Re-scheduling Television in the Digital Era

Hanne Bruun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000025446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how the television industry is adapting its production culture and professional practises of scheduling to an increasingly non-linear television paradigm, a testing ground where different communicative tools are tried out in a volatile industry.

Based on four case studies the book argues that a new television paradigm is being produced from within the multiplatform television organisations themselves in order to adapt to changing viewer habits and the tensions between digital and broadcast television. Drawing on a unique genre and production studies approach that cuts across the humanities and sociology in television studies, chapters cover in-depth studies of:

• The communicative changes to the on-air schedule as a televisual text phenomenon in the digital era, and how the conceptualisations of the audience are changing in scheduling and curation for multiplatform portfolios

• The changing production culture of scheduling in companies for their multiplatform portfolios

• The dilemmas of curation in multiplatform portfolios.

Situated at the intersection of the humanities and sociology in media production studies, this book will be of key interest to scholars and students of television studies, media production studies and cultural studies and to researchers and media professionals and management in the television industry.

1 What is the schedule, and why study it?

Introduction

I am sitting in my living room on a Saturday at 7.53 pm 29th of September 2018. Together with my husband, and a lot of other Danes we are watching television and waiting for the Danish version of the British reality game show The Big Bake Off to start. The show has been a big hit for DR1, the main channel of the Danish public service radio and television company DR, and DR is about to air its 7th season of the show and has moved the show from Monday at 8 pm to Saturday. The few minutes of television that we are watching before the show starts is not scheduled in the online TV guide we use, but it is a very familiar and common part of the daily experience of being a television viewer. What we witness is a channel voice greeting us and building expectations towards the show that is about to start “in a moment” while showing a trailer from the upcoming episode. The channel voice goes on to tell us what DR has to offer on 3 of its other 5 channels “right now” showing trailers for these programmes. This is followed by the promotion and a trailer for the upcoming Danish drama series on DR1 later this Fall. The speak and trailers that offers us to see something else now or later on another channel is topped by the information that DR’s streaming service DRTV offers us a preview of the next episode of a documentary on DR3, DR’s youth channel. The DR1 channel voice then finally announces that The Big Bake Off is starting, and the show begins. If we had turned on one of the commercially funded channels instead of DR that is financed by a media tax, we would have been asked to wait while the commercials were shown as well as all the announcements of the different sponsors involved in financing the programme we were about to watch.

The situation described above is probably very familiar to everyone watching traditional linear television now-a-days, and the piece of television content experienced is a bit of the so-called on-air schedule and ‘continuity,’ which is the industry term for the bits in between the programmes. In television studies, the schedule, including the on-air schedule and ‘continuity,’ is fundamental to what is understood as a key characteristic of television as a time structured medium and to how the everyday life of the audience and the medium is intertwined. The schedule is perhaps even one of the most distinctive features of television as a medium. It not only creates a setting for the individual programmes but is also a communicative interface between the television channel, the company and the viewers. The schedule is a prism of current changes to television and a playground for navigating these changes within the industry. In this book I argue that research on the on-air schedule and on scheduling is more important than ever because it is much more than the distribution of content. It is communication and relationship building with an audience. The book joins forces with a new wave of scholarly interest emerging especially in Europe because of the tradition for public service television, and it is connected to a broader set of changes to television in the digital era. Since the arrival of broadband internet, the access to high-speed web connections in households and on mobile devices, and the possibility to distribute audio-visual content over the public internet the incumbent television industry is moving into a transitional period that is changing the schedule as a genre and how it is produced. Interactive social media like YouTube and on demand services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO have enhanced the viewers’ control of what to watch, and of, when and where they watch television. Watching television does not have to take place on a television set and has become much more independent of the time structures of the schedule compared to what was possible using the Digital Video Recorders (DVR) and previously remote controls. The content is mobile in terms of devices and location, and the programmes do not need to be embedded in the timeliness of a schedule in order to reach an audience. The content is accessible as files in databases that are interactively connected to the users and respond to this specific use in different ways using algorithms. The content does not need to fit the slot structures of a schedule that is mirroring and shaping the temporal structures of everyday life but is shaped by what Johnson (2019) terms ‘frames that organise content within services and devices and shape how it is experienced’ (p. 9). To sum up, scheduling is currently marked by the tensions between a familiar linear television paradigm and an emerging non-linear television paradigm, and at least these five key characteristics of the two paradigms collide (Table 1.1):

Table 1.1 Two television paradigms

The schedule, including the on-air schedule and ‘continuity,’ can be regarded as a ‘child’ of these key characteristics of the linear television paradigm outlined above and its industrial logics. An important part of these industrial logics is the dominating business model in the television industry: the commercial break. As an integrated part of the on-air schedule and ‘continuity’ this business model is presently challenged as part of the tensions between a linear and a non-linear television paradigm. This means that the non-linear paradigm potentially upsets the schedule as a point of connection between the communicative, industrial and cultural-political dimensions of television’s role in a society. These dimensions are potentially at stake, and this book is an investigation of how the television companies navigate in the tensions between the two paradigms, and its focus is on how the work influences the role of the schedule and of scheduling as a professional craft.

The television industry in many countries all over the world is marked by this technological disruption and it is safe to say that understanding television and the television industry in the digital era is a work still in progress in television studies. Among others, Amanda Lotz’s work based on the development of the television industry in the United States has been very important and influential. Lotz argues that the television industry in the United States is currently in a historic phase of transition on the route towards a so-called post-network era (Lotz 2014: 21–32). Furthermore, drawing on Bernard Miege’s three models of media production logics, Lotz argues that the flow model typical for radio and television industries is giving way to a publishing model best known from the film, music and book publishing industries (Lotz 2017: 7–10). Even if there certainly is very hard evidence of fundamental changes taking place in the television industry in Lotz’s work, these assumptions are based on a rather linear and simplistic notion of how media development works, and second they are reflecting the commercial context of the North American media system. As suggested by Grainge and Johnson (2018) based on their analysis of the managerial discourse on the BBC iPlayer understanding the development of the television industry in the digital era needs some further discussions based on findings from research on how the television industry develops in media systems outside of the United States. Enli and Syvertsen argue that it is generally needed to include political and cultural factors in the analysis of how television is developing (Enli and Syvertsen 2016). Especially the political tradition of elaborated cultural-political regulation and subsidies on a national and international level must be considered, as well as the priority given to well-funded public service obligated television broadcasters in the North-Western European and Nordic countries. Furthermore, the ‘media ecosystem’ (ibid.: 147) in different markets is important and especially the balance between private and public media.

The television industry in the Nordic countries is first of all defined by a very strong public media sector, and even within this context the television industry in Denmark stands out. The two television companies, TV 2 and the Danish Radio and Television Company (DR), both with public service obligations, dominate the television market with a combined share of viewing of 76 per cent in 2018 compared to a combined share of viewing of 65 per cent between BBC, ITV and Channel4 in the United Kingdom (BARB 2019: 28). This strong market position frames how commercial television companies try to navigate in order to get a piece of the pie on a market with a decline in traditional television viewing. Both companies have a platform neutral obligation to inform, enlighten and entertain. Especially it is a paramount obligation to offer a population of 5.6 million people a substantial production of Danish-language content across genres and subject areas in order to join the citizens in small and large communities (DR’s Public Service Kontrakt 2019–2023; Tilladelse til TV 2 Danmark 2019-2013). Currently around 70 per cent of the content is in Danish (2018). DR’s streaming service DRTV is included in the licence fee that will gradually be turned into a media tax by 2022. TV 2 is funded by subscription and commercials, and the basic version including commercials of the subscription-based streaming service TV 2 Play is included, if TV 2 is part of a bundled cable television subscription provided by the telecom companies. If not, TV 2 Play is as a stand-alone service in different versions on the internet. A more elaborated account of the Danish television market, the major companies and regulatory regime will follow in Chapter 3, but for now and to sum up, the industrial and cultural-political dimensions of the schedule and of scheduling are very visible given the public service obligations and the popularity of public service television. For public service television the challenge facing scheduling is to maintain this market position and to meet the obligations in the tensions between the two paradigms.

The second reason for looking into how scheduling develops using the Danish television market as a case has to do with the fact that Denmark is part of the ‘avant-garde’ in terms of being an actual digital society (DESI/Digital Economy and Society Index 2019, European Commission, 2019). Google and Apple are using Denmark as a datacentre hub because of its digital infrastructures, low energy prices, green energy supply and stable political environment (Oxvig 2018). The changes to the television industry by the emerging non-linear paradigm are supported by the fact that 99 per cent of households have internet access and 93 per cent have high-speed broadband access (2019). Furthermore, the use of mobile broadband is on the increase and in 2018 Denmark had the highest 4G coverage in Europe, and in 2019 the 5G started to be rolled out. In terms of digital devices 61 per cent of the households have a smart TV, and 88 per cent have a smart phone (Agency of Culture and Palaces Mediernes udvikling i Danmark – Internetbrug og enheder 2019: 22). Based on these conditions, the viewing habits in the population are changing fast and 53 per cent of the Danes (12+) stream from the broadcaster’s services every week and 40 per cent use Netflix every week (2018). Young segments of the population are spearheading this development, and the changing viewer habits will be elaborated in Chapter 4. However, the older segments of the population are following in their footsteps at a high rate which will gradually close the alleged generational gab. 98 per cent of the 12–34-year-old and 88 per cent of the 35–54-year-old stream every month. A rising number of the 55–70-year-old are doing the same, from 55 per cent in 2017 to 62 per cent in 2018, and the use among the +71-year-old rose from 31 to 34 per cent. (Agency of Culture and Palaces Mediernes udvikling i Danmark: Streaming - Audiovisual Services 2018: 10).

Based on these two characteristics the question is what happens to television scheduling in a television market where the non-linear use of television is increasing, which is strongly supported by the mature digital infrastructure and the cultural policies regulating a dominating public service sector? And furthermore, what happens to scheduling in a market where the use of international streaming services like Netflix is rapidly becoming a mainstream activity among the viewers but where public service television is still very popular compared to commercial television, and where fairly traditional public service obligations and business models are still in place? The book uses the, in many ways, extreme case of the television industry in Denmark to illuminate and discuss how the television schedule and scheduling as well as television in general are developing in the tensions between two television paradigms that in many ways collide. The idea is that the combination of a very small, public service television dominated and digitally advance market makes the study able to unlock empirical perspective and a broader set of issues around scheduling, the future of the television industry and especially public service television’s ability to attract an audience. This book will add to the confusion and insecurities about the future of television within the industry and in television studies by suggesting that a third television paradigm is presently being produced by television companies. The companies are faced with the new competitors like YouTube and Netflix, and they are changing from within by including streaming services in their portfolios in different ways. The companies are in that sense not just to be regarded as objects of change in the industry but are powerful agents of change themselves trying to ensure their own individual survival as a company and in some cases to meet cultural-political obligations too. The book traces how these changes and adaption played out based on findings from 2014 to 2019, a period when Netflix became a serious competitor and the focus of the television companies shifted from cross-media production towards non-linear production and distribution.

The functions and tiers of the schedule

In this book the schedule is regarded as the point of connection between industrial and cultural-political dimensions, and the historical development of the schedule as a competitive tool is where changes in the television industry become very visible. This role as a prism of change has to do with the fact that in traditional linear television the schedule performs five communicative functions on-air between the programmes that create the interface between the company and the viewers:

1. The on-air schedule has to inform the viewers of upcoming content, retain the viewers’ attention during these intermissions and even attract new users. The text produced must tackle the tension between, on the one hand, the schedule and the programmes, and, on the other hand, the time viewers spend waiting for the next programme to begin. In short, it needs to inform and to entertain in order to control and secure an audience flow. In public service television the schedule additionally has to meet cultural-political demands to make television a significant source of information, enlightenment and entertainment, and to support a cultural and political democracy. As a consequence, the public service companies aim to construct channel schedules that will make the viewers watch specific and/or a variety of genres, e.g. by placing the news before or after popular entertainment shows, or by offering niche channels for special target groups, e.g. young people. Internal diversity and a mixed menu are part of the normative ideal guiding the production of the schedule and implicitly the conceptualisation of the audience.
2. The on-air schedule is where the provider explicitly tries to brand itself and its products (Stigel 2004, 2006). It is where the quintessence of the specific ‘house style’ (Ellis 1982) of the provider’s portfolio of channels, platforms and content is presented in the interstitials of ‘continuity.’
3. The on-air schedule is where the dominant business model of commercially financed, linear television (with or without pu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 What is the schedule, and why study it?
• 2 The schedule as a TV genre: theoretical approach
• 3 Communicative characteristics of the on-air schedule
• 4 The implied viewer of ‘continuity’
• 5 The changing production culture
• 6 Dilemmas in multi-platform scheduling
• 7 Digital television
• Index