Television Studies After TV

Understanding Television in the Post-Broadcast Era

Graeme Turner, Jinna Tay, Graeme Turner, Jinna Tay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134021666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Television studies must now address a complex environment where change has been vigorous but uneven, and where local and national conditions vary significantly. Globalizing media industries, deregulatory policy regimes, the multiplication, convergence and trade in media formats, the emergence of new content production industries outside the US/UK umbrella, and the fragmentation of media audiences are all changing the nature of television today: its content, its industrial structure and how it is consumed.

Television Studies after TV leads the way in developing new ways of understanding television in the post-broadcast era. With contributions from leading international scholars, it considers the full range of convergent media now implicated in understanding television, and also focuses on large non-Anglophone markets – such as Asia and Latin America — in order to accurately reflect the wide variety of structures, forms and content which now organise television around the world.

Part One
What is television?

Introduction

Television is no longer a stand-alone medium. The major ratings successes of the twenty-first century have been multi-platform, multimedia events. One significant example is Big Brother, with its websites, chat-rooms, live video streaming, and its key narrative moments – the evictions, for instance – turned into public events by being performed before a live audience. The decline of the broadcast era in the West has seen increasing industrial and technological convergence as telecommunications, information technology and the electronic media coalesce under the same corporate umbrellas, and as technologies themselves interact more directly than ever before. Broadband is now the coming thing in the US industry, as the internet develops new forms of access, new modes of interaction and new media products for a youthful, innovation-seeking audience. This has produced an environment where the demand for content has exploded as media companies try to keep pace with the proliferation of new media formats and distribution channels – both in terms of providing content and in terms of working out how to ‘monetize’ these new platforms.

Within this climate, of course, television continues – even if ‘TV’ may not. As Spigel and Olsson’s collection (2004) demonstrates, the model of ‘TV’ can no longer be regarded as normative. Now, in many developed media markets, broadcast television must compete for its audiences against new media formats – not just subscription television, print and radio, but the attractions of the online and mobile environment as well. Admittedly, in such markets as Australia, New Zealand and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom, the free-to-air networks still dominate and continue to address a national audience for much of the time. Even in these markets, however, the situation has changed such that we cannot think of television networks in the way we once did: as merely competing for their slice of the national mass audience. In other locations, such as Latin America, the situation is different again in that there is a transnational, regional audience built upon a transnational language, Spanish, rather than solely upon the citizenship of a territorial state or membership of a national community (Sinclair 1999). Further, and as we will see in Part Four, outside the major markets of the West, the national political contexts in which television is produced and consumed exercise a major influence over what kinds of markets are constructed, and what kinds of experiences are offered to television viewers. Notwithstanding the internationalization of the media industries, these days the answer to the question ‘What is television?’ very much depends on where you are.

Although one of the objectives of this book is to present evidence that might help to problematize the ‘end of broadcasting/rise of broadband’ narrative referred to above, the task of Part One is to focus upon the undeniably dramatic changes – technological, industrial and cultural – that have motivated such a narrative. Michael Curtin’s essay presents a highly nuanced discussion of how these changes have affected the shape and structure of the American television industry as it moves into what he describes as an era of ‘matrix media’ – where the earlier patterns of dominance no longer work, and where the television platform can no longer stand alone. John Hartley’s chapter plots the displacement of the traditional forms of television by the growth of social networking sites and further develops his signature argument that the changing patterns of media consumption implicated in this shift constitute an intrinsically democratic development. For television studies, he argues, there is a significant lesson to be learnt about the importance of examining the productivity of the television/online audience with as much attention as we have previously given to representations in television texts.

Mark Andrejevic also approaches the issue of the productivity delivered by the interactive capacities of digital media, but in a very different way. Rather than focusing on the opportunities that interactivity provides for the active consumer, Andrejevic focuses on the opportunities it provides for the advertiser and marketer. Andrejevic’s version of the politics of the new interactivity is far less optimistic than Hartley’s: rather than empowering the audience, he sees interactivity as providing another avenue through which they are articulated to commercial interests. Finally, David Marshall’s chapter describes the migration of television content away from the television screen, with the rise of internet television, mobile television and television on DVD. This migration, he argues in ways that complement Hartley’s analysis, has had the consequence of changing television from a mass medium of exhibition into what Marshall calls an ‘intermediary form of interpersonal communication’.

Chapter 1
Matrix media

Michael Curtin

As the world’s leading programme exporter, the American television industry has for decades been a trendsetter in the development of the medium worldwide. American TV exports not only entertain and inform audiences in far-flung locales, they also influence local production practices, programme formats, institutional behaviours and audience tastes. As key assets of the world’s largest media conglomerates, the US TV companies appear to be both prosperous and powerful. Yet the latest trends in the industry are somewhat fore-boding, as new competitors, restless advertisers and empowered audiences agitate for change. The network oligopoly of the 1960s that confidently controlled the most powerful mass medium in US history has morphed into a constellation of huge multimedia conglomerates that seem far less confident of their abilities to manage audience behaviours and advertiser needs. Consequently, television companies seem to be undergoing a historic shift in their organizational structures, industry strategies and programming practices. US television, which was founded on principles of broadcast networking, is now moving into the matrix era – a shift that is emblematic of transformations taking place at media institutions around the world.

Several developments during the 2007 season seemed to herald this change. The season began with an agreement between national networks and advertisers to include DVR audiences in their ratings reports, basing calculations for each show on the number of live viewers plus those who watch within three days via DVR. At the time, close to a quarter of all US households owned a DVR and the major networks had been pressing advertisers to acknowledge some of these viewers, since they comprise a substantial share of the audience. In return, the networks accepted advertiser demands for ratings of TV commercials as well as programmes. The agreement represented a fundamental change in the ways in which audiences are measured and interpreted. It allowed networks to claim larger audiences for their shows, but it also intensified accountability for the commercial minutes they sold to sponsors. Both parties saw it as an important innovation aimed at coping with dramatic changes in media technologies and audience use patterns.

Yet these weren’t the only issues troubling the television industry. Executives also expressed concern about growing competition from video games. On 9 March 2008, Nintendo released Super Smash Bros Brawl, updating the enormously popular Super Mario and Super Smash Bros franchises. That evening, television ratings among 18- to 24-year-old males dropped 8 per cent. The following day, they dropped 14 per cent (Fritz 2008:1). Furthermore, studies showed that young people spent 25 per cent more time online than viewing television. Just as worrisome, an increasing number of Americans were turning for video entertainment and information to the internet, a medium that Google dominates with 38 per cent of all video streaming (ComScore 2008a). Although television companies remained the leading producers of video content, their historic control of distribution seemed increasingly uncertain.

As these changes unfolded, another daunting challenge emerged as Hollywood writers voted to strike on 5 November 2007 in the very heart of the television production season. Late-night talk shows were most immediately affected, and in December drama series were forced on hiatus as well, leaving gaping holes in the prime-time schedule. Ratings plummeted and, by the time a strike settlement was reached in early February 2008, it proved unexpectedly difficult to lure audiences back to network television. Many executives declared the season a washout and nervously shifted their attention to the upcoming (US) fall schedule. Some struck a more contemplative posture, arguing that it was time to reassess the foundational assumptions and practices of the industry. As if to emphasize the point, all four networks announced that they would transform their upfront sales presentations in May, seeking to demonstrate that, despite the apparent slide in ratings, the national networks remained leaders of the overall television economy and that, along with their corporate siblings, they could attract substantial audiences across a range of electronic media, including the internet.

Interestingly, intermedia rights were the key point of disagreement between the networks and the writers during the strike, with the latter arguing for a share of revenues earned via new delivery systems. During the classical network era, when three companies dominated American television, writers were compensated for prime-time showings and syndicated reruns, a formula that carried over easily into the cable era. Yet that compact became subject to debate during the 1980s, due to the development of VCR technology. At the time, writers tried to convince the studios to share a percentage of video revenues, but executives claimed it was too early in the development of video to establish a revenue-sharing formula and that high royalty rates might smother the nascent industry. After a bitter strike in 1988, the two sides settled on 0.3 per cent royalty on reportable gross sales. As video took off and became a multi-billion-dollar industry, the formula was earning writers only pennies from each sale and it therefore became a bitter point of contention, since royalties are often the only source of income for writers during inevitable stretches of unemployment.

In 2007, screenwriters were determined not to let the video rights formula established 20 years earlier become the basis for internet royalties, but media executives countered that rising costs and growing competition made it difficult for them to surrender internet revenues at a time when the income from online sources was minimal and tenuous. Executives for the media conglomerates seemed to be speaking out of both sides of their mouths, however. To advertisers at the upfront sales events, network executives presented their companies as powerful multimedia providers, while only months before they had told the writers exactly the opposite. Although seemingly duplicitous, their position pointed to a momentous transformation of the American television industry as it moved from the network era into the matrix era.

During the 1950s, when American television was in its infancy, executives confronted the challenge of building a durable and prosperous industry, despite the enormous capital costs of production and distribution. At the time, most agreed that television would be ten times as expensive as radio, a prospect that encouraged industry leaders and policy makers to advocate for a centralized commercial system in the hope of realizing economies of scale. By the time television took off, three networks were solidly entrenched and would remain so for more than 20 years, a system based on principles of national mass production, distribution and consumption – what Michele Hilmes (2007) refers to as the classical network era.

With the arrival of cable, these mass media logics were challenged, as the number of channels multiplied and the audience began to fragment. Joseph Turow (1998) has shown how advertisers fuelled this transition, as they sought to undermine the network monopoly and to pursue greater efficiencies in the delivery of advertising messages to targeted audiences. Amanda Lotz (2007) portrays this period as the multichannel transition, suggesting that the fundamental logic of the network system remained in place, even though audience behaviours were changing. That is, programme development, scheduling and advertising practices remained largely the same, even as hints of a more profound transformation began to emerge in the 1990s.

Unlike the mass television era, when the industry churned out inoffensive mass-appeal programming, executives during the multichannel transition began to pursue groups of viewers who were passionate about particular ideas, topics and interests. These niches were constituted as much by their audiences’ shared world-views as they were by their sense of difference from other viewers. To serve these audiences, producers began to pitch programmes with ‘edge’, meaning both programmes that pushed up against the boundaries of mass taste and programmes that hailed their viewers as self-consciously distinct from others. These niche programmes were not for everyone. Indeed, they offended some viewers while catering to the passions of others (Curtin 1996).

Observing these changes, executives came to believe that they needed to compensate for the erosion of network ratings by investing in niche cable channels as well as mass-appeal network services. Furthermore, they needed to anticipate the emergence of new digital media offerings and internet services. This led to a period of mergers and empire building during the 1990s, resulting in the formation of huge media conglomerates premised on the notion that content might successfully be exploited across a range of media. Proponents argued that successful corporations would be those that could control multiple sites of creativity and diverse modes of distribution, and could operate them in synergistic harmony.

Yet synergy was easier to imagine than to execute, largely because the various components of each conglomerate were too accustomed to operating as distinct units: as network broadcasters, cable channels, internet portals, and so on. Moreover, line executives were compensated on the basis of the performance of their respective divisions, not on the health of the overall corporation. In the very top echelon of the media conglomerate, synergy seemed a logical objective, but down in the trenches executives and creative talent often fought bitter battles with their corporate cousins. When the merger bubble burst shortly after the dawn of the new millennium, many executives became openly critical of the huge conglomerates, which they averred only made sense to investment bankers who pocketed fat fees for putting them together. Consequently, the promise of synergy began to fade as media executives more or less went back to their old ways. Despite such resistance, changes in the media industries continued to unfold, driven largely by the fact that audiences and advertisers were increasingly engaging with television as part of a multimedia environment.

The 2007–8 TV season therefore proved to be something of a tipping point for the industry, a moment of crisis when executives and creative talent were again forced to revisit the issues of synergy and intermedia strategy. In part, they needed to recalibrate daily practices, audience-measurement techniques and revenue-sharing formulas, but at a deeper structural level they needed to rethink the spatial logic of electronic media. Both the radio and television eras in the United States were premised on the notion of broadcasting: the dispersal of information and entertainment from a central source to a diverse audience, limited only by the reach of electronic transmission waves. Radio did not discriminate among its listeners; indeed, as Roland Marchand (1985) argued, it played upon the ambiguity of second-person address, beckoning ‘you’, the mass audience, and ‘you’, the individual listener at home, while also massaging the two into an ‘us’. Advertisers paid to become part of that circle of mutual recognition, and the most powerful among them would underwrite the interconnection of transmitters across the country so that they might deliver their messages from highly centralized facilities in New York and Hollywood to a vast, networked nation. By the 1960s, each of the three major television networks regularly drew close to 25 per cent of all television households to their prime-time schedules. Yet during the 2007 season, prime-time audiences for each of the four leading networks averaged roughly 5 per cent of television households, only a fraction of what they had attracted during the classical era. Interestingly, daily television viewing hours remained high – in fact, higher than the 1960s, at 4 hours 35 minutes – but it was coming from more centres and flowing through more circuits than ever before: via DVD, cable, satellite and broadband; via Telemundo, Spike, Netflix and YouTube (Nielsen Media Research 2006). It was no longer a broadcast medium or a network medium, or even a multichannel medium; television had become a matrix medium, an increasingly flexible and dynamic mode of communication.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘matrix’ was first employed with reference to social life during the late nineteenth century, when biological metaphors spawned conceptions of human societies as comprising complex, dynamic and interconnected elements. In the 1960s, managerial experts began to invoke the term with respect to flexible organizational structures, as opposed to linear or hierarchical institutions. This emphasis on complexity and flexibility was seemingly picked up by the telecommunications industry as it developed the matrix switch, which is an array of circuits laid out in a grid so that paths can be established between any input port and any output port. A matrix switch can, furthermore, provide full bandwidth to multiple transmissions. When confronted with traffic congestion, it allows signals to be broken down and rerouted, only to be reassembled at their destination. These basic principles of electronic design prevailed during the late twentieth century, but just as important, they governed the development of vast telecommunication systems, which were often portrayed as large-scale iterations of the matrix switch: a field of paths and possibilities for multiple users.

If the classical network era was characterized by centralized production and transmission to an undifferentiated mass audience, the matrix era is characterized by interactive exchanges, multiple sites of productivity, and diverse modes of interpretation and use. Although huge corporations continue to shape and influence the media environment, they can no longer presume to deliver a national mass audience at an appointed hour, and they can no longer market the attention of that audience to eager advertisers at the upfront presentations each spring. For media industries, the matrix era suggests emerging new structures and practices as well as changing conceptions of advertising, which remains the single most important source of media financing.¹

It is always difficult to lay a confident finger on watershed moments of significant historical change, but the 2007–8 season seemed to offer stark evidence that the television industry was undergoing a profound transformation. CBS saw its viewership plummet by almost 30 per cent, from a 7.9 rating to a 5.6 average for the season. ABC and Fox experienced a similar slide, and NBC brought up the rear with a 4.8 rating (Simons 2008). In response to its changing fortunes, NBC announced that it would substantially alter its upfront sales presentation in May, transform its marketing practices and reconfigure its season schedule. Instead of a conventional fall premiere, NBC said it would introduce new series throughout the year, giving more attention to the promotion of each new show. Instead of a 23-week season anchored by autumn premieres and summer reruns, it would shift to a 52-week schedule that would constantly be adapted and reinvigorated by the addition of new series. And, rather than presenting the entire season’s schedule at the upfront market in New York, NBC ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART ONE What is television?
• PART TWO The function of post-broadcast television
• PART THREE Television and social change
• PART FOUR Television content: what’s on now?
• Bibliography