In a lively discussion at the 2008 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Philadelphia in March, the Future of Television Studies workshop revisited the thorny issue of what we television scholars might do about the state of television’s history, and particularly, the challenge of uncovering and capturing the medium’s archival materials. The panelists and the audience raised a number of concerns which I think have become somewhat defining of contemporary television study. We still face questions about determining what is worth recording, and about tracking down the primary and secondary resources that detail the production, distribution, and reception of programming. The physical challenges of accounting for both television programming, as well as the medium’s extra-textual materials both online and in print, remain. These present an increasingly difficult task as the expansion of television’s paratexts mean the objects of interest to television scholars are not only increasingly dispersed, but further complicate the challenge of recording a medium that refuses to stand still.

Striking, however, was the suggestion the current ‘paranoia’ over copyright and licensing may restrict access, as fewer and fewer public or private archives are likely to pass their collections into the public domain. When modern ‘archives’ are made public, it is increasingly with an eye to the potential “aftermarket” value of content along the Long Tail. As such, digital formats and the increased release of material from television’s past on DVD on the one hand bring the promise of some sort of escape from storage and distribution issues. On the other hand, however, they come with region coding to protect geographically-bounded national markets, making international work difficult, challenges compounded by the unequal development of both archives and commercial distribution strategies in some parts of the globe.

So what’s a television scholar to do?

The tantalizing suggestion is that we should band together and flex whatever strength our collective muscle might have, working to construct an archive of our own, pooling personal recordings, attempting to open up our institutional archives, and tracking down available material. But of course, such an activity is quite apparently fraught given the challenges of manpower, organizational magic, and copyright wizardry that would be required. Indeed, the incredibly useful “Best Practices for Fair Use in Teaching,” prepared by the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Public Policy Committee, hints at the legislative mire such an activity could pose, even if it was limited only to the US. And while fair use might be “a muscle that retains strength only through exercise and practice,” compositing such a wide-reaching archive would require convincing a range of much more conservatively minded institutions, many of whom already struggle with the archivists paradox of preservation and access, to commit scarce resources.

But then, as John Hartley (citing Bain Attwood) has pointed out1, grand narratives commence with a process of “narrative accrual,” a gathering of the bits that build up enough of a narrative for a people to become aware of themselves as a corpus (like a nation). And perhaps the way forward is not for us to try to pull together an archive2 but to start to accrue and record the available traces of the archives that abound. Perhaps what we need, or what we can achieve, is not an archive but a catalog. Perhaps the task is to design a project that would draw together already existing activity, both within the academy and beyond, in a form that capitalizes on the opportunities of scale provided by digital networking. In addition to the seemingly many un-connected archives that exist within formal sites of knowledge production, there are a great number of interesting projects compiling traces of television’s past outside of the academy. Of course, such an activity must be certain to recognize the activities that take place outside the academy as sites of knowledge production, rather than as resources for academic raiding. Perhaps what we need to do is to find a way to connect these activities up – to uncover and link together the enterprises within the academy, and to tie them to the range of resources beyond; to embrace the vernacular archives created on YouTube and elsewhere (two of my favorites here: http://idents.tv/blog/ and here: http://www.televisionau.com/), and to create a model that might encourage future activity, and provide ways to continue to tie new nodes into the system.

This is, in part, the motivation behind a large project funded through the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant scheme John Hartley, Graham Turner, Alan McKee, Sue Turnbull, Chris Healy, Christine Schmidt, and myself are involved in. “Australian television and popular memory: new approaches to the cultural history of the media in the project of nation building,” is a modest attempt to be ambitious. It aims to draw a history of Australian broadcasting by accessing histories of television from four key sites – industrial or institutional sources, programming and television’s own memorialization of itself, academic work, and the activities of pro-amateurs and the popular recollection of the public (see Hartley’s previous column on Flow as well as Hartley, John, Green, Joshua, and Burgess, Jean (2008)).3 It seeks to gather the available traces of Australia’s television history from the academy, published sources, popular recollection, oral history, industry sites, and vernacular activity, collecting not the resources but recording their presence, and constituting a history of the medium by working across them. Doing so, the project hopes also to contribute to the ever evolving digital humanities, documenting the resources and inviting participation in the formation of a diverse, national, archival project.

I come not to spruik this project, but to suggest it might provide us with a model to start to think about how, internationally, we can draw together the traces of television’s history. There is a real need to build effective archives, to push back the ever encroaching assumptions of exclusivity copyright owners assert over the cultural commodities of popular culture. Doing so is surely a long process of cultural change projects such as the aforementioned Society for Cinema & Media Studies Public Policy Committee and the venerable In Media Res contribute to. In the short term, I wonder if the way forward is to draw together and make public the resources that do exist; to encourage the the expansion and preservation of vernacular activities, not as resources to be raided but as sites of archival practice; to connect these energies across national borders in ways that reveal the challenges of local spaces; to start creating not a single archive but a record of the places materials reside.

Image Credits:
1. Television archive as national institution – Joshua Green
2. Analog TV history – Joshua Green
3. Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive – Joshua Green

Please feel free to comment.

1. Hartley, John (2008) Television Truths, Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell.
2. Which, I should be clear, no-one suggested was what we should do.
3. Hartley, John, Green, Joshua, and Burgess, Jean (2008 ‘“Laughs and legends” or the furniture that glows? Television as history,’ in Hartley, John Television Truths, Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 223-242

Viacom’s US$1 Billion lawsuit against YouTube has been looming over the online video space since it was announced in March 2007, and with the ruling on discovery handed down by Honorable Louis L. Stanton on July 1, 2008 it has been pushed back into the public eye. In the suit, Viacom accuses YouTube of inducing and profiting from copyright infringement, and of building a successful business — worth US$1.65 billion to Google, who bought the service in 2006 — on the back of content from major media producers. At the centre of Viacom’s complaint is the assertion content from large media producers is what makes the site popular. (Read YouTube’s reply to the complaint.) As YouTube sells advertising on (some) videos across the site, and doesn’t police closely the uploading of copyrighted content without permission from copyright owners, Viacom argues YouTube both draws a profit from, and has legitimated, the uploading of content that infringes upon the copyrights of Viacom and others (This is despite the fact the DMCA clearly places the burden of monitoring possibly infringing materials on the party who claiming copyright ownership.) As the media conglomerate wrote in a press release shortly after filing their original motion:

There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission and destroying enormous value in the process. This is value that rightfully belongs to the writers, directors and talent who create it and companies like Viacom that have invested to make possible this innovation and creativity.

(The press release is now off the web but see the Mashable report on the filing of the suit).

Viacom are not alone; Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset has similarly started action against YouTube for 500 million Euros (US$780 million) for copyright infringement, TF1, the largest French broadcaster, has filed suit for 100 million euros, and the English Premier League announced action against YouTube for copyright infringement in 2007.1

Yet there are questions that need to be asked about whether YouTube and Google are profiting on the back of material produced by large media producers, especially as the arguments made by Viacom and others seem so soundly rooted in broadcast-era understandings of what media is and how it operates. There are questions about how we understand what is popular across the site, about how we understand what types of content the site supports, and about the rights of both producers and audiences in a post-broadcast era.

To test their claim programming from large media producers is the most popular content on the site, and the principal draw for users to the service, Viacom was granted access to logs of every video that has ever passed through YouTube, and the IP address of every user who has ever watched a video (they’ve agreed to accept anonymized data in the latter category). With such data in hand they’ll be able to compile a large and long list of the range of videos that appear to infringe copyright and those that don’t, assuming they can accurately determine issues of authority to upload and ownership of the copyrights in question.

The assertion the videos that are ‘Most Viewed’ on the service constitute the most popular content misunderstands, I think, YouTube for a distribution platform. As much as the site supports broadcasting-like activities, for some users the site is as much about discussion, response, and interaction with audiences and friends as it is achieving economies of scale for wide-spread distribution.2 While Viacom’s principal interest is finding the proportion of the overall archive composed of content they claim infringes copyrights, popularity on the service revolves as much around what is “Most Discussed” or “Most Responded” as it does what is “Most Viewed.”3

Understanding this is crucial to effectively accounting for YouTube as a diverse media space. This is not to suggest everyone comes to the site to post a video blog, but rather to come to terms with the fact that YouTube is built as much through practices of audience-ing as it is practices of publishing, and to realize the two as intimately linked. As much as the video blog, YouTube is ruled by the clip and the quote — the short grab or edited selection; these videos are evidence or demonstration of active audience-hood. Selecting and editing a particular moment might be seen as acts of what Fiske described as ‘enunciative productivity,’ – ‘the generation and circulation of certain meanings of the object of fandom within a local community.4 Granted, posting to YouTube might spread this material beyond a local community, but that might have much to do with the redundancy in the system, where content hangs around long enough to become searchable. Similarly, as a practice of audience-hood, posting clips or quotes to YouTube more closely resembles what John Hartley describes as ‘redaction’ – ‘the production of new material by the process of editing existing content,5 than it does an act of copyright infringement or ‘piracy.6

Copyright infringement and piracy are broadcast-era ways to deal with what are essentially audience practices. Both are rooted in an idea of a technologically ill-equipped agent re-distributing materials, a situation that doesn’t even come close to describing modern audience members, and doesn’t describe a great proportion of the content on YouTube. That short snippets of material have now been proven profitable for media companies doesn’t change the fact that editing material now comprises significant audience practice.

Finally, thinking about clips of content as the product of audience-hood rather than unlicensed distribution, raises certain questions about ownership, value and labor. While copyright law may provide Viacom with exclusive license over the valuable content they seek to reign in, the value of this content is not produced by Viacom alone. Success in the commercial media landscape in which Viacom competes seems to be based on the Fiskean (Sorry.) like transformation of cultural commodities into cultural resources; the raiding of the products of companies like Viacom for publicly useful semiotic tools. The successful transformation draws together an audience, producing that second-order commodity that Viacom can and does on-sell. The value of particular cultural commodities then, would seem to be co-created, and as such, not Viacom’s alone to be exploited.

I don’t mean to reduce this to a somewhat simple and idealistic distinction between commodity and culture, nor do I mean to suggest companies such as Viacom get one bite of the cherry and then they’re done. Both of these are untrue and uneconomically viable. Likewise, I don’t want to rehearse here what are becoming well-trodden arguments about the promotional value of YouTube for programming, brands, channels and broadcasters as it seems that part of the challenge Viacom sees is that YouTube is generating advertising revenue Viacom has no control over. But striking out at YouTube Inc. involves also striking out at the YouTube community, and I am struck by the fact that part of the difficulty with Viacom’s (and Berlusconi’s, and TF1’s) approach to YouTube is its refusal or (and?) inability to accept the implications of the labor of the audience in the creation of value around their properties. Even as they seem adept at brand-building and dealing with both audiences and fans, they still cling to the notion they are solely responsible for the value of their creative endeavor, when really, the value they draw is co-created through the efforts of both company and audience. Given such, then, perhaps having content clipped, quoted and posted on YouTube is a cost of business in the current landscape?

Image Credits:

1. YouTube logo
2. Viacom logo
3. Screen capture from YouTube Mosts. Screen shot from Joshua Green.
4. A poster from the Consumer Electronics Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Please feel free to comment.

1. The question of ‘authorization’ is a hairy one, as the history of YouTube is littered with myths about marketing or producer types uploading content to the service only to have legal types from the same company demand its withdrawal — Morrissey, Brian, (2006), ‘Old Media Faces a Hard Lesson On Sharing.’ Adweek, 3 April and ‘Don’t Touch That Dial.’ Ryan, Oliver, (2006) Fortune 154(5): 76-77.
2. Lange, Patricia (2007) ‘Publicly private and privately public: Social networking on YouTube.’ Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1): 361-380.
3. Understanding what popularity means on the site requires accounting for the distinctions between these categories, a task Jean Burgess and I have been working for a while. This study was a joint project between the Comparative Media Studies Program and Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT, where I am based, and the ARC Centre for Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT, where Jean is based. The Convergence Culture Consortium operates with the support of corporate partners including Tuner Broadacasting Inc., GSD&M Idea City, Yahoo!, Fidelity Investments, and MTV Networks — a Viacom company. The results of this study will be published in YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.
4. Fiske, John, ‘Cultural Economy of Fandom,’ in Lisa A Lewis, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, London: Routledge, 1992, pg.37-38.
5. Hartley, John, Television Truths: Forms of Knowledge in Popular Culture, London: Blackwell, 2008, pg.112.
6. As the CEA and EFF suggest, you should know the difference between the scourge of the high seas and a consumer.

Hulu sits somewhere between broadcast and video-on-demand models of television. Advertiser supported, the service inserts usually a single 30-second advert into each of the commercial breaks structured into American programming. Each program is presented as sponsored by a particular advertiser, meaning one advertiser per program appear in these breaks (often, annoyingly the same commercial). This porting of the advertising model of broadcast television, however reduced, is an attraction for companies such as General Motors, who see Hulu as something of an extension of their broadcast spend (Dana and Steel, 2008). The service provides advertisers with a ‘safe’ space, an antithesis to sites that rely on user-created video, which brings with it risks in terms of quality and appropriateness of content — on Hulu there are guarantees the materials won’t offend any more than prime-time television.

This advertising model also provides the kind of direct connection between television content and online advertising dollars some media companies, NBC among them, found lacking on YouTube. Much like Viacom (Becker, 2007), NBC it seems became convinced the promotional value of having content on YouTube did not outweigh the financial returns gleaned from the revenue-sharing deals Google was offering (Broache and Sandoval 2007; Garritty, 2007; Kornitschnig, 2007). Frustrated at having to police content and seeing ad dollars not coming exclusively back to the rights holder, NBC committed to developing Hulu as an “official” alternative, where rights holders have complete control over the appearance of clips (rather than needing to take responsibility for their disappearance) and where third parties don’t intersect the revenue streams — an issue that also contributed to NBC severing its relationship with Apple’s iTunes service in 2007 (Barnes, 2007). These three factors — the perception Hulu is an official alternative to YouTube, that rights holders are responsible for the distribution of content across the service, and that the service might fill the void left by NBC’s withdrawal from iTunes — seem to influence the perceptions some viewers bring to the site, and the value they ascribe to their attention.

Organized around an on-demand model, viewing the advertisements is often seen by viewers as direct payment for access to programming on the site. Television audiences have, of course, long been aware of viewing ads as the ‘payment’ for television content, but this relationship seems foregrounded on Hulu. Many of those commenting point out that they would happily offer more attention in exchange for content, particularly anywhere seasons are incomplete. Writes one viewer:

I’ll put up with more ads if it means getting this content [previous seasons] added. You should create a ad watch vs. rating for show system. Just don’t overload the ads.

Similarly, some viewers point to their attention as an indicator of a market force that should be acknowledged, especially where little more than a collection of ‘clips’ from programs appear:

Why would we want to see a fraction of our favorite shows when we can download them for free? The reason I use your service is convenience, and clips are not convenient. If you want to sustain your advertising revenue I suggest you get more full episodes. THE USERS HAVE SPOKEN!

Regularly, viewers point out that Hulu is competing with ‘free’, and that the bargaining chip Hulu possesses is access to official copies. While the content offered might be of higher quality and assuredly legal, the real point of differentiation for the service is episode duration:

No full episodes = bad. If I wanted to see excerpts, I’d go to youtube.

Remarks such as these turn up regularly, although they don’t dominate the comments on the service, many of which review or discuss the respective programs (the only place to leave a comment is a section labeled “User Reviews”), or offer some praise to the service for making content available. It is also not uncommon to find a commenter pointing to the market logics of DVD distribution as a reason only a limited amount of content is available, though it is usually in a tone that suggests Hulu is ultimately under serving the audience, in this case, in order to preserve another, more valuable market.

I can afford cable monetarily, but simply won’t spend 20 minutes of every hour watching commercials—it’s simply not worth it. I’m happy, though to pay $1.99 to watch an episode without commercials. Happy, that is, until Bravo yanked Project Runway off of iTunes. Seriously, how much does Bravo make off of a single viewer? Why in the world won’t they take my money to watch a show?

These complaints, of course, are not new, and I don’t wish to suggest Hulu has in some way produced this attitude. Ratings systems and audience measurement are not democracies nor true free markets, and to a certain extent, the idea of being a slighted viewer in a marginal audience segment, the value of whose viewership is ignored, is somewhat fundamental to the television audience experience. If anything, Hulu merely makes this experience visible by providing an avenue alongside insubstantial schedules where the audience can speak back. Where previously these activities took place in lounge rooms and on Internet forums, all Hulu does is bring them into direct contact with the program itself.

At the same time, however, there seems to be a suggestion undergirding these comments that the service, given its official status, is bound to respond to the market. Lucas Hilderbrand (2007), writing about the disappointment of finding content removed from YouTube, suggests expectations for availability have been extended and exaggerated by “[t]he Internet, Google, and YouTube,” such that “[e]xpectations for access have developed into a sense of access entitlement” (p. 50). While I’m not sure I would go so far as to suggest a sense of access entitlement, certainly looking at negative comments on Hulu reveal an expectation of access and demands of availability. In one sense, these viewers seem to be holding the entertainment industry to its message that digital distribution needed to be legitimated through a business model. Rather than routing around official sources, these audience members are using the currencies they’ve been prescribed to go through the front door and ultimately finding them lacking. Maybe had the industry not criminalized file-sharing and the redactional (see Hartley, 2007) activities of YouTube, some audiences would be more forgiving.

These patterns of relation reveal mixed messages about the value of audience attention and Hulu certainly isn’t alone in sending them. CBS’ recent decision to resurrect post-apocalyptic drama Jericho after a determined and attention-grabbing fan campaign suggested initially that perhaps non-broadcast audiences were enough to influence the economics of the industry. After all, the myth goes that Jericho had been especially popular with DVR viewers and those using CBS’ Innertube service (Wyatt, 2007), and a fan campaign was enough for CBS to recognize they were out there. No sooner had the program been revived, however, were fans told that in order to show their continued support they would need to transform into a different sort of viewer – the regularly-scheduled-at-8pm-kind planted in front of the broadcast. Not just that, but they would need to encourage others to join them. Adding insult to injury, fans were offered a somewhat compromised second season, with a smaller cast and less sophisticated production.

That Jericho didn’t survive season two should come as no surprise; the program was ultimately made dependent upon none of the audiences who made it popular in the first place. Indeed, it would seem that the network itself ultimately disavowed the very modes of attention that supported the show and characterized the viewers who rallied to bring it back. Similarly, there is a sense at times on Hulu that audiences who are doing everything that they’re asked are ultimately being ignored.

This is, of course, too broad a perspective on Hulu; relationships between the site and its viewers are much more complex than an ignored and demanding audience and broadcasters defending existing revenue at the expense of new. While the value of online advertising is on the increase, particularly in relation to traditional television spending, the industry is still organized according to a series of logics and practices that privilege first-run broadcast economics. This is a fact audiences are aware of; even if they don’t fully appreciate the constraints such logics and conditions might place upon networks. Yet the broadcast model doesn’t wholly fit the patterns of audienceship across the site, and we need to rethink the way audience attention is accounted for, and the expectations of behavior imposed by the adaptation of broadcast models to the online space.

Works Cited

Barnes, Brooks (2007) “NBC Will Not Renew ITunes Contract,” The New York Times, 31 August.

Becker, Anne (2007) “YouTube to Viacom: We Will Pull Your Clips,” Broadcasting and Cable, 2 February.

Broache, Anne and Greg Sandoval (2007) “Viacom sues Google over YouTube clips,” CNET News.com, 13 March.

Garritty, Brian (2007) “Video Screen Goes Dark For Nbc-Youtube Channel,” New York Post, 23 October.

Hartley, John (2007) TV Truths, London: Blackwell.

Hilderbrand, Lucas (2007) “Youtube: Where Cultural Memory And Copyright Converge,” Film Quarterly, 61(1), pp.48-57.

Karnitschnig, Matthew (2007) “Viacom Orders Removal Of Videos From YouTube,” The Wall Street Journal, 3 February.

Wyatt, Edward (2007) “CBS Revives ‘Jericho,’ With a Plea to Fans,” The New York Times, 9 June.

Image Credits:
1. Hulu.com banner
2. Jericho promotional image

Please feel free to comment.

With the news the Australian Broadcast Corporation is set to follow the BBC model and rebrand itself as a suite of services, and amidst the din of the re-configuration of US television networks into something that may resemble multi-platform, and perhaps medium agnostic, content providers, I thought it might be an opportune moment to look at the object of television as constructed by the American Public Broadcasting System. As seems true of many public service broadcasters, PBS represents something of a unique system. Even as it maintains some common carriage, local specificity seems a core part of the PBS experience. As a result then, PBS, like television, is not a singular object, and the image it constructs of what television is, and what PBS is, is multiplicitous and sometimes contradictory.

PBS Logo

My particular interest in PBS is not so much motivated by questions of whether and how the service might be meeting its public service obligations or the opportunities new media provide PBS, as it is how the service represents itself and its viewers. As such, what I would like to do is take a particularly cursory glance at some of the manifestations of the service presented by PBS to at least start to build a picture of the constructions of television PBS has produced. Such an exploration is motivated especially by the discovery of this 1995 promo for public broadcasting that provides a sweeping vision of not just the nature of the public broadcasting service but also ideals about what television could be.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1995 Public Television Promo

Appealing to the ideals of public broadcasting as a service for civic engagement, this ident is as much a short film about the grand model of television as public sphere as it is a promo for PBS. Public television is constructed as the “storyteller of a nation, guide to the world”, driven to share and compelled to follow stories of significance from around the world. Television, and especially public television, is “A vital source of information; An electronic gathering place for all Americans; A national town hall where all our values can be heard, all our stories can be told, where we come to know ourselves and our world.” The promo trades on well practiced notions of television as a device to navigate the world on behalf of viewers, an agent that connects nationally bound viewers and internationally significant events; this is what television, and indeed “public” television, was “meant to be”.

While such a description is fraught with issues of access, participation and representation which public television and PBS have long encountered, I am more interested for the moment in the role of the network as intermediary or representative for the citizen consumer. Positioning itself as the vital link, the authoritative voice and the educated eye, PBS stands-in for both the television service and the viewer. Like a corporate citizen, this promo constructs public television itself as the active agent. This is an alternative to the appeal to the audience PBS employed at the beginning of the decade when the jingle-tastic “Just Watch Us Now” argued for the significance of the service on the grounds its suite of content represented a clever alternative to the commercial system.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1990 PBS “Just watch us now” Promo

At the same time, however, petitioning that what television is “meant to be” is a site for the navigation of significant international events at a national level by a representative agent, this promo absents both the viewer and their locality from the experience of television. Such a construction strains when compared against the other stalwart of the PBS system, the pledge drive. Here, television seems “meant to be” an especially local experience, where civic duty and audience participation are drawn as equivalent through a duty to support programming you enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

PBS Dr. Who Pledge Drive

There is perhaps something unfair, however, in establishing at the outset that the PBS experience is a complex negotiation of nationalism and localism and then contrasting the two as if distinct. Indeed, it is inherent to the PBS experience that somewhat nationalistic goals of civic duty (the construction of an electronic public sphere for Americans to communicate across) and hyperlocal notions of civic participation (especially through direct support for the local ‘chapter’) should collide. So perhaps the place to consider the status of the television experience as constructed by PBS is not the individual ident itself, but by considering a block of branding material as a single unit. Looking then to Boston’s WGBH, one of the larger producing stations, we get a taste of both a more contemporary idea of the PBS television experience, and a more holistic sense of the way “television” is constructed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2004 WGBH Promos

Once again the spots construct the service along relatively traditional public service broadcasting lines. Programming is promoted as a source of civic enlightenment in broad terms, emphasizing education, worldliness, nationalism, curiosity and quality. The spots raise questions about the class bias of the values promoted, especially through the proposition education and “quality” are equivalent, but these questions are far from exceptional in the Service’s history. So too the perhaps unintentional contrast between equating the PBS audience with a multi-ethnic and multi-generational female constituency and the local station with the science oriented “2-guy”. On the whole, however, this group of spots works to demonstrate the ties between the local viewing experience and the national “electronic public sphere”. What we’re left with is local distinctness directly abutting national significance without reducing the local to the obviously specific. In doing so, the role of “the service” as the active representative of the audience is softened. Television is still constructed primarily as the development of civic enlightenment, but at least it acknowledges people as some sort of agents in this process.

Image Credits:

1. PBS logo.
2. 1995 public television promo.
3. 1990 PBS “Just watch us now” promo.
4. PBS Dr. Who pledge drive.
5. 2004 WGBH promos.

Please feel free to comment.

]]> http://flowtv.org/2008/01/what-public-television-was-meant-to-be/feed/ 2 http://flowtv.org/2007/11/what-does-an-american-television-network-look-like/ http://flowtv.org/2007/11/what-does-an-american-television-network-look-like/#comments Fri, 16 Nov 2007 18:40:18 +0000 Joshua Green / MIT http://flowtv.org/?p=899

As US networks adjust to the shifting paradigms of control that govern the space in which television is produced, distributed, and consumed, the nature of the television network is being re-written. The industry focus on ‘engagement’ across platforms requires a re-imagining of what a television network looks like, how it behaves, and how it constructs its audience. Though not completely dead yet, the network ident, historically crucial to the construction of network identity, has been stretched by these new conditions.

Network idents themselves seem to have been absent from US television for a while now. Alhough the networks feature Fall line-up promos advertising the highlights of the coming season, ongoing promotional material selling the network itself is, in the words of ABC marketing chief Michael Benson, “fairly low on the totem pole.” (McPherson 2006). Indeed, ABC’s Yellow “I Like TV” campaign of the 1990s is still popularly remembered as the last network-wide branding campaign that had any real impact (Friedman 2007) and the current emphasis seems to be on promoting programs as sub-brands rather than focusing on network “cheer” (McPherson 2006). This approach resonates with current discussions about the changing nature of television’s form, particularly the decoupling of television programming from the television schedule and advertising modes (Carlson 2006), and the increasing disconnect between content and the broadcast medium (Dawson 2007; Hills 2007; Kompare 2006).

Late 1990s ABC Network

The absence of overarching branding campaigns articulating the nature of the television network – advertising, consequently, its appeal to audiences – raises a question, however, about what a television network looks like in the current climate. Television branding, Benson told Broadcasting and Cable in 2003, “is not simply graphic packaging, it is developing a voice, personality and feel for a network and its programming.” (”Brand Builders”, Broadcasting and Cable June 2, 2003). Reflecting on his time at VH1 in the 1980s, Benson remarked “it dawned on me that we needed to take more of a packaged-goods approach to branding [television] – to create our ‘Coke can’ or ‘Cheerios box,’ – and then prove to our audiences who and what VH1 was about.” (”Brand Builders”, Broadcasting and Cable June 2, 2003). While a little blunt, the ‘packaged-goods’ metaphor seems a useful one to describe some of the work television idents have traditionally played.

In the US cable market this description would still seem apt (consider USA’s “Characters Welcome” or Bravo’s “Watch What Happens” campaigns), and though it doesn’t account for the community forming role idents play, it would also seem to describe to some extent the role of ident campaigns in places such as the UK and Australia.US networks, however, have progressively eschewed this model of television branding, moving further towards program specific promotion at the expense of network identity campaigns. The germ of this movement might be traced to the watermarking of content in the early 1990s in response to the increased mobility of viewers in a multi-channel environment. ABC introduced watermarks as part of their 1993 attempt to position the network as a ’superbrand’ (Mandese 1993), promoting programs rather than the season’s lineup and marking their programming with the now standard visual reminder of the content’s origin to make apparent the link between program and network.

The emphasis on program brands as opposed to network identity makes a certain degree of sense given the declining role of the schedule as a way to structure audience engagement, increasing personalization of both content streams and sites of consumption (Carlson 2006; Dawson 2007), and move further toward first-order-commodity relationships with viewers (Hills 2007; Johnson 2007). And yet, the Networks have not fully transitioned to a status as program producers or content providers. The organizational form of television still relies on individual programs contributing to the cumulative success of the network, meaning there may still be some value in promoting the network brand. This brand, however, is one that now stretches across not only multiple content types but also multiple sites of consumption or engagement, and this requires a shift in the way the network is constructed through ident material.

Click here to view the embedded video.

ABC’s current “Start Here” ident.

Despite the current elusiveness of network identity material on American television, ABC’s “Start Here” provides an insight into the way US networks are adjusting to the challenges of representing the network in the current market. Rolled out with their Fall 2007 line-up, “Start Here” presents ABC as the launching point for engaging with their content regardless of platform. Built around a graphics package featuring revolving icons representing a TV, computer, iPod, and cell phone, it features a prominent “play button” on the flip-side of the ABC medallion and a reminder to viewers the network is the official source for accessing content. Expressly offering viewers the promise of content available “anytime, anywhere,” the campaign attempts to establish the significance of the network in an era of textual and viewer mobility.

As Dawson (2007) argues, ‘mobility’ as it pertains to the current television moment needs to refer not only to the physical mobility of viewers but also to the mobility of television texts, available and portable across platforms. Having traditionally only made limited offerings available through official or sanctioned sites, the networks are yet to ascend to a status as the predominant sites beyond television through which viewers can access content. ABC’s approach, then, attempts to establish the network not only as the party responsible for the production of content, but also as the site responsible for the distribution of this content across platforms. This campaign represents a determined shift away from network branding strategies of old which positioned the Networks as sources for the experience of television. Consider, for instance, NBC’s “Come Home to NBC” or “Be There” (see below) campaigns from the 1980s where the Network was actively constructed as not only domestic but the site itself through which the television experience took place.

Click here to view the embedded video.

NBC’s “Be There” promo.

If anything, “Start Here” serves to drive viewers away from the television set, responding to the fact that the consumption of television content is no longer medium or temporally specific. Similar tendencies are present in the break bumpers NBC uses during commercial pods to remind viewers they can consume more – additional content, encores, two-minute recaps and the like – over at NBC.com. These break bumpers play with the feathers of the NBC peacock, using one feather each spot as a substitute for a mouse pointer while the content available online is promoted (a similar strategy is employed by NBC owned cable channel Bravo). What is significant about ABC’s campaign, however, particularly in comparison to NBC’s break bumpers, is the way it constructs the television network itself as a multi-platform object. “Start Here” portrays ABC as a network that exists across multiple platforms, rather than emphasizing (as NBC does) that the television experience is supported by extra-medium materials. Referring to ABC in the first person (suggesting viewers “start with us”) and presenting the platforms as virtually equivalent or interchangeable as sites for consumption (which in practice is untrue), the campaign re-imagines the television network as a network oriented around television content, rather than one organized around the television medium or the shared experience of consumption.

Bibliography

Carlson, Matt. (2006) “Tapping into TiVo: Digital video recorders and the transition from schedules to surveillance in television,” New Media and Society, 8 (1): 97-114.

Dawson, Max. (2007) “Little Player, Big Shows: Format, narration, and style on televisions’ new smaller screens,” Convergence, 13(3): 231-250.

Friedman, Wayne. “Peacock Ruffles Feathers, Launches Brand Effort,” Media Daily News, 07/17/2007.

Hills, Matt. (2007) “From the Box in the Corner to the Box Set on the Shelf,” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5(1): 41-60.

Johnson, Catherine. (2006) “Tele-Branding in TVIII: The network as brand and the programme as brand,” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5(1): 5-24.

Kompare, Derek. (2006) “Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television,” Television & New Media, 7: 335-360.

Mandese, J. “ABC’s ’superbrand’: Net powers up plan to bolster programming”, Advertising Age, 6/14/1993: 2.

McPherson, Steve. “ABC’s Benson Pushes “One” Campaign,” Broadcasting and Cable, 6/12/06: 2, 24.

Image Credits:
Image can be found along with evolution of the ABC logo.

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