expected to have other official partners as well. See Declare Yourself's MySpace page for more information.

Continue reading "Norman Lear Asks Young People to Declare Themselves--in Multiple Media Formats" »

April 10, 2007

Update: Lime TV Living On as Online/VOD Brand

When life handed Lime a lemon, it made lemonade. Or maybe it made Sprite. I'm not really sure. But I wrote back in February about Lime TV making the decision to switch from being a traditional linear channel and instead providing content through video-on-demand and broadband.

Since that time, Lime TV lives on, focusing on "healthy living with a twist." The Steve Case broadband video channel features multiplatform content through its Web site and VOD services and has launched quite a few campaigns, including a push to "live the change," encouraging its fans to walk as often as they can to get from place to place, log their walking minutes, and discuss their experiences while walking with friends or on their lunch break.

The "live the change" tag line also includes testimonials by stars like Penelope Cruz and multiplatform interactive features like forums, a blog, and user videos.

The company has also focused on more viral marketing for its campaigns, relying on building a community of health-conscious consumers around its broadband platform. Take, for instance, the way it connects with other Web sites focused around healthy living.

Continue reading "Update: Lime TV Living On as Online/VOD Brand" »

April 5, 2007

Veoh Developing Deal with AMD to Connect High-Res Content To TV Sets

Online video distribution platform Veoh continues to add to its services, with an announcement this week that the company would be collaborating with new technological services to bring DVD-quality high-resolution Internet television to its video service, and to effectively connect that video service to users' TVs.

Veoh will work with AMD to offer more than 100,000 high-quality videos through its service, as Veoh sets to distinguish itself in the market based on its video quality. The videos will have no length restrictions and will include both user-generated independent content, as well as content through deals with major media owners.

And the technology from AMD, called Active TV, will facilitate the Internet-to-TV service in tandem with the Veoh videos. In the story he filed on Reuters' blog, Kenneth Li writes, "We're not quite sure where or in what form Active TV technology will pop up. And plenty of skeptics wonder if anyone will care at all. Competitors will also have to convince consumers why their gizmos will be better than Apple's new set-top box device, Apple TV, that links iTunes to TV sets."

Continue reading "Veoh Developing Deal with AMD to Connect High-Res Content To TV Sets" »

March 31, 2007

NBC Universal Mobile Plan Launches with MediaFLO on Verizon, MobiTV

Earlier today, I wrote about the partnership between MoviTV and Yahoo! to sell a variety of advertising for MobiTV's mobile television platform, now with 2 million subscribers.

At the end of the post, I mentioned a comment from Rick Mathieson on Branding Unbound, who said that, "with MobiTV's new ad capabilities, it makes for a compelling mobile advertising partner for just about anyone looking for compelling ways to provide contextually relevant, interactive advertising to today's most tech-savvy consumers."

As I noted in the earlier post, Mathieson was referring to a deal between MobiTV and NBC Universal to launch a significant amount of NBCU content as on-demand for mobile users.

The announcement for the service was made earlier this month, when Mathieson wrote, "Now this is what mobile television should be - over the air and on demand."

Continue reading "NBC Universal Mobile Plan Launches with MediaFLO on Verizon, MobiTV" »

March 25, 2007

NBC Universal/Fox Plan Online Video Distribution Site--But Are They Competing with YouTube?

News Corp. and NBC Universal just can't let go of that dream, the one where the networks all band together to eliminate the new threat on the block. After all, they've been engaging in legitimate business, while this newcomer is violating all the rules. In an organized crime analogy, the networks have engaged in racketeering, while YouTube came along to sell drugs to babies.

Back in December, I first wrote about the "network alternative" to YouTube. At the time, I said:

It sounds like something out of The Godfather. Three families who have long competed, shot at each other, and undercut each other's businesses--sometimes even using questionable tactics--all think about banding together when a new threat comes into the town. They may have always despised each other because they wanted complete control, but the last thing any of them want is a new guy on the block, especially one that doesn't play by their rules.

So you set up a meeting and start thinking about doing the impossible--working together to run that new power off. This new ring has the gall to do the things you never imagined you could get away with.

NBC Universal and News Corp. have hung on to that goal and announced plans to team with C3 partner Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL to create an online destination that will include free television shows and full-length movies with advertising support.

Continue reading "NBC Universal/Fox Plan Online Video Distribution Site--But Are They Competing with YouTube?" »

March 24, 2007

CBS Forms Deal with Sprint for Significant Mobile Television Content

CBS announced another major deal this past week that will lead to cross-platform distribution of a significant amount of its content to mobile devices through the Sprint service system.

Those who subscribe to Sprint TV will be able to start receiving video clips and live streams, as well as full episodes, provided by CBS.

The deal is that CBS provides the content to Sprint as an incentive to get more subscribers for Sprint TV, while Sprint in turn allows CBS to have complete access to sell advertising during those mobile programs. These mobile ads will include short spots before clips air as well as commercial breaks within planned live simulcasts of news content, such as a live mobile airing of The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric for Sprint customers.

Full episodes of Jericho will be available on demand, while clips will include a variety of the crime genre television shows on CBS, as well as the late night talk shows and reality show Survivor, Entertainment Tonight, and classic shows from the CBS archives.

Continue reading "CBS Forms Deal with Sprint for Significant Mobile Television Content" »

March 17, 2007

CBS Uses YouTube for March Madness Cross-Platform Distribution, but Users Angered at Lack of Grabability

My cousin Steven, who I recently mentioned clued me in on the I Hate Steven Singer campaign, is a basketball fanatic, so I was worried about him on his trip home recently DURING March Madness. After all, my soap opera is preempted, so it's hard to forget that March is NCAA season.

But CBS has forged a new deal to make sure the 64-team tournament is even more ubiquitous this year, with video footage appearing on YouTube, with only a very short delay. The site, co-branded by YouTube, CbS SportsLine, NCAA Sports, CSTV, and Pontiac, seems to have driven significant traffic so far, as the tournament begins. The channel is certainly not going to replace CBS coverage of the games, but the deal has provided yet another way for viewers to keep up with the games in the most convenient way, as well as to review highlight clips on-demand.

Not surprisingly, the blogosphere points to the irony of Viacom's suing YouTube while CBS is finding effective and profitable ways to work with the video sharing site. David A. Utter with WebProNews points out that the first CBS March Madness clip on YouTube prominently displays UPS advertising and indicates the potential for major profit for the network and YouTube as well. Utter says, "Why Viacom misses the potential of YouTube while their former brethren at CBS embrace it would be a question we would like to see Viacom answer if their YouTube/Google lawsuit ever comes to trial."

Continue reading "CBS Uses YouTube for March Madness Cross-Platform Distribution, but Users Angered at Lack of Grabability" »

March 6, 2007

BBC Deal with YouTube Raises Questions About Quoting, "Damaging the Brand"

YouTube has created another "official" deal this week, now with BBC. According to news that was announced last Friday, the BBC will provide two official BBC channels on YouTube focusing on properties such as the popular Doctor Who, as well as a third channel focusing on content from BBC News.

Mathew Ingram with WebProNews points out how different the BBC reaction is to Viacom's.

"The venerable BBC--an 'old' media giant that has been teaching much younger media outlets a thing or two about new media for some time now--has taken a different tack when it comes to YouTube." Ingram believes this is "a much smarter strategy" than pulling clips.

However, keep in mind that there will be blocks for people in Britain for viewing the news content on YouTube because they will include ads. More controversially, though, Rafat Ali at paidContent points out that BBC Worldwide content will include pre-roll ads that can be seen in the UK.

Continue reading "BBC Deal with YouTube Raises Questions About Quoting, "Damaging the Brand"" »

Electronic Arts Releases Music from Its Games on iTunes

Here's an interesting example of ancillary content that will likely receive some focused interest from video gamers. Electronic Arts is releasing music from its video games for download through Apple iTunes. According to last Thursday's press release, the music can be purchased through the Electronic Arts Web site. At EA Trax, users can create an "iMix of their usic for their favorite EA game on iTunes."

The market will soon expand from North American into Europe, and new music content will continue to be added from games past and present.

Steve Schnur with EA says in the press release, "As our culture goes increasingly mobile, music fans have demanded to take our game music with them. They have been looking for a singular destination that houses all of EA's music--and this is it."

Continue reading "Electronic Arts Releases Music from Its Games on iTunes" »

March 5, 2007

V CAST Mobile TV Launches in 20 Markets

Plans for mobile television capabilities have expanded, now that V CAST has launched a mobile television service in 20 American markets. The product comes along with the full V CAST plan, which includes mobile Internet and video clips, for a package of $25 a month or costs $15 a month on its own. The launch took place last Thursday.

Initially, V CAST Mobile TV will offer eight channels of television content, featuring content from C3 partner MTV Networks, as well as CBS, NBC, and Fox, among others.

Markets who feature the technology initially will not include usual suspects like NYC and LA but rather major cities in Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Nebraska, Utah, Kansas, Nevada, Illinois, Virginia, Minnesota, and Missouri, as well as Palm Springs, California, and Jacksonville, Florida.

Continue reading "V CAST Mobile TV Launches in 20 Markets" »

Fox Plans to Open Up Fox On Demand to All Affiliate Web Sites

Fox plans to continue expanding its online content, called Fox On Demand, by making it available to all of the Web sites of its affiliate stations, according to news that broke late last week.

The company had started by making online content available to 24 of its 200 affiliate stations that the company itself owns. This plan for expansion of the primetime lineup for the network exists alongside distribution of Fox programming on MySpace as well.

The business model is that the affiliate stations and Fox will share advertising revenue for ad-supported streaming as well as part of the fees for pay-for-download material.

The news, which broke Thursday, also included information on Fox plans to use their own new video player, which will be made available to affiliates as the company plans to expand its content to each station's site by the end of this month and have all of the affiliate stations' sites prepared for playing video by late June.

According to Cory Bergman with Lost Remote, "the affiliates will be able to sell 30 percent of the streaming ad inventory. Video downloads -- which include 24, Bones, and Prison Break - will sell for $1.99 an episode. Visitors to Fox.com will have the option to enter their zip code and be directed to their local Fox affiliate site for the video."

Continue reading "Fox Plans to Open Up Fox On Demand to All Affiliate Web Sites" »

March 2, 2007

BitTorrent Transforms into Digital Video Store

BitTorrent is getting their feet wet in the world of "legitimate" media distribution, with their store opening this past week offering content for cash from content providers such as our partners MTV Networks, as well as 20th Century Fox, Paramount, and plenty of other heavy hitters.

Building off the standard set by Apple iTunes, the idea is TV shows for $1.99 an episode and the ability to rent films for a buck or two more, to keep with the going rental rates.

I'm extremely interested in seeing whether BitTorrent can transform itself into a strong competitor for groups like Apple and Amazon and the other companies that have launched strong products in the online video distribution space. I don't doubt that there is significant room for competition there, and we already have Wal-Mart and plenty of other players stepping into this space, but I continue wondering whether BitTorrent's reputation as a sharing technology where a lot of material was blatantly pirated and shared, would transfer over well to a "legitimate" business model.

Continue reading "BitTorrent Transforms into Digital Video Store" »

February 24, 2007

Revver Announces Distribution Deal with Verizon FiOS

The online video distribution service getting the press most recently has been Revver, as the company has announced that it will be making its content available through the FiOS TV service offered by Verizon.

The Revver content will be available on FiOS later this year, as well as Verizon's Surround broadband entertainment portal.

The new FiOS service was officially introduced at CES. As Beth Duggan with TelevisionWeek puts it, FiOs "enables subscribers to access broadcast TV, the Internet, their private music and photo collections, and now Revver videos, through one media-management system."

Revver has hyped their ability to bring more attention to the creators who use the video service for their content, by providing more portals for distribution. On the other hand, this gives substantial new content to FiOS as well. The profit will be split half and half between Revver and its creators for earned revenue with the distribution.

Continue reading "Revver Announces Distribution Deal with Verizon FiOS" »

February 21, 2007

Joost Deal with Viacom Expands Platforms for Content Across the Company's Brands

In the past month, I have written about the expansion of Veoh and Brightcove, News Corporation's investment in Roo, and YouTube's deal with Digital Music Group.

Add another interesting cross-platform distribution deal to the mix this week, as Viacom has announced a deal with Joost to distribute Viacom music videos and television shows through the online system. The deal will include Paramount movies and various MTV Networks properties, including MTV, Comedy Central, BET, VH1, Nickelodeon, CMT, MTV2, Spike TV, Logo, mtvU, and Gametrailers.com.

Ken Fisher provides plenty of information at ars technica about the partnership, with the prediction that Viacom is taking 2/3 stake in the venture.

Of course, everyone is making the YouTube connection, and the story in The Wall Street Journal emphasizes Joost's agreement to work on copyright protection as one of the "stumbling blocks" of the YouTube negotiations with Viacom, which I wrote about earlier this month.

He writes, "Truth be told, Joost is nothing like YouTube. Joost is all about TV-length programming, although it can show shorter clips and even feature-lenght films. Most importantly, Joost is focused on commercial video content, not the user creations that have made YouTube so popular. To wit, you cannot upload content to Joost."

Continue reading "Joost Deal with Viacom Expands Platforms for Content Across the Company's Brands" »

February 15, 2007

Formation of CBS Mobile a Further Indication of a Commitment to Mobile Media Extensions

One big piece of news I neglected to mention on the blog over the past couple of weeks is news that CBS Interactive is creating a new division to focus particularly on wireless entertainment. The division, given the no-frills title CBS Mobile, will help direct the links the company has built with a variety of mobile distributors, such as Verizon V CAST.

Plans for the new cell service includes original mini-soap operas for mobile distribution, which will launch this year.

I don't know the specifics of the soap opera related plan, but the shift of CBS indicates that companies are getting more and more serious about formulating a definite mobile media plan.

CBS has been very forward-thinking in regard to some of the series and cross-platform distribution through CBS innertube for Web content, and this move more boldly into mobile media indicates the company is forwarding a multi-platform distribution model for its future.

This drive stems from the formation of CBS Interactive, which I wrote about back in November. Quincy Smith, formerly with the investment bank Allen & Co., came to CBS to help formulate a more aggressive approach to the company's new media efforts.

Continue reading "Formation of CBS Mobile a Further Indication of a Commitment to Mobile Media Extensions" »

February 8, 2007

Comcast/Facebook Pair for TV Show Featuring User-Generated Content, While Leichtman Finds Online Video Viewing Growing Slowly

Viewing online video growth may be growing at a slower rate than some visionaries would like to see, but it isn't slowing the variety of new business models designed to facilitate online videos or to launch new media properties through Web programming. One key that seems to be driving the growth in online video viewing and new models, however, is the pervasiveness of user-generated content.

A partnership has been announced between cable provider Comcast and social networking site Facebook to create a television series featuring user-generated content through Ziddio, Comcast's user-generated Internet video platform. This fulfills one of Ziddio's major goals. As I wrote back in November, "The plan is to bridge this user-generated content cross-platform into video-on-demand for Comcast users as well, picking the best content for VOD."

The plan is for Facebook to encourage its users to post videos online through Ziddio or Facebook, with representatives from both companies choosing some of the user-generated clips for a new show called Facebook Diaries, which would air on VOD for Comcast as well as on Facebook's site and Ziddio's site.

Continue reading "Comcast/Facebook Pair for TV Show Featuring User-Generated Content, While Leichtman Finds Online Video Viewing Growing Slowly" »

February 5, 2007

In a Bold Move, Lime Moves Operations to VOD and Web--and Away from Linear Model

What I would consider a significant development in the television landscape, albeit not with a particularly significant network, is the decision by those at the head of Lime TV to go the way of NBC Universal's Trio and switch from being a traditional linear channel to instead providing programming through broadband and video-on-demand.

In this case, as opposed to Trio's losing its carriage with DirecTV, the decision to go broadband/VOD was driven by Lime.

The independent cable channel launched by Revolution Llc., the company owned by former AOL chair Steve Case, will be abandoning its traditional cable channel for VOD and alternative, non-linear distribution methods.

Lime originally launched in 2005, acquiring the Wisdom channel and transforming it into a healthy-living network available to 7 million cable subscribers.

In addition to its VOD plans, Lime will have programming available on its Web site and through deals with Joost and Yahoo! Health, according to the Reuters/Hollywood Reporter story from Andrew Wallenstein.

Continue reading "In a Bold Move, Lime Moves Operations to VOD and Web--and Away from Linear Model" »

Yahoo! Brand Universe and OurCity

While C3 partners MTV Networks and Turner Broadcasting have made our news this past week, there's also been some interesting developments with Yahoo!, another partner in the consortium.

The company's plan to create a new approach to linking sites called "Brand Universe" broke during the week, with the company publicly discussing a new strategy to create more efficient links to entertainment content that stretch across the various Yahoo! services and Web sites.

The plan is to pick 100 "high-profile" contemporary entertainment properties and create sites dedicated to them. This will include movie properties and popular television shows and video games, as well as video game platforms, as well as particular celebrities. In particular, the company is hoping to target properties that appeal to 13-to-34s.

The idea is that Yahoo! content has been fragmented in the past, divided by media format and without any content links. Instead of dividing media information in flickr and Yahoo TV and fan forums, the idea is to create a site that will link all of that content together so that people can access the info by entertainment property across all of Yahoo!'s platforms.

Continue reading "Yahoo! Brand Universe and OurCity" »

January 31, 2007

WWE Set to Merge Existing, New Video Streams into Broadband Video Network

Along with my earlier post about the controversy surrounding News Corporation's investment in ROO comes news from World Wrestling Entertainment of plans to turn the various video bits they offer into a centralized broadband video network.

According to the press release from Noah Starr with the WWE, "For the first time ever, WWE fans will be able to access all the free videos on WWE.com from one convenient location." This is all part of a campaign from the WWE over the past several months to continue innovating its Web site as a must-visit destination for its fan base, as I've written about before.

The content will include airing the entrance videos of wrestlers that they use when they come to the ring for matches, as well as highlights of each week's RAW and Smackdown, the online-only wrestling program Heat, and a variety of Internet-only segments, such as OMG Moments, Hardcore Hangover, WWE Sidesplitters, Val Venis' Sex-U, Lifestyles of the Built & Dangerous (featuring tours of the WWE wrestlers' homes), and Seein' Superstars, focusing on celebrity fans of the WWE.

The new broadband network is set to launch in the morning.

Continue reading "WWE Set to Merge Existing, New Video Streams into Broadband Video Network" »

January 28, 2007

Online Video Distribution Transforms the Sundance Film Festival

In the spirit of Ted Hovet's recent piece here on the C3 blog about the film and its review in the New York Times, I thought I would point to a Times article about another innovative filmmaker, particularly the launch of M dot Strange (Michael Belmont) through the Sundance Film Festival. Meanwhile, another movie was premiered in Second Life the day after its Sundance premiere.

As David Carr writes in his recent article, M dot Strange's movie gives "new meaning to the term 'studio apartment' by jamming eight computers into his place and producing 'We Are the Strange.' The movie has a wide visual vocalbulary borrowed from the far reaches of the Web, anime, video games and children's nursery rhymes. And dolls. Lots of dolls."

While plenty of viewers apparently got up and left at the Sundance instead of watching his film, Strange benefitted from a strong following from viewers who had already seen his work through YouTube. The filmmaker had been regularly updating a video blog on YouTube for the past two years, giving updates on his movie and then posting a trailer that received almost 650,000 views when the article was published.

Continue reading "Online Video Distribution Transforms the Sundance Film Festival" »

January 24, 2007

Broadband Video Sites Veoh and Brightcove Continue to Expand

Two online video sites I've written about several times here at C3 are Veoh and Brightcove, and both made new announcements this past week regarding an expansion of content, in Veoh's case, and significant new funding for Brightcove.

Veoh has formed a partnership with Us Weekly magazine to create an online celebrity news and entertainment show that will be available on the Us Web site and Veoh's site as well. The initiative will launch in February with the intent of also including user-generated content.

For another look at a broadband celebrity destination, see my November post, "The Death of a Buzzword: Synergy and Time Warner". At the time, I wrote about TMZ, the Three Mile Zone product being launched by Warner Brothers and AOL. At the time, I wrote:

But, while TMZ is not my cup of tea, I think that it touches on the ability of the Web to do something others don't and to prove that synergistic relationships, even as that buzzword has gotten a negative connotation, are the building blocks of convergence and transmedia approaches. The success of this site shows that there is still power in these types of partnerships. The problem is in the thinking that they work irrespective to how they are executed.

It will be interesting to see how this Veoh/Us product compares to the TMZ project.

Meanwhile, Veoh has also partnered with the United Talent Agency to create "an online resource for digital content submissions," according to Daisy Whitney with TelevisionWeek.

Continue reading "Broadband Video Sites Veoh and Brightcove Continue to Expand" »

January 19, 2007

The Convergence Manifesto I: Convergence--The Buzzword

This is the first part of a piece that originally appeared in the 01 September 2006 edition of the Convergence Culture Consortium's Weekly Update, an internal newsletter for affiliated researchers and corporate members of C3.

The word convergence is getting a lot of buzz. In fact, since I am a researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium and the primary operator of its blog, I guess I am capitalizing on that buzz quite a bit myself, so this is no criticism of the convergence buzzword. We took our name from the book by the director of our research group, Henry Jenkins, entitled Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

All of us working within C3 wholeheartedly believe that, with the advent of new media forms and the potential for cross-platform and transmedia storytelling, that we truly are in a drastically altered media environment that both users and content producers are still plumbing and mapping out.

Continue reading "The Convergence Manifesto I: Convergence--The Buzzword" »

"Less Hitty" Shows and the Cancellation of Passions

Recently, while I was at with fellow C3 researcher Ivan Askwith, we discussed the need for a shift in the economic models for television in general, particularly in how the life of a property is envisioned. I've written time and time again this fall and winter about the death of various shows that had developed a following but not up to the standards the industry wanted to see. Instead of switching those shows to a cable network to finish out their days or aim for profitability over time through DVD distribution, these shows were cancelled quickly for fear of not getting an immediate major profit from advertisers. This up-front, make-your-money-from-advertising model was the way television was structured before products had a shelf life beyond syndicated distribution, but the economic model is shifting now. The many ways products can live on through Internet distribution, mobile content, DVD distribution, video-on-demand, and a variety of other forms of cross-platform distribution means that television producers who are making shows are no longer producing one-time ephemeral content but rather a media property that could live on well into the future in various formats.

But the industry still isn't structured that way. If a show dips in ratings, it could quickly become yesterday's news, and it seems the shows are becoming even more drop happy at a time when the economic model should be shifting in the opposite direction. At the least, if a show is booted off the network, it could be finished off on one of the many cable networks these conglomerates own, or even just finished for DVD distribution . After all, a substantial number of fans have already invested in many of these shows, and they are angry when they are cancelled. And, who knows, the show may pick up a strong following to be launched back into broadcast. Instead, though, they cancel these shows before they even have the opportunity to build up enough episodes to launch onto DVD at all, and then they run fans off with getting them invested in a product, only to finish out the experience with having to read a synopsis of what would have happened the rest of the season, if the network had not decided to pull the plug.

No wonder fans don't want to invest in these shows. Investing in a show, especially a serialized one, is an obligation, and no fan wants to start listening to a story that people are just going to stop in the middle of. Nothing is more frustrating than that.

Continue reading ""Less Hitty" Shows and the Cancellation of Passions" »

January 18, 2007

New Statistics and Initiatives Meant to Revitalize Syndicated Programming's Relationship with Affiliates, Advertisers

Syndicated content may have a stronger connection with its audience, a new piece of advocacy research finds, while syndicators are striving to find new ways to reach a majority of Americans, including using broadband video to help hook new viewers.

The week has certainly been full of news for syndicated program producers, particularly with the release of a new study from the Syndicated Network Television Association that finds that the stars of syndicated shows have a more developed connection with their viewers than stars on corresponding network television series. The survey found reports of viewers claiming a higher degree of "trust" in the stars of syndicated programming and also found that those with digital video recorders were less likely to skip commercials while watching syndicated programing and also that the shows have higher same-day viewership on DVR than network viewers, with 95 percent of adults watching a show the same day it aired, while it takes up to four days after airing for 95 percent of DVR audiences to watch network shows. The statistics were for viewers 18-49.

Continue reading "New Statistics and Initiatives Meant to Revitalize Syndicated Programming's Relationship with Affiliates, Advertisers" »

Replacing Viewing Fees with Advertising Leads to Huge Growth in Web, Mobile Big Brother Views in UK

Are ad-supported models becoming the definite winner in terms of mobile content? Endemol UK has reported increasing its audience for mobile video clips of Big Brother in the United Kingdom when it started making the clips advertising supported instead of pay-per-download.

If last year's generated 100,000 paid downloads, my math skills inform me that it means the show has reached the million mark for the current season with free ad-supported video clips instead.

The discussion was part of the "Mobile ++ Conference" from the NATPE in Las Vegas. Daisy Whitney with TelevisionWeek reports that the show also received a significant boost in broadband downloads, jumping to 24 million downloads of ad-supported content, as opposed to 5,000 to 10,000 downloads of clips online in 2005.

Continue reading "Replacing Viewing Fees with Advertising Leads to Huge Growth in Web, Mobile Big Brother Views in UK" »

December 30, 2006

Fox Sports to Make Championship Bowl Games Available Online

Sports fandom has driven a lot of new attempts at marketing and distribution to get content to fans in the ways those fans want it. The latest decision is to make bowl games available online.

The first of these bowl games, which will be launched by Fox Sports, will be on New Year's Day, when the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic will be available through simulcast for free.

The games that will be made available online are all part of the college football Bowl Championship Series. After the initial free simulcast of the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic Game, the plan is to offer full-length games after they have been completed for $2.99 through sites such as Apple iTunes, Amazon's Unbox and Fox outlets Direct2Drive and Fox Sports on MSN.

Highlight packages and preview shows will be available for $1.99, or fans can purchase the whole series as a package for $19.99 or a specific bowl game's package for $6.99.

Continue reading "Fox Sports to Make Championship Bowl Games Available Online" »

The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency Previewed on Glam

This past week, the highest-rated show in the history of the Oxygen network, The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency, aired a preview of the first episode of its second season on the Web network Glam. While the episode will air on Oxygen on January 10, astute fans of the show and others interested in the show had the chance to view that second episode as a holiday treat.

I'll have to admit that I know nothing about the show, but I'm also guessing that I'm not in the target demographic. In return for getting an exclusive preview of the show, Glam is promoting The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency through online banners and e-mail correspondence with its network of bloggers, according to Jon Lafayette with TelevisionWeek.

Continue reading "The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency Previewed on Glam" »

December 29, 2006

Craig Jacobsen and the Conflict Between Episodic Storytelling and Broadcasting Nature

Another interesting piece from Flow that I wanted to bring to everyone's attention is an essay by Craig Jacobsen from Mesa Community College. Jacobsen, in an essay entitled "The Simultaneous Dawning and Twilight of Broadcast Network Narrative", builds on his previous piece on "How TV Met Narrative Sophistication."

Throughout the fall, we have been documenting the debate about the future of complex television. I have written in response to Jeremy Dauber's column in the Christian Science Monitor depicting the ways in which culture has shifted with the rise of DVD viewings and how the broadcast system is not as good at supporting many complex narratives in primetime simultaneously. I wrote about the cancellation of Smith and how "the middle ground gets you cancelled," as well, concluding that:

In this case, what is said about Hollywood makes sense for television as well, and one has to wonder, as show after show falls off network lineups this fall, which of them could have gone on to be major successes in the long-term. But, until there is a monetized way to value the shows that take the middle ground, and until there is more economic incentive on the network's part to care about the success of shows long-term, then would-be fans of Smith and many other shows will have to just keep guessing what might have been.

Continue reading "Craig Jacobsen and the Conflict Between Episodic Storytelling and Broadcasting Nature" »

December 22, 2006

Viacom Drops Out of Plans for Network-Driven YouTube Competitor

Looks like one of the gangs dropped out of the coalition.

Viacom, the parent company for our partner MTV Networks here in the Convergence Culture Consortium, has announced this week that it will not be a founding member of any collective group that provides online video content, with plans that were being formulated to create a competitor for YouTube in the distribution of official copyrighted content on the Internet.

The decision was made public through a story by Claire Atkinson and Abbey Klaassen Advertising Age on Wednesday, with Viacom sources saying that, while the network may license material to be distributed on such a channel, it will not plan to be one of the founders of an online platform of that sort.

Already, we had mentioned that ABC was not planning to be a part, as Disney is content with releasing content through its own online digital distribution service. Daisy Whitney with TelevisionWeek writes, "Viacom's early exit from the proposed venture represents yet another blow to the networks' YouTube copycat project."

Whitney points out that, with iFilm and Atom Entertainment, Viacom is already positioned well online, and that's not counting various video distribution systems for some of its networks, including CBS's innertube.

Continue reading "Viacom Drops Out of Plans for Network-Driven YouTube Competitor" »

Dan Rather Reports Distributed on DVD

HDNet is planning to use cross-platform distribution to help further develop its brand identity and establish itself as an entity separate from its technology, as the network announced this week that it will be releasing a line of DVDs of its news program Dan Rather Reports.

The Dan Rather Reports DVDs are only offered in standard-definition right now, while HD versions will be available next year. Each program carries a hefty $9.99 price tag, with the first five episodes currently available.

Starting next month, there are plans in place to offer the program through the Web site by paid download as well. No news has been released as to the cost of downloading each episode.

Continue reading "Dan Rather Reports Distributed on DVD" »

December 5, 2006

Ninja Tune Launches Music Video Channel in Second Life

Here's another interesting bit of news forwarded from my colleague Geoffrey Long via Macworld UK: a British record label is finalizing plans to launch a virtual music video channel through the immensely popular virtual world Second Life. The channel will be called Ninja TV, launched by independent record label Ninja Tune. The channel will feature multiple hours' worth of content from a variety of UK artists, and any Second Life inhabitant can watch the TV station free, as well as purchasing the release through the digital shop for Ninja Tune.

Ninja Tune will launch its virtual music video channel as part of a new TV network from the UK design agency Rivers Run Red, which will be called Virtual Life.TV. According to their story, "The Ninja TV channel will be supported by leading UK digital music research firm Music Ally, which will be hosting an event in London in December to profile how Second Life can benefit the music industry."

Continue reading "Ninja Tune Launches Music Video Channel in Second Life" »

December 2, 2006

Wal-Mart Offering Digital Downloads for Movies--If You Buy the DVD First

Wal-Mart is the newest name involved in the digital distribution of films, with the company's new program to stick its toe in the download market with an interesting program--making digital copies of films available to those who buy a copy on DVD.

Here's an interesting way around the complaint that movies don't allow one to see them in any platform you want to with digital rights management blocking copying them from one format to the other. Wal-Mart will not mess with its DRM but rather allow a corresponding download along with the purchase of the film on DVD.

The test film? Summer blockbuster Superman Returns.

Brad Stone with The New York Times suggests that the download service may be a sign that "the decade-old DVD moved two small steps closer yesterday to technology's endangered-species list."

But don't think this is out of the goodness of the retailer's heart. No, according to Amber Maitland in her post on the business initiative with Pocket-lint in the UK, "Customers who buy a copy of the DVD will be able to choose a $1.97 download for portable devices; a $2.97 option for computer-compatible download; and a $3.97 version that works on both."

Continue reading "Wal-Mart Offering Digital Downloads for Movies--If You Buy the DVD First" »

December 1, 2006

YouTube/V CAST Deal a Natural Extension for Cross-Platform Distribution, But Do Users Feel It Is Overpriced?

When we write about new forms of cross-platform distribution, it seems, for the most part, that we are discussing transferring television or film content into an alternate form of distribution. But the new deal between Verizon and YouTube is a reminder that these content distribution deals can also be based on content that first appeared on the Web. But some of the initial user response indicates that what fans perceive as incorrect pricing for these services could lead to them being ineffective, even if the crossover is a natural idea.

Mike Shields with MediaWeek points out that, "at this time, the company has not laid out whether those clips will be primarily of the user-generated variety or will feature content provided by YouTube partners, such as CBS or Universal Music Group." He summarizes YouTube's co-founder Steve Chen's philosophy as being that "extending into the mobile space is key for YouTube to make its platform available to consumers wherever they want it."

Continue reading "YouTube/V CAST Deal a Natural Extension for Cross-Platform Distribution, But Do Users Feel It Is Overpriced?" »

November 29, 2006

Yahoo! TV Relaunch Jazzes Up Graphics--But Some Question Whether It Fully Utilizes the Power of Web 2.0

Yahoo! is attempting to improve and expand the reach of its television content amidst an increasingly heated Internet television distribution market, as the company launched a new design for its TV section of the Yahoo! search engine this week. This marks the first effort to improve the design of Yahoo!'s TV services in five years, according to Daisy Whitney with TelevisionWeek, who cited the reason for the design change as "part of its effort to keep pace with new ways of consuming television online" which "follows efforts by small and large video sites in the last several months to introduce new features in what's becoming the increasingly competitive online video business."

What are these changes? They include an embedded video player for Yahoo! TV that allows viewers to navigate around the page while the video is playing on the page, rather than having to be static in searching for content while the video is playing. The product also includes links to the most popular show on Yahoo! at any particular moment, as well as videos grouped by themes and "a personalized TV grid that follows users as they navigate the site."

Continue reading "Yahoo! TV Relaunch Jazzes Up Graphics--But Some Question Whether It Fully Utilizes the Power of Web 2.0" »

November 27, 2006

Lincoln Charter Advertiser for Gospel Music Channel's VOD Services

The Gospel Music Channel is working toward expanding its reach in cross-platform distribution, and they've found a corporate partner to help them expand into video-on-demand space: Lincoln.

The Ford Motor Company that produces all the Towncars I used to see parked in the lots surrounding Baptist churches all around Kentucky may be a good fit for gospel programming, and they are now the "charter advertiser" for the new service, as was the phrasing from Jon Lafayette with TelevisionWeek. They will be advertising for on-demand views of the Hometown Gospel series. Hometown Gospel segments will be offered on-demand, with 30-second Lincoln spots on the front and back end of each segment.

The Hometown Gospel specials are scheduled to air quarterly, with the first one debuting on the actual channel's lineup on Dec. 9. The VOD version will be made available next February.

Continue reading "Lincoln Charter Advertiser for Gospel Music Channel's VOD Services" »

November 24, 2006

HBO Announces Preliminary Plans for Launching Broadband Channel

News broke this week of potential HBO plans for an Internet TV channel that would be made available to the subscribers to its cable television network. The broadband channel would likely be used primarily as a tool for cross-platform distribution, being made available for its existing subscribers and giving them an additional way to access the HBO content.

Richard Keller at TV Squad writes that "HBO is slightly behind the curve when it comes to broadband content, most likely due to the fact that it is a subscriber service. Over the last year the four major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX, The CW is really just an infant network) have begun offering free downloads of their programs, as well as web-only based content, through their own sites or through partners such as Yahoo and YouTube."

The company is currently negotiating with cable operators in order to facilitate such a service, according to Joshua Chaffin and Aline van Duyn with The Financial Times, and they plan only to make this type of move in conjunction with the cable operators that the HBO model is completely dependent upon at this point.

Continue reading "HBO Announces Preliminary Plans for Launching Broadband Channel" »

Burger King Xbox games available

The Burger King Xbox games featuring "the King" are now available in Burger King outlets for $3.99 if you buy a value meal. Joystiq has the scoop, along with reviews of each of the 3 games.

November 22, 2006

The Death of a Buzzword: Synergy and Time Warner

Synergy is one of those nasty buzzwords that people don't want to throw around anymore. That's why convergence and transmedia has become preferrable. Of course, synergy seems to now connote a marketing exercise that lacks artistic merit, something that's just done for pure profit and that has no substance, whereas transmedia is a word used to indicate something that crosses media platforms, that sees companies work together, but that is more than just a superficial alliance.

Earlier this week, The New York Times featured an article from David Carr on the "post-synergy success" of Time Warner, writing that, "even as the concept has been left for dead, it is being put into practice, albiet in diminutive ways, at the current version of the company." The project that Carr refers to? TMZ.

Continue reading "The Death of a Buzzword: Synergy and Time Warner" »

November 17, 2006

FOE: Henry Jenkins' Introduction

Introduction
The following is the C3 team's note from Henry Jenkins' introduction to the C3 Futures of Entertainment conference. For the conference's details, look toward its main page.

To open the conference, Henry Jenkins, the director of the Convergence Culture Consortium, gave some background information on what is being described as "convergence culture," to borrow the term from his book, that sets the stage for the various panels taking place here at Futures of Entertainment over the next two days. Also, see Steve Garfield's links over on Off on a Tangent.

Continue reading "FOE: Henry Jenkins' Introduction" »

November 16, 2006

Nielsen Plans to Release VOD Measurement for National Programming

Niesen's commercial ratings may be spinning its wheels, but the company is hoping to have some degree of success with the new VOD measurement service it will be rolling out mid-December. On Dec. 11, the company will begin measuring information from VOD viewing based on the same system it uses to measure national viewing from traditional broadcasting and cable networks.

Cynthia Brumfield with IP Democracy is a little dubious about how accurate VOD measurement will be, especially in these beginning phases. She writes, "The ratings service (which I can imagine will be beset by glitches galore given the vast numbers of on-demand choices) will be limited to on-demand content produced by national broadcast and cable networks." The distinction is made because there is no mechanism in place for Nielsen to measure offerings from individual cable companies or cable systems and is only measuring those nationally organized offerings that are easy to trace.

The comments on Lost Remote emphasize how much work needs to be done in the VOD measurement area, considering projections from Rentrak that more than 2 billion VOD programs will be viewed by the end of 2006.

These plans were presaged by an announcement back in August that Nielsen would begin measuring VOD for Insight Communications as part of its launching of the Nielsen On-Demand Reporting and Analytics service (NORA). At the time, I wrote:

Many still question the measurement abilities of the Nielsen ratings for regular television, but the company has been developing various initaitives to both improve their traditional ratings system and to also provide further measurement of new delivery forms.


In the meantime, with the devleopment of a Nielsen standard for on-demand content coming, it may help encourage advertisers and content providers alike to pour more content into the expanding platform, with not only the movies-on-demand products already established but also products like WWE 24/7, the on-demand wrestling subscription service offered on many major cable networks.

This is one of many new initiatives by Nielsen, driven largely by its June announcement of the shift to an A2/M2 measurement system that would better measure how much content people consume anytime, anywhere.

Will the numbers for VOD curtail the sour taste some people have in their mouths over this commercial ratings debate? I hope it will at least further drive innovation in the VOD market, where viewers are increasingly interested and where new and innovative business models may be developed. We'll see what difference the Nielsen measurements make in this platform in the coming months.

NBC Video Podcasting Nightly News, Meet the Press

Here's an innovation that I wanted to highlight for the continued development of transmedia and cross-platform broadcast network news content.

The first is that, started on Tuesday, NBC started offering its flagship news program, NBC Nightly News, and the oldest television program on the air, Meet the Press in its entirety as a video podcast. This marks the first broadcast news show to be offered in this format, while others offer alternate versions of the news in podcast format.

The hope, of course, is to expand the audience of its news division. The nightly news will be made available each night at 10 p.m., while Meet the Press will be available at 1 p.m. eastern each Sunday afternoon, available through this site. The show had previously been audio podcasted.

Lee Aase, who works as manager for national media relations and new media for the Mayo Clinic, has written a comparison of NBC's approach to video podcasting for news as compared to ABC's. Lee writes, "I have mixed feelings about their approaches. ABC feels like it has worked out more of a sustainable business model, and that its podcasts could actually be profitable. But it is producing something different for the podcasts as compared to what goes over the air, so it has some expense involved with production that NBC doesn't. NBC has to delay its podcast to avoid angering local affiliates, so it's not as timely...but you see the 'real' news program featuring Brian Williams, and not something mashed together for podcast."

Lee's reference is to ABC's use of advertising for its news site, while NBC only offers ads for its own programming. I first wrote about the ABC/NBC competition for transmedia news programs back in May, when NBC began offering retro news content for iTunes, while ABC struck a deal with the BBC to put BBC news content on its Web site with advertising support.

In July, NBC ramped up its transmedia content with a video blog for Brian Williams, while ABC dropped temporality of its news to promote a continuous news cycle for its online and cable content, ABC News Now.

CBS has not been silent in this race with its simulcast of a streamed version of its evening news.

Strategic New Convergence Partnerships Around Us: Revver/Fame TV; MySpace Concert Webcast; MTVN/Nexon Partnership for Neopets

Here are three new deals that are worth taking a look at as to how they fit into a drive toward cross-platform distribution and greater use of video content online, for purposes of user-generated content and Internet-only content.

1.) Revver/Fame TV Deal. The Web site Revver, an advertising-supported site that allows users to share videos with some of the revenue going to content creators, has formed a partnership with Fame TV, a UK broadcast channel that exclusively features user-generated content. The partnership further develops cross-platform interest in user-generated content. Greg Baumann with TelevisionWeek writes, "The partnership represents another step in the integration of user-generated material and traditional television. Fame TV joins Current, a U.S. based cable channel, as an outlet for video created outside the entertainment industry's established structure." Beth Snyder Bulik with Advertising Age points out that "Fame TV runs nine boxes on-screen at one time, each titled and given SMS codes so that viewers can vote for their favorites via cellphone." And Revver is the online site that discovered and promoted the now-famous Mentos/Diet Coke user-generated videos.

2.) MySpace Concert. Here's a first: a concert Webcast on MySpace. The concert will combine performances of various artists with user-generated content. Mark with Digital Media Wire has further information on the concert, a six-hour live webcast that "will utilize MySpace instant messenger to let fans interact with artists during an exclusive live music performance."

3.) MTVN/Nexon Game Partnership. Our partner here at C3, MTV Networks, has formed an alliance with Nexon for promotion of MTVN's Neopets. Check out this press release from the PR Newswire. The company calls this a "broad based strategic partnership" that will enhance the online community for Neopets, on the one hand, and Nexon's massive multiplayer online games have major penetration in Korea, where the company will help MTVN market Neopets, and the company will be adding personalized virtual items for Neopet owners to buy. In return, MTVN will market Nexon's online game titles throughout its online and cable networks, as the company plans to branch several of its games into the American market.

TiVo Branching Further Into Internet Content, Providing New Conduits for User-Generated Video

Major news that broke this week: TiVo's plans to branch into Internet video for the television. In short: the plan is to allow people to use the TiVo DVRs to watch at least some Internet-based video programming for the television set.

While TiVo's service has not branched into user-generated and professional online content, a series of new features are planned to be added to the service that will take effect next year. The technology conflict that had caused a problem is that TiVo uses a recording format generally used for DVDs, which is not compatible with the file type of most online videos.

According to Saul Hansell with The New York Times, TiVo's way around the problem is asking some producers to convert their programs to TiVo's MPEG2 format to make it available for direct download to TiVo's recorders, adding content from a variety of online players, including iVillage, Heavy.com, The New York Times, CBS, and Forbes; as well as "software that will allow users to watch a much wider range of videos that are available on the Web."

In this case, new customers must download the videos to their computers from the Internet and then, using TiVo software that will retail at $24.95, they will connect the TiVo recorder to the computer over a wired or wireless network to watch the videos on TV. The company already offers software to view photos on TiVo boxes through the computer, as well as listen to Internet radio. The feature will be implemented by the end of December and will be offered as a free upgrade for existing users.

The software will work with MPEG4, QuickTime and some types of Windows Media. Hansell writes, "This will allow it to play most video podcasts and some files offered by video sites including Google Video and Revver." However, it will not play videos with copy protection, nor anything produced through Flash, conflicting with YouTube content. The plan, according to an AP story on the TiVo announcement, is for deals to be put in place for copy protected content to be ported over to the TV in the future.

TiVo will also plan to launch as service for people to upload their home movies and send them to others' recorders who they want to see them in particular. This service will cost $4 a month, while receiving the videos will not cost any fee.

The service will not work for DirecTV TiVo boxes.

This comes in addition to the company's official deals with online content providers for the TiVoCast product we wrote about in June, as well as plans to offer a standalone high-definition DVR that records multiple shows simultaneously, a first for the company in servicing high-definition users.

November 15, 2006

Nobody's Watching Continues Its Survival Online While in Limbo

Do you really need a TV network after all? It was back in July when we first wrote about Nobody's Watching, the TV series that didn't make it past a pilot. The series was to be a faux reality show about two guys making a sitcom, joke being, of course, that the reality show about making a sitcom is, in reality, a sitcom itself. But the pilot was leaked on YouTube, and it suddenly became a phenomenon.

Eventually, NBC showed interest in the show once again but has taken a more cautious approach, as the show has only been doing short pieces on the Web at this point.

Continue reading "Nobody's Watching Continues Its Survival Online While in Limbo" »

Convergence and Conversion: A Few Interesting Studies on Religion and New Media Technologies

One topic that we've only broached a few times here at C3 is the marriage between faith and convergence (and I'm not trying to get into a discussion of the gender of faith and convergence).

I've written about Fox Faith and the attempt to create a film division to more closely cater to a Christian fan base. For instance, last month, I wrote about a particular example of FoxFaith's product through its first theatrical release, Janette Oke's Love's Abiding Joy. And, back in June, I wrote a post about the book Religion and Cyberspace and particularly my interview with the pastor the small church I attended when younger back in Kentucky and about how religion adapts to multiple media forms.

Now, this month's Convergence Newsletter points to the University of South Carolina's recent Convergence and Society Conference, where a variety of speakers presented research about convergence and its affects on religion in various ways.

Continue reading "Convergence and Conversion: A Few Interesting Studies on Religion and New Media Technologies" »

November 11, 2006

Turner Super Deluxe a Promising Upcoming Venture for a Variety of Comedy Material

One interesting online development worth noting is a new venture by one of our partners here in the Convergence Culture Consortium, Turner Broadcasting. In the past two weeks, Turner has made headlines with its plans for a new broadband channel launched for comedy content, Super Deluxe. The project will be cross-platform, with plans to launch the content from the online broadband channel onto video-on-demand, mobile platforms (phones and portable players) and video game consoles. There are also plans to cross content from Super Deluxe into video sharing sites like MySpace and YouTube, although Turner promises to strictly monitor user-generated content on its site for potential copyright infringements.

Considering that this is one of the most ambitious broadband channel projects yet launched by a traditional cable company, I'm sure all eyes will be on Super Deluxe when it launches in January. It will join CNN Pipeline and GameTap, two other Turner broadband ventures.

Continue reading "Turner Super Deluxe a Promising Upcoming Venture for a Variety of Comedy Material" »

AT&T Launching Into Video Services and Mobile Entertainment with Latest Plans

Will AT&T play a major role in the future of mobile content? Going back to some Halloween news, a USA Today story from Leslie Cauley focuses on the new moves by the major telephone company to move into position to challenge cable companies, as telephone and cable providers line up against each other to provide services. This has been a battle that has been a long time coming, and it will likely be a war waged over the next several years, with service and pricing in play on the field.

Cauley's story focuses on how AT&T plays to deploy one of the greatest tools that may be in its arsenal--wireless content. With AT&T eyeing a purchase of BellSouth and thus gaining complete control of Cingular Wireless (which it would change to AT&T), it would have a major cellular company at its disposal, allowing the company to move forward with its major plan to increase entertainment content.

Cauley points out that, while the current plans with other cable operators with Sprint for wireless entertainment services, for instance, have not led to any profit, AT&T would benefit from having a wireles service provider in-house along with U-verse, bolstering recent attempts like the U-verse, AT&T's new video service that could serve as sharp competition to cable and satellite providers. According to the story, plans include integrating wireless and "wired" products, "including high-speed Internet and U-verse TV," creating a package that "blurs the line between wired and wireless." These plans also include greater technology to fuel integrated advertising and an expansion of advertising on cell phones.

U-verse is being tested with AT&T users in San Antonio right now, with plans to offer it in 15 to 20 markets by the end of the year. It offers both Internet and video service that includes up to three digital receivers per home, as well as a DVR and on-demand service. The deal right now includes three months of free television through U-verse. They are also launching a voice over IP service, as UverseUsers wrote about last month. Plans are also being made to make service high-definition by the end of the month, according to MSNBC.

November 9, 2006

Xbox 360 Provides New Opportunities for Cross-Platform Distribution

Here's the latest in plans for cross-platform distribution:

Two of our partners here in the Convergence Culture Consortium, MTV Networks and Turner Broadcasting, have finalized deals with Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console to distribute various programs through the gaming platform.

For Turner, the plan is for programs from the popular Adult Swim programming bloc of The Cartoon Network, as well as content from Nascar's Web site (also run by Turner) for use for gamers who have the Xbox Live Silver subscription. To access this cross-platform content, users must have broadband Internet connection for their Xbox 360.

Nascar's content will be its online show Race Rewind, while popular shows Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Robot Chicken, and Sealab 2021 are planned to be distributed from Adult Swim.

MTV Networks has plans for content from several of its channels, including MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, and Spike TV.

Also included in the deal is CBS and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (mixed martial arts). In all, more than 1,000 hours of content have already been planned. The content for Microsoft Live Marketplace also includes select feature films from Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers. Content will be available on both standard definition and high-definition.

See the original press release here.

The plan is for the Marketplace to launch on the console's first birthday on Nov. 22.

According to supadupagama, the movies will cost approximately $6 apiece (480 Microsoft points) for high-definition and $4 (320 points) for standard definition, while all television shows will be $3 (240 points).

The High Definition Blog points out that "Xbox 360 will be the first gaming console to bring standard and HD TV shows and movies to the customer via digital distribution over the Internet," and also notes that Microsoft has beaten Apple in offering HD content via download.

Spencer Yip with Siliconera writes, "Forget blu-ray this and HD-DVD that, Microsoft is sidestepping the format war and turning the box 360 into a digital download station."

For cross-platform distribution, the move is a major one. While I know plenty of people have already taken Xbox and other consoles and reworked them to become distributors of other content, Microsoft has now officially transformed the Xbox into a platform for movies and film. My guess is that, while Turner Broadcasting and MTV Networks, along with CBS, UFC, and the movie studios, are the early users, that as long as this is successful, we will see a race for additional content from these partners as well as myriad others. Think about how quickly Apple added on content once the snowball started rolling down the hill.

This will probably inspire quite a bit of writing about cross-platform over the next few months.

The Papdits and InTurn on CBS innertube: Thank You Very Much

Along with news this week that CBS has formed CBS Interactive under the helm of Quincy Smith, news has also broken that the network will have new content available on its innertube player and will be launching innertube content onto CBS. One is a discarded pilot, while the other is a reality show based on the soap opera industry.

The first is plans for innertube to feature a pilot that the network did not end up putting into the schedule, a show called The Papdits. The show was created by Anthony Hines, who wrote the popular feature film Borat. The show, which was a pilot for this past season, strikes a similar cord with the popular film. In The Papdits, a family from Kashmir interacts with Americans, very similar to Borat's film, which creates comic misunderstandings and cultural differences. No surprise that CBS decided to pull this one out of the archives now that Borat looks to be a major commercial success at the box office.

Continue reading "The Papdits and InTurn on CBS innertube: Thank You Very Much" »

November 8, 2006

New President of CBS Interactive Division Making the News

Does the hiring of a new president of what is now being called CBS interactive mean an even more aggressive charge into digital media for the major network?

News came out Monday that Quincy Smith has been named to lead a newly named interactive division, coming to the company from investment bank Allen & Co. James Hibberd with TelevisionWeek reports that Allen was a major dealmaker there, including transactions for Google, AOL, and Yahoo, and speculates "the hiring of Mr. Smith could signal more aggressive growth for the new media division."

Smith's job will be to oversee CBS innertube, the online platform for redistribution of CBS shows and original Internet-only programming, as well as the various CBS Web sites. His job will also be to oversee the general trajectory of CBS' digital efforts and to forge partnerships for the network in expanding this area.

CBS, of course, is confident that a dealbreaker for major companies is the way to go. Others are more critical. Take these comments from Mathew Ingram, for instance, who writes, "So CBS wants to find and buy the next YouTube before it gegts big. Gee, I wonder why no one else has thought of that? Way to go. And so they've hired a guy who at age 35 is described as a 'veteran' of the industry, and of the takeover game. Why--because he helped advise Viacom to buy Neopets? Wow."

While Ingram questions whether there is a longterm strategy at CBS Interactive, the recent interview with Ingram at paidContent emphasizes that Smith is trying to get his bearings in this new role and proceed strategically. Staci D. Kramer writes that he is "a man full of ideas and details but wary of sounding too glib or all-knowing."

The interview is worth looking at for the man who will help lead the immediate future of one of the major television forces in entering more aggressively in digital distribution and original online content.

November 4, 2006

Tape It Off the Internet: The Future of Navigating Internet TV Options?

One interesting initiative to look at is the Web site Tape It Off the Internet, whose mention statement says, "We currently index 1,600+ TV shows -90,000+ episodes - and we are matching everything up with content sources like iTunes, AOL and Amazon Unbox - with more to come." The beta version of the site launched Thursday.

This type of "finder" feature is important with so many different initiatives currently offering television features online and with so many exclusive deals currently in place. And it's Web 2.0 social networking features make it a viable model. Nothing is more frustrating than knowing that an online version of a show may be out there but not particularly easy to find considering all the content providers on the Internet. We've written many times about the wealth of these companies competing in offering television shows online since iTunes first began the drive, and Henry Jenkins wrote back in September about television "going multiplatform."

Having a site that helps you sift through the growing number of choices and complex ways of finding content that may be out there is a valuable resource, and Tioti is starting to gain steam by providing that resource. They list a five-step package for users: Discover. Share. Download. Chat. Tag. Even though it just launched in beta form, the initiative is generating some interest.

Mike Butcher with TechCrunch has an interesting insight on the new initiative and its immense popularity in beta form, writing, "It seems TIOTI's aim to be the first TV-based "social media aggregator" may prove more popular than that convoluted name suggests. Already it seems to be tapping into a pent-up desire among users to share and discover TV shows, employing several Web 2.0 techniques like tagging and user ratings."

He provides a detailed history of the project and an analysis of what it offers that is well worth a read. Through his interviews with one of the co-founders, Paul Cleghorn, Butcher also provides further insight into the project. "He thinks TIOTI is a step up from simple time-shifting TV via a recorder, and also goes beyond video-on-demand. Since by aggregating feeds from a variety of TV guides and download sources it effectively does the 'remote flipping' for the user: 'Like TiVo for the internet if you like," he says.

More information about the project is available here. The site says, "At TIOTI we keep tabs on download sources across the interweb and glue that together with TV guide and episode data. Filter all that through a list of our favourites and we can keep you notified when a new episode becomes available somewhere."

Be sure to check this out, as it may become a major player in talking about TV distribution on the Internet in the coming months.

October 29, 2006

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness

In a research group that consistently publishes on the ways in which new media technologies are impacting the way that users are interacting with content, the ways in which producers are making that content available, and the new financial models that companies are able to/forced to create to accommodate for these new technologies, few innovative products have had more of an impact on our society than the iPod.

The iPod innovated the music industry, distribution of music videos, the television industry, and now movies and casual games.

To commemorate this massive cultural reach, Newsweek journalist Steven Levy has published The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness.

I was impressed with the the book's design to look like a video iPod, as well as the fact that the book is written in shuffle mode, with the chapters being arranged in different order depending on which version you purchase. Gimmicky? Sure. But it's a pretty darn creative gimmick.

I haven't read the book yet, but I was impressed by the review by Clayton Collins with The Christian Science Monitor. Collins writes, "Both Apple and Jobs, Levy persuades, continue to emit brilliance, navigating the rocks of digital rights management, morphing the product, winning over fans from rock stars to college kids to preteen girls," and he further emphasizes that "his treatment of shuffle also highlights Levy's remarkable depth of access. Recounting one of many private encounters with unrelenting visionary Steve Jobs, Apple's chief, the author describes a heady chat about the "randomizing algorithm" of shuffle."

For anyone wanting a sample of some of Levy's insight, check out his blog on the iPod promoting the book here.

October 27, 2006

Warner Music Group Signs Online Video Distribution Deal

Warner Music Group has now inked a deal to distribute music videos online through commercial means, alongside efforts from Time-Warner to limit the distribution of company products through distribution that violates copyrights.

This week, Warner Music Group forged a deal with Brightcove, an Internet TV group, to help commercially distribute Warner music videos online, as well as other music-related material. Working with Brightcove, the plan is currently to make music videos available through the Web sites of all the labels that are under the Warner umbrella, as well as various artists signed to these Warner labels. There are also plans to forge official deals through Brightcove to syndicate Warner Music videos on other sites as well. The content will also include live performance and behind-the-scenes footage of various Warner performers.

The plan is currently to make the Web videos available free supported by advertising, as well as some with pay-per-view models.

Time-Warner, the parent company. has already indicated plans to go after YouTube for distribution of videos that violate the company's copyright. Meanwhile, the WMG label has struck a deal with Google Video for distributing videos, with Google and Warner Music Group sharing in the profits, and Warner has signed a similar deal with YouTube. The various approaches are one strong indicator of the period of flux and change we are currently in.

Brightcove, which is based here in Cambridge, also provides a music video platform for Sony BMG called Music Box.

October 26, 2006

The OC Debuting Online Early for Fox Affiliates, MySpace

News came out this week that the season premiere of The O.C. will be first show launched online through MySpace today, a week before it makes its debut. The show will begin airing on Fox on Thursday nights starting Nov. 2, but, according to Daisy Whitney with TelevisionWeek, this will be "the first time Fox Interactive Media, the parent company of MySpace, will offer full episode online in advance of the program's on-air debut" (sic). The second episode will also be put on MySpace and on the sites of local Fox affiliates before it airs on the station and will remain to be made available after their TV broadcast, supported by advertising revenue.

This is the next step in a continued move toward providing more television program cross-platform, distributing shows through the Web, at least in experimental form. CBS innertube has continued to gain steam, while NBC, including NBC's deal with AOL, and ABC have made news in recent weeks for their own methods of distributing shows online through their own Web players and sites.

Owning the MySpace distribution space sets Fox apart from its competitors in this regard and questions how far Fox can stretch its use of the social networking site for synergy. This comes only week after the announcement for several Fox shows to be made available on-demand through MySpace. At the time, I wrote, "The plan is to air a variety of the top Fox shows online, especially during this month, when the network's regular programming is being so regularly interrupted with baseball playoffs. By streaming shows through MySpace, Fox hopes to maintain viewer connections with these shows, so that the fan base won't lose interest during their hiatus form television."

The OC introduces a new scenario, in which Fox is trying to get people talking about the show's opening this season before it's launched. It is reminiscent of CBS's preview of The Class on TiVo, as well as previews of several other shows. I wrote then that, "the idea here is to make good content available ahead of time, so that the network can both embrace new platforms and show their innovativeness while also giving content to viewers ahead of time in hopes that the content is so good that these folks will act as grassroots advocates for the show's debut so that allowing a few people to watch the show early will actually lead to more viewers, not less, when the content is first broadcast." Fox has also made its content available to multiple other sites.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch questions Fox's choices of what to make available at MySpace, feeling that a lot of weak shows have been offered, considering that The OC has been pitted against top shows from other networks and that Fox has not even ordered a full season this year, with questions about a great falloff in interest in the show, which has been considered somewhat of a cultural milestone for this youth generation.

Kirkpatrick writes, "Making shows available online first is a good move to build web viewership, but is Fox still not getting it or are they not taking it seriously? Perhaps they take what so many people say about MySpace being lowest common denominator consumers seriously. Why put weak shows in a media experiment? Aren't such experiments destined to fail? Why take the shows offline a week after they play on TV? Some long tail ad revenues would make sense."

I think he's right in saying that they are only putting "a little toe" in the water, but there are so many problems to overcome with expanding content across multiple platforms and with transmedia storytelling--issues with the WGA and affiliates. Will this be a boost to The OC. Conversely, is Fox just not providing enough to meet audience demands when it comes to cross-platform distribution? How far can MySpace be stretched as a tool for distribution for Fox without losing its appeal as a social networking site with its own identity? I guess we'll see how this all plays out in coming months.

October 24, 2006

Weird Al's Gettin' "White and Nerdy"

Reuters, that print news network that has now expanded into Second Life, had a fascinating story on CNN's Web site yesterday about the immense success of Weird Al Yankovic's newest album, Straight Outta Lynwood.

According to the story, out of all of Weird Al's famous work over the years, this album is the first to break the top 10, while his new Chamillionaire parody "White and Nerdy" has broken the top 10 singles in the country. What does Weird Al attribute such success to? The Internet. Here's what he said:

"I'd kind of written off the chance of ever having another hit single, since record labels weren't really releasing commercial ones. As much as people are griping about the Internet taking sales away from artists, it's been a huge promotional tool for me."

Although his album is doing well as a whole, it seems to be driven by the "White and Nerdy" single. According to the senior director of marketing for Zomba in the story, the song has been in the top five of iTunes for several weeks now. He was quoted as saying.

"We knew with 'Nerdy' that he'd hit on something incredibly relevant to different generations. Kids were discovering him like a new artist." He goes on to point out that, while many of the artists Weird Al has parodied over the years have come and gone, he remains a cultural icon.

The video for "White and Nerdy" has gotten quite a bit of play on YouTube, and Yankovic doesn't seem interested in suing for any free distribution of his work, instead in spreading his name through his MySpace page. And Chamillionaire loved the parody of the song so much that he posted it on his MySpace page as well.

It's inspired some interesting fan response as well, including this video explaining a math problem with a very strange finale, entitled "Brown and Nerdy." with reference to MIT embedded.

If you want to talk a bout a song poised for success in Internet distribution, it really is no surprise that "White and Nerdy" struck a chord with the Internet crowd. With its references to almost every cult fan activity you can think of (he works in references to Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, "first in my class at MIT," html coding, comic book collecting, the chess team, Wikipedia, MySpace, and on and on, in the song and video), the song has hit widespread appeal and has been viewed more than 3 million times.

Because of the standalone nature of parody songs, I think it's important to further consider Weird Al's emphasis on distribution of singles once again made possible through the Internet and the impact that has on his music career and introducing him to a new generation of Weird Al fans.

Thanks to David Edery for passing this story along.

October 23, 2006

AOL Expanding Content with New Film, TV Digital Distribution Deals

As the digital video distribution competition gets continually tighter, companies are doing all they can to get their particular platform noticed. This includes expanding as quickly as possible to incorporate as much content as possible. Of course, Apple iTunes already has the leg up in that regard, but companies are striking deals left and right for digital cross-platform release of their content, as with the recent Showtime deal with Amazon Unbox.

Now, news has been released that AOL Video will be adding a variety of films from Paramount Pictures to its download service, now the fifth movie production company that AOL has such a deal with. According to Daisy Whitney with TelevisionWeek, this will make a total of more than 300 movie titles offered by AOL Video ($9.99 to $19.99 range for the cost to download the films to own). Whitney lists the other film companies who have deals with AOL in her article.

Also, a fledgling network focused on "bluegrass and western lifestyle programming" called BlueHighways TV has now developed a distribution partnership with AOL Video, as the company makes deals with both corporate giants and also small niche marketers like this. For those of you who have been following our blog for some time, you'll know that I have a connection with bluegrass music, so I'm excited about this prospect. Currently, BlueHighways TV airs in video-on-demand and through the RFD-TV network.

AOL's video services has been developing a wide range of content for some time, including an all soaps channel, Spanish-language programming, and several other categories of content.

July 2, 2006

Major Moves to Online Content--But How Will Congress' Upcoming Decision Affect Convergence Culture?

Moving into a major holiday four-day weekend, there were a lot of major announcements and events in the industry at the end of last week that affect old media companies moving their content online.

For instance, CBS announced a deal with its affiliates to help gain further network-wide support for a drive to new media content related to CBS programming. According to Michele Greppi of TelevisionWeek, the deal resembles FOX's agreement with its affiliates, in which stations receive 12.5 percent of what the network receives, after deducting various expenses, for on-demand repurposing of already-aired content and 25 percent of any content being available online before it airs on television.

CBS's deal will allow those stations who promote digital content on broadcasts to share in the revenue that results from the on-demand Web content. The affiliates are also slated to receive a fee for generating hits on CBS-owned Web sites with content supported by advertising revenues.

Meanwhile, also in the Viacom family, MTV Networks has added substantial content to its iTunes offerings. MTV's show Viva La Bam, Nick at Nite's show Fatherhood, TV Land's show Sit Down Comedy with David Steinberg, Logo's Noah's Arc, and The N's Beyond the Break will all be available for $1.99 per episode, in addition to a free download of the inaugural episode of Blade: The Series, from Spike TV, offered until July 11.

Finally, also on Thursday, Google announced that its video service will now allow users to rate clips, as Google tries to continue competing with the immensely popular YouTube in the video sharing market.

But all this news of content moving online comes amidst growing fear that content providers will lose the battle on Capitol Hill with Internet service providers over what has been labeled "net neutrality," which I've written about in the past. The Senate Commerce Committee rejected the addition of a "net neutrality" clause to the current legislation aimed at easing restrictions for telephone companies to get involved in pay television...As usual, it's hard to figure out how the one thing has to do with the other when it comes to bills being put together.

Regardless, net neutrality (as is currently in place, for the most part) has already been rejected by the House and is now on the Senate floor. Online content providers and "Internet equality" types are all protesting and organizing lobbying efforts to get net neutrality onto the agenda for the bill to pass.

The debate right now is, one the one side, that net neutrality is essential to allow everyone equal access to Internet content, and, on the other side, that service providers need to be able to get extra compensation for expenses required in updating lines for increased video content, etc., and that they should be able to work out deals and charge sites for preferential treatment.

Just as we have a strong movement toward equal access online, these proposals to eliminate net neutrality--along with moves toward online gated content--damages the ability of consumers to find products. And any move that ultimately takes power away from consumers is, to me, detrimental to convergence culture.

June 28, 2006

NBC and YouTube/Whistler on The Click

Two new announcements of mutli-platform promotion and distribution of television programs was announced this week, including NBC's new deal with YouTube and MTV Networks' The N distributing the debut of its new series both on television and on the Web simultaneously.

NBC will market its fall lineup on YouTube and will also purchase advertising and give on-air promotion to the video sharing Web site that has helped transform user generated content and fan control of television clips and which has burgeoning popularity over the past year.

NBC's is the first comprehensive deal with the online video provider among the broadcast networks, probably explained by the fact that NBC is currently fourth among the six broadcast networks for marketing to 18-49s according to TelevisionWeek, and more willing to experiment with new ways to reach young viewers. As part of the deal, NBC is sponsoring a contest for amateur videos to be made promoting The Office, with the winning spot running on the network.

Cable networks, such as E! and MTV 2, have done similar promotions of television programs through YouTube.

For NBC, which has pulled out its legal eagles as much as anyone else in the past, it's a major step in the right direction.

As for our research partner MTVN's new teen series Whistler, the program will both air on their primetime teen network The N but also on their Click media player online simultaneously, in what is being called a "simulcast" (which always makes me think of that surreal moment when Vince McMahon bought WCW and a 15-minute segment aired simultaneously on both TNN and TNT, cable competitors).

Two more moves in the right direction when it comes to networks being more open about promoting content in multiple media forms.

June 23, 2006

Weeds successful in iTunes and DVD Sales

For those who have not already read this story on Paid Content, the latest news in examining the success of online distribution of television shows comes from Weeds, the Showtime situation comedy which features a single mother who must sell marijuana to support her family.

The show, produced by Lion's Gate, has produced an income of more than $600,000 on iTunes at this point, yet producers reveal that the show is providing high numbers (pun intended) in pre-orders for the DVD of the first season.

This success is leading to Lion's Gate further expandng their online distribution options, in addition to iTunes. So far, the company has found that these online sales are not cutting into DVD distribution, which means at this point that there is no downside to online distribution and that, with TV shows on DVD, at least, there is still a value to owning the actual official DVD set of the show.

As more companies seem to be finding this lesson to be the case, iTunes will likely continue getting a substantial influx of television programming and producers will be a little less scared of providing its content through even more media platforms.

The lesson seems suprrising yet full of common sense at the same time. After all, DVDs sets of television shows are expensive--it comes as no surprise that they are for collectors in particular. And those collectors may be well willing to pay to download episodes to see them early and still purchase the DVD set. Again, it all hinges on creating a quality product that people will want to own and/or finding a niche audience willing to pay first for convience of viewing and later for collecting purposes.

Coming from a wrestling standpoint, a similar phenomenon is when wrestling fans are willing to buy a wrestling pay-per-view program live as it happens for $40 and then buy the DVD of the same event a month later. Sure, there are plenty of fans who don't buy the DVD and wouldn't under any circumstances, and there are some that wait until the DVD comes out and who care less about the exclusivity, but the two products appeal to different types of customers--and many customers fall in both camps--and thus really do not compete with one another.

Instead, by providing its products in multiple arenas, the companies seem to be reaching more customers by providing their products in ways that are convenient for different types of consumers. Basically, a show like Weeds has a large group of potential consumers. The Showtime airing of the weekly show would not reach many of these people who do not have timeshifting capabilities and who cannot watch it when it's on or who do not pay to have Showtime. Those who do timeshift may never find the program unless they watch Showtime often enough to see promotions for the program.

By making the product available on DVD and online, the producers have been able to expand the Weeds fan base considerably, not hamper their own sales. Sure, customers are not willing to buy the same product over and over again, but a show downloaded from iTunes and a show to collect on DVD are vastly different products, even if they are two releases of the same programming.

Thanks to David Edery for passing this along as well.

June 14, 2006

New Series Debut on Web Before Network TV

Considering my previous post about what has been labeled "gated" channel distribution, such as is the case with the SoapNetic series only being available on Verizon, comes something more along the line of the model I'm thinking of--Sundance will be launching a new series on the AOL Black Voices Web site before it debuts on its show.

Of course, AOL helped pioneer the "gated" channel concept on television, as I can remember the stress one had in the mid-1990s if some of their favorite media content was available exclusively to AOL members and others were available exclusively to Prodigy members.

But this newest initiative shows how much their thinking has switched. Sundance will be launching its new series House of Boateng, which is based on fashion designer Ozwald Boateng launching his first clothing line in America. The series will debut on the AOL site on June 20 and will play that Tuesday and Wednesday before debuting at 9 p.m. next Thursday night.

AOL Black Voices is a major online initiative to reach African-American audiences.

I think this is just the right idea to create buzz for a new show among a target audience. Of course, that type of approach only works if the show you have is worth creating the right kind of buzz for. Sometimes, movies that don't release their films early for reviewers have the right idea--they don't want to kill any buzz for their release. In this case, though, I think Sundance has the right idea, as long as they believe in their product.

It will be interesting to see how many downloads it gets in the two days prior to the series premiere on television with the numbers the show brings in. Will the exposure on Black Voices create a grassroots word-of-mouth for the target audience in time to get more views for the program's opening on television?

And, if so, will the Nielsen numbers be able to reflect that word-of-mouth, which depends on your faith in current measurement systems, I guess.

Either way, I think Sundance has the right idea.

Disney and Gated Channels: Exploring the Future of Online Distribution

A post by Rafat on paidContent has brought my attention to a TelevisionWeek piece about Disney's new digital distribution efforts through the Disney Channel Network, as well as its SOAPnet channel--a project I'm particularly interested in.

The company has adopted two simultaneous revenue streams, by receiving paid advertising content from a broader online site available to everyone in some projects, while only allowing other services to be accessed through what Daisy Whitney in the TV Week piece refers to as "gated" channels. For instance, the second approach is embodied by SoapNet's project called SoapNetic, offering content only to those who Verizon high-speed internet customers who pay to see it. But, companies should be careful by locking up content in gates that some people cannot access it even if they were willing to pay to...

According to Disney's strategy, this approach strengthens the relationship between Verizon and SOAPnet and encourages fans of SOAPnet to use Verizon to gain access to SoapNetic, while Disney gains fees from Verizon for offering this exclusive content.

The company is celebrating this two-pronged approach, offering both content exclusive to gated channels while also offering shows that are available for download by all. Experts quoted in the story indicate that this proves that the right idea is still up in the air and that Disney is trying to diversify by launching several different approaches simultaneously.

For SoapNetic, launching content in online forms helps it overcome the fact that the channel is not yet available in many cable markets. Daisy Whitney says that SOAPnet has been "among the vanguard of networks offering shows online." The SoapNetic site will include content not available anywhere else.

I'm interested in seeing which of Disney's dual approaches seems to gain the most legs. The problem with the "gated" approach appears to be the company-specific restrictions that causes many problems of platform. If, as a fan of soap opera and pro wrestling and classic country music (using me as an example, you see), soap opera content is available to me exclusively on Verizon, wrestling exclusively on RCN, and country exclusively on BellSouth, then I'm going to be extremely upset as a fan that I'm blocked from being able to enjoy the content I want to see the most because it's locked up in such company-specific deals. Of course, these deals mentioned above are hypothetical, but--while staying in Kentucky--I can't see the SoapNetic content if I wanted to, since Verizon Internet service is not offered here.

I would much rather see companies taking the approach of charging subscription prices or pay-per-view webcasts to get content directly from their site, such as WWE does with its content. Of course, with network neutrality itself hanging in the balance, more and more of these "gated" channel distribution deals may be in our future. But I think companies, including Disney, should think more about what they may be costing themselves with "gated" deals in alienating fans and shutting them off from content they love.

In the media world, absence does not make the heart grow fonder. Considering the great number of choices out there, absence usually makes you forgotten.

Thanks to C3's David Edery for pointing me toward this development.

June 12, 2006

Crime Investigations and iTunes

I was watching a rerun of CSI last week when Gil Grissom made the joke, one of his usual one-liners, that there were way too many crime investigation shows on TV. For fans of diversity in broadcast network programming, there's probably a lot of consensus at that dig at the prevalence of a genre that CSI has led the drive for in many ways. But, of course, we've always had these trends (Westerns in the late 1950s being one of the best examples).

Now, though, it seems that Gil's comment is as true for the online space as it is for television. Last week, iTunes announced that it will be adding CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, NCIS and Numbers to the series available on iTunes. All these CBS series are in addition to NBC's Law and Order, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Trial By Jury.

Some have made the claim that shows like this aren't destined to do as well in downloads and such because they are so episodic in nature and don't have the seriality that drives the need to watch and own that shows that build on themselves from week to week do.

However, both Law and Order and CSI seems to do well in DVD boxed sets, which seems to destroy some of that. There is a tendency among television historians and critics, at least those of us here at MIT, to dismiss these more episodic shows as not taking enough advantage of the seriality of television, but there is at least enough character development or at least interesting characters that it continues to interest people.

And, as all the crime investigation shows invade iTunes with these newest moves, it serves as a strong reminder that episodic television has its place and its power in the digital world as well as on cable and broadcast television. Those who claim that these shows only work because they are push media that just offer an episode to people flipping through channels don't realize how much these become "pull" media that people seek out--and, if iTunes are any indication, episodes that people are willing to download, even if they deny much of the serial power of television.

June 9, 2006

Religion and Cyberspace and Echols Church

A book released last year, edited by scholars Morten T. Hojgaard and Margit Warburg, brings us a reminder that one form of popular movement that has and continues to innovate the way the Internet is being used are religious movements.

In Religion and Cyberspace, a collection of academic work on the impact the Internet has had on various religious movements focuses not on the particulars but the overall way that one of the deepest human values in all culture--faith--has expanded with new means of communication.

Few movements are more grassroots and more "fan"-driven than religious movements (if you consider the faithful "fans" of their deity). Last year at MIT, when we were instructed to conduct an in-depth interview with a media content producer, I called back to my hometown baptist church in Echols, Ky., and contacted the pastor there, Darrell Belcher.

While many people who don't follow the Christian movement closely (especially since most strictly Christian programs only appear in places like Trinity Broadcasting) don't realize how media-savvy religion can be, Darrell discussed with me the importance of an oratory performance and the art of preaching, which he believes is often lost on those who study the craft in a seminary instead of being born with that gift of reaching people. Further, Belcher talked with me at length about the transmedia experience of transferring his sermons to video and to radio, both of which he has done.

Darrell had never done any Internet-related projects but said that he saw it as yet another tool to reach people, another communication forum. And that's what attracted me to learn more about Hojsgaard and Warburg's book. According to reviewer John Shelton Lawrence, whose review in the latest Journal of American Culture is how I learned about the book, a distinction made in most scholarship about religion stems from a comment made by A. Karaflogka, who cites the difference between "'religion on cyberspace' (where a religion merely uploads its usual wares to a server) and 'religion in cyberspace' (where new forms of worship are mediated by computer networks and reside there exclusively)" (247).

Similarly, Darrell talked to me at length about what a disaster one would have if they were unable to adapt their sermon appropriately for the radio medium, yet try to recreate the atmosphere of a church meeting by learning how to address the home listener versus the live congregation.

Regardless of one's religious affiliation or lack of one, these distinctions are important for all transmedia content. As Darrell realizes with radio preaching and as scholars who distinguish between on and in cyberspace acknowledge, media content is just not that interesting if some degree of medium specificity isn't kept in mind. I mean, sure you can video tape a play and put it on screen or transport clips from a show and put it on the Internet, but it will be imagination and new concepts of content that will drive new media and transmedia opportunities. And that's one message the industry can learn from.

June 7, 2006

Is It The Tonight Show if You Watch It the Next Morning?

Network wars seem to be battled as often online as on television these days. Previous posts have outlined issues such as the expansion of news content online by NBC and ABC. However, now the deals for ways in which content can be accessed on iTunes are increasing experimentation.

Case in point: the new distribution deal for Jay Leno's Tonight Show, which airs on NBC. The network's staple late show was launched on iTunes in December with sample episodes lasting less than five minutes in length, according to Michele Greppi's article in TelevisionWeek. Now, Leno's complete monologue will be made available for download, as well as comedy bits from the show.

Each set of clips will cost the traditional $1.99, but a 20-monologue mutipass will cost $9.99.

Will avid Leno fans be willing to download episodes, or will fans choose to cash in on a multipass? And, if Leno is successful, maybe we'll see an online reprisal of the Letterman vs. Leno wars. Perhaps an even better question--how does the loss of timeliness affect the entire idea of a "late show?" In the end, is programming that suggests its temporality such as news or daily variety shows as easy to turn into paid downloadable content, stripped of its "airing time"? How will shows like The Tonight Show perform alongside more serial fare such as Lost or Desperate Housewives?

June 1, 2006

And the DVR Battle Rages On...

As you all have probably heard by now, half of the big studios and networks are suing Cablevision for their DVR service, due to copyright issues. The disagreement here relates to how the service that Cablevision offers is defined. By Cablevision's definition, the company is offering a DVR service, with the only difference being that, instead of allowing customers to record shows onto a digital hard drive or a disc, it is stored on secure customer space within Cablevision.

All the companies who file the suit say that this is not DVR but instead video-on-demand because the "recorded" material remains in the hands of the company instead of recorded directly by the consumer. They claim that such movements will cause damage to all the new and innovative services that they are offering, such as mobisodes, iTunes downloads, web streaming, video on-demand, etc.

To me, though, this just seems like displaying insecurity with their own technology. If they are confident that viewers want web streaming or mobisodes or any of these other products, then Cablevision's technology won't be a major factor. True innovation won't be protected by stifling the innovation of others. Of course, I may not be grasping the whole story here, but it seems like yet another prohibitionist move motivated by scared companies who are worried about giving up too much control.

May 13, 2006

Tracking Moves in the TV Industry

A quick look through the top news items for TelevisionWeek this week reveals that fury with which the industry is moving toward the adoption of new delivery services and just how hard it is to keep track of what moves everyone is making.

For instance, CBS will be offering the finale of Survivor free on-demand through a few Comcast markets, with General Motors sponsoring the episode, marking the first instance of a major network show being sponsored and offered for free on-demand. Fox, meanwhile, is beginning to launch some of its most popular series for download on iTunes. And NBC Universal is restructuring its corporate hierarchy to make the push for digital distribution more seamless.

Meanwhile, Bravo is launching BrilliantButCancelled.com, a broadband channel which will air short-lived series that had cult followings, while VH1 is unleashing an online gaming site dedicated to VH1-branded games, in addition to a package of classic games.

CEO Eric Schmidt has announced a refining of video-sharing capabilities and improved search options for Google, while Yahoo en Espanol and Telemundo are combining their online sites to create Yahoo Telemundo, in an effort to better target Hispanic consumers.

Warner Brothers is now teaming up with BitTorrent to offer Web-based downloads of its television shows and movies, available for a fee the same day Warner Brothers properties are released in retail stores. The downloads will be able to be burned onto DVD but must remain on the hard drive of the computer it was downloaded on.

The moves within the industry are coming daily now, and the partnerships of Yahoo and Telemundo, for instance, or BItTorrent and Warner Brothers show how many top companies are beginning to think further and further outside the box and through new linkages in order to come out of the rush to new platforms and new distribution methods on top.

January 25, 2006

The Potential Effect of Soderbergh's Bubble on Film Distribution

While the entertainment business keeps its focus on the announcement of the CW Network I mentioned here late last night/early this morning, Ty Burr covers out another story with a potential effect on the entertainment industry, in particular film distributors, in today's Boston Globe.

Steven Soderbergh's new film Bubble will be released in theaters, on cable, and in video stores simultaneously on Friday.

What does this mean? Bubble isn't going to be that big of a film, but everyone is going to have their eyes on what this means for it. Will it garner more total interest by being available in so many media forms simultanously? How much will this damage theater distribution? At this point, it seems that the company may not have much to lose, but theater distributors will most definitely be hurt by it.

What is your all's take?

Be sure to check out the excellent article on Bubble here.

January 19, 2006

Podcasting begins for As the World Turns

For those of you who follow this blog even semi-regularly, you've probably caught a lot of my posts on the world of soap opera. In fact, my thesis here at MIT involves the soap opera industry's adaptation to new ways to communicate with their fan communities and instances of transmedia storytelling.

With that in mind, the soap opera I am a fan of, As the World Turns, officially began podcasting this past week, with the podcasts available for download to MP3 players. The podcast is the dialogue from the show without music or background noise and with an audio narrator to transition scenes.

The show began the service on Monday. Its Procter & Gamble Productions sister show, Guiding Light, has been offering podcasts for a few weeks now and are now including daily commentary from various actors on the show, as well as features on certain characters on certain days.

This is all a part of the CBS Netcast initiative. The network even provides an Internet-only talk show about soaps called CBS Soapbox.

It's a little too early to know where this is going, but the trend is an exciting one to help transition one of television's oldest genres into the 21st Century.

December 8, 2005

NBC joining video iPod services

NBC is the latest to jump on the Apple iPod bandwagon.

According to an article by Brooks Barnes and Nick Wingfield in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, the company is joining ABC by providing content that can be downloaded on the video iPod.

For instance, Law & Order and other popular shows will be available for download, as well as shows on the USA Network, the Sci Fi Channel, and classic series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Dragnet, and Knight Rider.

This movement takes Apple farther into the emerging market of video downloads to portable devices, as the company attempts to gain control of content distribution through iTunes.

Again, what might this mean for potential transmedia storytelling?

HBO Inks Deal With Vodafone

Apparently HBO will be offering its shows via Vodafone's 3G mobile phones in Europe. The options (Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm) seem to be shows that have finished their run, so neither Rome nor Deadwood is available, but i4u.com has quite a list of other channels (including MTV, Discovery, Fox, and Eurosport) which are carried via Vodafone in the UK and New Zealand.

It's interesting that one of the side-effects of the convergence of TV and electronic media is the divergence of ways in which people consume that media. I suspect that while it's easier to repurpose existing content for phones and portable video players like the video iPod, the not-too-distant future will see more content being created specifically for mobile platforms. (Whether that content will have to sell itself by association with a pre-existing brand, like the 24 and Lost mobisodes have, is quite another question.)

December 6, 2005

iTunes and Video-On-Demand

Apple announced this morning that they are adding 11 new television shows from NBC Universal to the iTunes Music Store. The new offerings include shows from the current season on NBC, the Sci-Fi Channel, and the USA Network. Past seasons of current shows and older NBC television series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Dragnet were also made available.

The iTunes music store has move than 3,000 videos available for download (including music videos, Pixar shorts, and television shows). Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, asserts in the press release that Apple has sold more than three million videos in the first two months of the service alone.

Over on Brand Noise, an entry today - ostensibly spurred by the Apple announcement - discusses the future of Video-On-Demand (VOD). Two points are clear:

  • Advertising will play a role in determining VOD cost
  • Programming shouldn't be limited to the VOD itself but include extra content for new and dedicated downloaders. Extra content will also provide opportunities for imaginative advertisers to reach a "finely-tuned" audience.

    Right now, the iTunes music store is the highest-profile provider of online VOD content and has so far resisted including advertising. When Apple does begin to include advertising (and I think it's a matter of "when," not "if"), it will be interesting to see how it is implemented - before the content in the style of movie previews, or during the content in the style of television? Who will benefit: the producer of the content, or Apple itself? And most importantly, how much advertising will viewers tolerate before they move on to the next product that allows them to skip advertising?

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