Deep Media

Behind the cable frenzy: The shift in TV viewing habits finally takes hold

The New York Times describes Charter Communications' $55 billion bid for Time Warner Cable as the result of "a tectonic shift in how Americans watch and pay for television." How tectonic is it? Recent sur­veys document two in­ter­connected trends:

• More and more television is being viewed on computers, smartphones, and other devices.
• At the same time, there's an upsurge in the amount of television that's streamed rather than watched live.

For large numbers of viewers, what we now call television is becoming un­coupled from the TV screen, from the TV schedule, and from con­ventional TV providers like cable and satellite. The impli­cations are huge. Network pro­gram­mers will find their once all-important scheduling func­tion becoming increas­ingly obsolete. And cable and phone com­panies will find their Inter­net business out­pacing their TV bun­dles both in importance and profitability. 

 

From VR to HBO, the top 7 meta-stories of 2014

For anyone who follows not just stories but meta-stories—that is, stories about storytelling and how it's evolving—2014 was a pretty big year. Along with twelve months of shootings, bombings, protests, invasions, and epidemics, we've witnessed profound changes in the way journalism and entertainment alike are being presented to us. Some of these developments have been building for years; others came out of the blue. Before we go rocketing into our next revolution around the sun, let's pause for a brief recap. 

1. Virtual reality gets almost real

Atop the 700-foot wall of ice in HBO's "Ascend the Wall"

Why blockbusters are not the wave of the future

Summer is now officially over, and for Hollywood the results were not good. No, the industry didn't suffer a repeat of the string of debacles that hit last year, when one mega-budget picture after an­other—White House Down, The Lone Ranger, Pacific Rim, Turbo, R.I.P.D.—unceremoniously tanked. In fact, the news was actually worse. 

Last year at least the hits made up for the misses. This year the North American summer box office was down 15 per cent overall. Movies like The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and the latest Transformers installment drew crowds to the multiplex, but smaller crowds than in the past. And there are signs the core audience is losing interest: According to the MPAA, the number of frequent moviegoers (once a month or more) last year fell in every age demographic between 12 and 49, with the biggest drop coming among 18-to-25-year-olds. It's not hard to figure out why: As producer Lynda Obst put it recently, “How many times can you see the same cities destroyed? How many ways are there to destroy them?”

High Valyrian, anyone? What the 'Game of Thrones' conlangs tell us about language and world-building

Behind the savage bloodshed, naked power lust, and epic betrayals that make HBO's Game of Thrones so enthralling to watch are the languages created for the show. The Game of Thrones conlangs—short for "constructed languages"—were developed by David Peterson, the 33-year-old linguist who co-founded the Language Creation Society, an organization based in Orange County, California, not far from Disneyland. Aside from devising Dothraki, the native tongue of the nomadic horselords of Essos, and Valyrian, the family of dialects based on the language of the lost empire of Valyria, Peterson is best known as the linguist and "alien culture consultant" for Syfy's Defiance. So far, however, nothing he's contributed has matched the use of Valyrian in the stunning scene at the finish of "And Now His Watch Is Ended" (season 3, episode 4), when Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen—she who hatched the fire-breathing dragons—takes command of the Unsullied, the 8,000 warrior-eunuchs of Astapor, from their slave master, Kraznys. 

Zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor: “A dragon is not a slave.”

Want to try it yourself? Later this month, Peterson leads a workshop in language creation at the first annual Filmatic Festival, an exploration of the future of movies at UC San Diego, the school where he earned his masters in linguistics. Thanks to an introduction by Rebecca Webb of ArtPower!, the campus arts organization that's sponsoring the festival, I was able to put some questions to him by email. Here's what he had to say about Dothraki, Valyrian, and language in general: 

 

What if TV networks themselves go over the top?

For years, people have been speculating about the day when viewers would go "over the top," cutting their cable or satellite connections and getting TV online. It hasn't really happened, since even with Hulu and Netflix, there was no viable Internet alternative—no way to watch Girls or Game of Thrones, for example, because HBO Go is only available to people who get HBO through cable or satellite. The first suggestion that this might be changing came last summer, when a top analyst, Craig Moffett, reported that US cable and satellite companies lost more than 300,000 subscribers between June 2012 and June 2013. But in the past two weeks, it's started to look as if the television networks themselves might cut the cord: 

• Two weeks ago, on March 3, Disney—which owns ABC and ESPN—announced a deal with Dish Networks to offer its programming via Internet, not just to Dish's satellite sub­scribers but as part of a separate, over-the-top subscription service. As part of the deal, Disney agreed to let Dish deploy its AutoHop ad-skipping feature on shows three days after they're broadcast. Disney had been suing Dish over AutoHop; now the litigation has been settled, leaving CBS, NBC, and Fox to cut their own deals. The three-day window protects the Disney-owned channels during the period advertisers are actually paying for. Still, as Michael Wolff observed, "Finally, a major network has bent to the obvious—people expect to be able to skip ads." His conclusion? "The sky is falling." 
• A couple of days later in the UK, the BBC announced its intention to stop broadcasting BBC Three—the digital channel whose shows include Being Human, the series that inspired the Canadian remake that's shown in the US on Syfy—and relaunch it online. This was billed as a cost-cutting move, but it makes sense for a channel whose target audience is people 16 to 34. 
• Last Tuesday, the head of CBS, Leslie Moonves, threatened to take his own network over the top if the networks lose their court battle against Aereo, the startup that wants to stream broadcast channels to subscribers without paying the channels. "If the government wants to give them permission to steal our signal, then we will come up with some other way to get them our content and so get paid for it," he told CNET, the CBS-owned online news service.

From 'Oliver Twist' to 'Game of Thrones': Six serials and how they've deepened the art of storytelling

For a couple of years now, “transmedia” has been the buzzword most people use to define story­telling in the digital age. But while telling a story across different media formats (video, text, game, what have you) can be an effective way to engage people in a narrative, it's not the only way—nor is it necessarily the best. One of the most effective means of creating an immersive narrative is in fact one of the oldest: by serializing it. 

I was reminded of this recently when I went to Turin to speak at the Scuola Holden, a “school of storytelling and the performing arts” founded 20 years ago by the novelist Alessandro Baricco. Named after that world-class narrator Holden Caulfield, this unconventional institution (no teachers, for a long time no tests, and certainly no phonies) was intended to be a place where young Caulfield might feel at ease. Instead of hiring professors, the school brings in professional storytellers; and instead of focusing on technical skills like journalism or filmmaking, it tries to foster an aptitude for telling stories in any medium. 

Nonetheless, students are expected to spend about half their time during the two-year program in one of six “colleges”: Scrivere (writing), Filmmaking, Series, Crossmedia, Acting, and “Real World”—that is, stories inspired by actual events. In the first month of the school year, people like me were brought in to describe what these different disciplines were all about. I was asked to talk about Series. Then I was handed this map, which I decided to redraw a bit. The point was to show how serialization can create a sense of immersion. 

 

 

How not to get the future of media? Pay no attention to what the audience is trying to tell you

What’s missing in most of the discussions media executives have about their businesses' future? The audience. Media execs across the board—in print, television, movies, and music—worry about shrinking profit margins, unpredictable technology shifts, and the ever-present specter of piracy. All of which is entirely understandable. But too often they miss what’s most important—not technology itself, but the shift in behavior and expectations that occurs as audiences embrace some technologies and ignore others. That’s the change that’s ultimately going to matter.

John Weber for The Milken Institute Review

This came up last summer when Peter Passell, editor of the quarter­ly Milken Institute Review, asked me to write about disruption in the me­dia industries. When an econo­mist men­tions disruption he's usually think­ing of Joseph Schumpeter, the Aus­trian/American theorist who 70-odd years ago introduced the idea of “creative destruction”—the notion that outmoded industries and com­panies will inevitably col­lapse and die as new ones arise. This kind of thing provokes terror in the hearts of the people running con­ventional me­dia corporations, who anticipate (with considerable jus­tification) that they are going to be on the receiving end of it. 

So, what should they do? Again and again, the response has been to ex­periment ineffectually while si­mul­taneously trying to hang on to once-dependable business models. Which is exactly what not to do.

CBS v. TW Cable: What's wrong with this picture?

I have a short essay on the online edition of The New Yorker today about the current CBS-Time Warner Cable smackdown. If you don't live in New York City, maybe you haven't heard: Last Friday, Time Warner Cable—the second largest cable provider in the US, with 12 million cus­tomers—summarily dropped CBS and all the other channels CBS owns in a dispute over retransmission fees. These are the fees that cable and satellite providers pay to carry television networks. They've become an increasingly important source of revenue for broadcast and cable networks alike—and an in­creasingly burdensome expense for companies like Time Warner Cable that have to pay them. Hence the dispute: CBS wants more for the privilege of carrying its channels than Time Warner Cable is willing to pay. Last Friday, Time Warner Cable went nuclear. CBS responded in kind, blocking access to its shows online for Time Warner Cable broadband subscribers. This kind of thing has happened before, of course, but today, with cable subscriptions declining for the first time ever, it's starting to look like Mutual Assured Destruc­tion. 

To deal with this situation, I have a modest proposal: Why stop at CBS? Why shouldn't Time Warner Cable drop every network, focus on its high-speed Internet offerings, and get out of pay TV altogether? This is not going to happen any time soon, of course—TV contributes nearly half the com­pany's reve­nue, and too many of its customers would howl. But don't think the cable chieftains haven't thought of it. On the same day Time Warner Cable dropped CBS, James Dolan, CEO of Cablevision—the much smaller cable provider based on Long Island—told The Wall Street Journal that "there could come a day" when his company gets out of television and makes broadband its main business. He also noted that his kids prefer to watch TV over the Internet, through Netflix. 

Henry Jenkins on 'Spreadable Media,' why fans rule, and why 'The Walking Dead' lives

"If it doesn't spread, it's dead": With this pithy dictum, Henry Jenkins summed up the nature of media distribution in the Internet age. Introduced as "our new mantra" in a 2007 blog post about Jonathan Lethem and slash fiction, it turned up again as the title of a 2008 white paper from the Convergence Culture Consortium, the initiative Henry launched at MIT to explore the changing dynamics of the media industry. Now it's the central idea that animates Spreadable Media, the new book he's written with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, two former C3 colleagues who have moved on to consultancy roles — Sam at Peppercomm Strategic Communications, Joshua at Undercurrent. In whatever context, this idea stands as a corrective to the distribution model of the broadcast era, which presumes that control will rest with whoever puts the product out, not with the people who are the market for it. The levers of power have shifted. 

Due out next week from NYU Press, Spreadable Media is an essential read for anyone who wants to under­stand how media works today. The book begins by contrasting spread­­ability with sticki­ness, an earlier measure of online appeal that prevailed during the heyday of "Web portals" like AOL and Yahoo! Sticki­­ness was a Web 1.0 concept that tried to port ideas from the broad­cast indus­try into the Web world — ideas like cen­tralization and pull and pre-structured inter­­activity, as opposed to dis­persal and flow and open-ended participation. But the au­thors take issue with Web 2.0 as well, and they seem border­line ap­palled by the "viral" metaphor that has attached itself to the act of online sharing. Participation, they argue, is not a dis­ease, and should not be treated like one. To do so is to denigrate not just the act but the peo­ple who doing it — that is, us. 

Henry and I have known each other for sev­eral years—I've spoken to his class at USC, and he interviewed me when The Art of Immersion came out. So with Spreadable Media now available for pre-order, I was eager to return the favor. Here's part one of our email exchange: 

When you coined the phrase "participatory culture" in 1992, did you have any idea how participatory it would get? 

I never would have imagined it, to be honest. My understanding of the concept has deepened over time. In 1992, I used "participatory culture" as the subtitle of my book, Textual Poachers, which just came out in a 20th anniversary edition. I was trying to set up a basic contrast between the ways that mass media had created a spectator culture and the ways that fandom was asserting a collective and individual right to par­ticipate within media culture, often through the production of new kinds of works — fan fiction primarily, but also fan music and fan video — from the raw materials that the culture industry provided. My thinking at the time was informed by writers like Seymour Papert, who had described the forms of cultural participation which had grown up around the Samba Schools in Brazil, but my thinking lacked much cultural scope or depth. 

 

 

The Colbert Super PAC: Magic happens!

Among the immersive media experiences we spotlighted at SXSW's Immersion 101 discussion last spring was Stephen Colbert's faux presidential campaign, which started on The Colbert Report and grew to include not only stump speeches but the formation of an actual Super PAC. Launched in response to the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which struck down government-imposed limits on "independent" political spending by corporations and the like as an affront to free speech, the Colbert Super PAC was no joke. Through an outrageous series of segments on his Comedy Central show, Colbert and his attorney, former Federal Election Commission chairman Trevor Potter, demonstrated just how ridiculous—and appalling—the rules on Super PACs are. A couple of weeks after SXSW, Colbert's Super PAC—Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which by that point had raised more that $1 million—won a Peabody Award, one of America's top prizes in journalism. “What an honor! I am truly speechless. Luckily, thanks to Citizens United, my money can speak for me,” Colbert tweeted in response. 

Now, of course, the campaign is over, the big money lost, and Colbert's lust for power has abated. But not, apparently, his appetite for money. Last night, in a final demonstration of the kind of abuses the Super PAC regulations permit, Potter told Colbert how to dispose of the fund's remaining $800,000 in a way that would make him very, very happy. For anybody with leftover campaign dollars out there, this video is highly instructive.