But, much to my dismay, there are actually a lot of (non-evil, non-monetary) benefits to a non-neutral web, especially to people who want to see robust interactive and video content served over these pipes (despite what Tubefilter might write). The hardware and software of the web runs into frustrating limitations when there’s a limited amount of bandwidth to be distributed equally to everyone. “Everyone” includes web video producers, who rightly need more bandwidth, and bloggers, who rightly need less. Mark Cuban put it well yesterday:
…in a net neutrality environment no bits get priority over any other bits. All bits are equal…When that happens, bits collide. When bits collide they slow down. Sometimes they dont reach their destination and need to be retransmitted. Often they dont make it at all. When video bits dont arrive to their destination in a timely manner, internet video consumers get an experience that is worse than what traditional tv distribution options.
We can’t have our cake and eat it too. We can’t argue that we want to web to be neutral to allow for innovation and cultural progress, but then desperately need more than our equally distributed share of the web in order for our art form to progress. But do we really have to surrender our rights for the good of artistic innovation? We did that once, and boy has that one come back to haunt us…
I’m just wondering if there isn’t a third path here, an alternative that makes it so we don’t allow huge corporations to unfairly and disproportionately benefit from a non-neutral web, but still allows us to take fuller advantage of limited technology. Should we make a third-party, unaffiliated entity that oversees connection throttling, the UN of the web? Or could someone design a program for the infrastructure of the network that will monitor broadband usage and adjust limits accordingly? Is that even possible?
With this week’s announcement of NBC falling under the same corporate umbrella as NBCU’s cable empire (Bravo, Syfy, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, the list goes on…), broadcast television is dead. Where there has always been a dotted line between the profits of the NBCU cable empire and the losses of NBC Entertainment, there’s now also a dotted line between their content production divisions. How long will it be until Universal Cable Productions folds into Universal Media Studios? I’ll set the O/U at a year. Then, the only thing differentiating NBC from its cable counterparts will be its news division (which, by the way, is already branded as MSNBC…the name of the cable channel. Try going to http://www.nbcnews.com).
And yet, the broadcast model of ad-supported media is as strong as ever and is poised to become even stronger as it becomes fragmented and attached to content. It’s not news that advertisers have generally become more content-focused as they’ve invested in digital content, whether it’s Nestea’s investment in CTRL or Microsoft’s sponsorship of The Guild. It’s almost a throwback to the birth of TV: the Colgate Comedy Hour, Texaco Star Theatre.
The difference now is content comes with a distribution outlet attached to it (you know, the medium is the message and all that). Digital content is increasingly becoming aesthetically tied to the medium in which it’s being presented. Not every web show is meant to live on YouTube or Hulu; some are better viewed on iTunes or through Xbox Live, or even in their own complex interactive environments. On top of that, it’s become clear that for a show to be attractive to sponsors, producers are being held responsible for protecting the way brands are presented by ensuring the brand message isn’t diluted or otherwise changed by anything around it. In other words, if your show is sponsored by Kodak, you can’t put it on YouTube for fear their algorithm serves a Fuji ad right next to it. The solution? Create your own site to distribute your content, a site you can design to be Kodak-branded. This is still the broadcast model for media, it’s just fragmented. Today, creating a web show can be likened to starting your very own network. Which means you can sell your very own ad inventory.
On top of that, you’re free on the web to do something TV producers would only die for: you can take your existing content or create new content related to your main show/network and sell it to other people at the same time! Premium content centers like YouTube, Hulu, and blip.tv have huge user bases to tap into and distribution deals with platforms you might not have made agreements with. Think of these guys as the CBS/ABC/NBC/Fox of the digital world – places that don’t produce content themselves necessarily, but sell advertising around acquired content. They’ll increase the reach of your content and can drive traffic back to your main site for your advertisers. So you can sell or just post for free smaller pieces of your content to these major content centers, almost as marketing for your own network. If it’s a hit, the big guys make money, you as a producer make money, and your sponsoring brand makes money as traffic is driven back to your site.
So the broadcast model might be dead on television, but it’s essentially just gaining an extra dimension online with the ability for content creators to create and own their distribution channels. We’ll see the standard licensing model applied to the big guys, as it was to the four major broadcast networks. But the smaller networks focused on single shows will be able to take advantage of their control of their distribution and make another revenue stream out of it.
I had the pleasure of seeing We Live in Public the other night, Ondi TImoner’s well-done and well-received follow-up to DiG!. It follows the life of Josh Harris, a guy you’d think us web series enthusiasts would know more about, considering he founded the very first web TV station, Pseudo, using a lot of money from dot.com investors. He was obsessed with the idea of the then-burgeoning internet as the beginning of a surveillance culture, and used a lot of his money to experiment on artists like himself, seeing what would happen if subjected to an extended period inside a planned community where surveillance was law. The results were some cool, if at times inhuman, experiments that radically altered the lives of the people who took part in them (Harris included).
Where the film lost me is when it tried to link Harris’s prognostications about the future of the internet with where we are today, or where we’re headed. On the one hand, today’s level of connectedness definitely implies surveillance of sorts – I can almost tell you every time John Mayer farts, and I’ve never been happier than when I stopped listing myself as “single” on Facebook so I could stop being served ads for porn. It is anxiety-inducing how much people can find out about us on the web. But on the other hand, one thing I learned while studyingsocial media in school: it’s much more complicated than all that.
True, there are people out there who take this whole thing to a massive extreme, and resemble the WE LIVE IN PUBLIC experiment a little too much. But who is the average user? The average user learns over time to have much more of a two-way conversation with their virtual and actual selves. As big a rush as it may be to see that you have over 1,000 Facebook friends, or 200 Twitter followers who actually show interest in what you’re doing, or a WoW guild to whom you feel closer than your actual friends, actuality is still lurking behind you, waiting to come back and remind you that it’s not all that easy. That’s what happened to Harris.
But how does this affect the children, who are just discovering what actual reality is? There’s definitely more chance than ever for people growing up with social media to retreat into dark corners and live online, and more chance for people to really endanger themselves because of things we put online. And there is no doubt that kids today (and I include myself) are mediated, forming nostalgic memories about Gilligan’s Island before they can start pining for the good ol’ days when they could just wear a diaper. But I then ask: so what? Is all that really going to severely affect a person’s emotional development any more than, say, your first real fight with your best friend? The jury is still out on that one.
I’d argue that we now have a virtual social development runs in tandem with our reality-based one (and I doubt I’m the first to do so). Both are important parts of growing up in the 21st Century, and both shape the person we end up being. And determining a healthy interaction between the two is important as well.
Which leads me to my point. Avoiding any problems related to virtual social development and privacy protection is as simple as introducing good, thoughtful media education in schools. I’m talking elementary schools. You learn how to interpret text from age 7 or so – by that time most kids have been online and using interactive media for…7 years. And I don’t think I need to argue that it’s just as easy to manipulate through computer as though the pen, just as easy to create stories and experiences that need interpretation whether you’re writing AHWOSG or creating a MySpace profile.
Media education would benefit web TV producers too. Imagine having a huge audience that is trained to interpret what you do in the same way they are trained to interpret what I’m writing. It would completely change the game. We wouldn’t have to have these conversations anymore. This blog wouldn’t exist.
So go see We Live In Public, because it’s a great film that will get you talking about these issues with the people around you. They are issues that need to be discussed, and aren’t enough.
It’s not news that NBC’s ratings are in the toilet, and the vast majority of critics will argue that it’s a result of the network developing and airing shows that have narrow audience appeal. Shows like Kings, 30 Rock, and the recently-premiered The Listener might be hailedby critics and appreciated by TV nerds like myself, but they don’t appeal to an audience large enough for broadcast television standards.
That’s the traditional way of thinking. But a closer look at the numbers in the age of Hulu and the DVR suggests something a bit different. People don’t watch NBC when the shows air, but NBC shows like The Office are some of the most-viewed premium shows on the web, and they’re DVRd more than most other shows too. What that says is people are watching – in fact they’re watching very closely, making appointments to make sure they have the time to sit down and catch every little Liz Lemon quip and small piece of elaborate production design in the Kings kingdom.
I’m suggesting that higher ratings are not about how narrow or broad the narrative content is. It’s more about the way that content is presented. The overall look and feel of the content encourages audiences to engage with the content in a specific way; NBC’s shows encourage a more focused level of engagement, requiring viewers to seek out venues where they can devote more of their attention to the content.
Few would argue this is the case when comparing shows airing on cable to shows airing on broadcast TV. There’s a marked difference between a show like Breaking Bad (on AMC) and a show like Two and a Half Men (the highest-rated comedy on TV, on CBS). Bad has what you might call a “cinematic” feel to it; it’s single camera, follows a complex protagonist, and requires viewers to pay attention to and analyze what’s going on. In contrast, Men takes viewers by the hand a lot more, following a clearer, defined format that involves segmentation and repetition of key plot points so viewers don’t really need to pay attention to what’s going on in order to be involved. Men encourages a more casual viewer engagement. It’s the type of show you can put on in the background while you’re doing the dishes; Breaking Bad is not.
I think you can say the same thing when comparing a lot of NBC shows to higher-rated counterparts. My favorite joke in last season’s 30 Rock was a quip form Will Arnett, playing a GE executive. “We’re just called G now, I sold the E to Samsung. Now they’re called Same-sung.” Hilarious – but if you’re not paying attention, you might miss it or not understand it. 30 Rock requires the viewer to pay attention or else he or she risks missing a joke. Two and a Half Men has a laugh track.
Maybe casual viewing is the point and purpose for broadcast networks in the new media hierarchy. Really, I’m just defining two different kinds of flow; one is and always had been unique to broadcast, one has developed more with cable. I’d argue that the new television aesthetic emerging on cable and now extending to broadcast doesn’t really respect the traditional flow television. That’s why we want to skip commercials or watch online with limited interruptions; the same kind of segmentation and interruption that once defined broadcast TV doesn’t apply to 30 Rock or Breaking Bad.
So in the future, broadcast networks should stick to that original model, providing a televisual experience filled with programming meant to be watched casually, allowing viewers to channel surf and make popcorn while Seacrest throws to the boring pre-taped interviews on Idol. Cable can provide that more intense experience, giving us shows that encourage a more focused level of audience engagement like Breaking Bad, The Shield, and The Sopranos.
And then there’s the web. Viewing habits outlined above suggest that audiences are using the web like a secondary DVR, and I think that’s one purpose. I also think the casual aesthetic has proven it has very important place on the web. But in terms of original programming created for the web, I think we need to take this as a lesson and focus on the premium experience, having our content encourage a more focused level of engagement. Before you start citing data about short form content and the frenetic, frenzied nature of surfing the web, let’s take a moment to recognize that CBS doesn’t really stream its hit shows online (certainly compared to how much NBC and ABC focus on it). CBS’s biggest comedy only has short clips on its website. Why aren’t fans clamoring to see Two and Half Men online? Because that’s not the best way to view it, so no one cares.
So to really take off, web series need to be bigger. The interactive experience already encourages a more intimate relationship with media; why not take advantage of that by making narrative content for the web that does the same?
A test of this theory will come in the fall, when NBC premieres two promising new comedies. Community is a single-camera following a quirky character. It has a great cast, no laugh-track, and moves through jokes quickly.
In contrast, 100 Questions is a multi-camera sitcom with a laugh track (the first in a while from the network; it almost seems off brand for them to be airing a multicam!). The show is about as standard as you can get, with a cute female lead, attractive and charming ancillary characters, and a narrative that follows the standard sitcom format as closely as any show on TV.
Which will do better? You heard it here first: Community will have a strong, devoted fan following but will struggle in the ratings. It will be one of the highest streamed shows on Hulu and might even make an appearance in the iTunes top 10, like Kings did. 100 Questions won’t do amazingly well either (comedies always take a while to find their feet), but will steadily grow its audience as the season progresses and will, in general, be deemed by the media the more ‘promising’ show of the two.
the networks have simply relegated themselves to being content producers. …The value of NBC is not in a show like Heroes or Friends. The value of NBC is the more than 70 years that it has taken the network to create expectations for generations…. By joining Hulu, NBC is essentially saying there is no value to those three letters.
Kevin is being pretty short-sighted by making some key assumptions. On the one hand, he’s right. A brand like NBC doesn’t really actually exist until people are taught what the brand means, and it’s been shown time and again that younger, web-savvy kids don’t see the difference between network content and independent fare. But really, why shouldn’t it be the same? It’s been said for years now: on the web, content is king. The networks will still be able to differentiate themselves from the independent producers because they’ll have the bigger budgets and the larger reaches; eventually the brand will still be defined to the user, it might just take some more time.
Networks will also still have good ol’ television to set them apart from competitors. Kevin is committing one of the biggest sins of new media trend-watching: he’s being an absolutist, claiming that the new media will completely replace the old. My vinyl player begs to differ. So does my television. And so does Nielsen, whose first quarter Three Screen Report came out today, studying the usage habits of Americans on their TVs, computers and mobile devices. Just like previous editions of this study and other versions looking at other forms of media, the TSR showed as viewing on mobile devices and computers goes up, so does viewing on traditional TV. Cord-cutting, in other words, is a myth.
With that in mind, it seems pretty clear that the online video space is poised to watch its advertising inventory inflate in value pretty dramatically. I’d say that’s 3-5 years away, once measurements of audience engagement and view counts can gain a bit more traction with advertisers. And that’s the last thing Kevin got wrong: he’s assuming online video ad value is going to stay constant(ly low) forever. There will be a lot of money to be made for third-party content pipes to syndicate content. A structure similar to the current network affiliate system could well eventually develop, where networks show their content on their own sites and distribute them to third parties with whom they’ve made distribution deals.
All of that means the networks should have an easier time than anyone in making their brands and their content take over the digital space. Doesn’t that seem obvious? The huge corporations with nearly infinite financial, talent, promotional, and legal resources will have an easy time getting their content out there and controlling it. Also, the Pope is Catholic.
Now, it’s time to think bigger. Time to take these new aesthetics and styles and apply them to more ambitious projects with more complicated, robust narratives. I’m talking about graduating from linear, episodic narrative and going toward an interactive medium’s inevitable end point. We need to start building worlds, not just stories.
A world is bigger than just one story – it’s a collection of stories that all follow a defined set of rules and conventions and use consistent motifs and styles. Worlds are not confined to one story line or one medium. Star Wars is probably the most complete example – fanfic books and spinoff movies and TV series all take place within the “Star Wars universe,” even if they don’t directly add to the narrative saga of Anakin, Luke, Amidala, and Leia. But worlds exist elsewhere too – take a look at The Office, with its accompanying Dunder Mifflin Infinity and webisodes. Or SNL, which essentially lives on the web these days, and has found increased TV ratings as a result.
On the web, we have an opportunity that these mainstream shows don’t – rather than making a central story that’s a primary focus and adding secondary content that builds a world around it, we can build the world first and have users decide what the primary story is. We can conceive of projects that, from the beginning, use multiple media to tell a story. These projects will combine long form episodes that can be branded as premium content, shorter episodes that can be watched more casually, and an interactive experience that complements both of them, and they will not intrinsically privilege any one aspect over another. Having these multiple story outlets gives the creators the freedom to take their story whichever way the users decide they prefer it. That’s the perfection of the web series medium, when users have the power to decide what everything looks like.
A fantastic benefit of this is it makes it easier to make money off of web media. With all these different arms to a world, there are so many different opportunities for advertiser tie-ins, distribution deals, and regular old CPMs. Instead of selling an entire series to one sponsor (as The Guild and many others have), you can have multiple sponsors covering each part of the entire project, increasing their exposure and your profits. You could even have one part of your world be subscription-based – like running a cable network and a broadcast network all at the same time.
If this sounds a lot like video games, that’s because the web is an interactive experience….just like a video game. I don’t think people give nearly enough attention to that fact: the way we explore information on the internet owes a lot to the way we explore worlds and discover rules in Mario Galaxy. We learn what we can click (link!) and what we can’t click (no link!). We learn the rules of social interaction with other players/users. We learn the physics of the world – Mario can only jump so high, and we can only scroll so fast (and only when the text is active, not the embedded flash video. Ever notice that? Man, it’s annoying…).
Of course, there’s a problem here: the little indies who are undoubtedly making the absolute best content on the web right now don’t have the capital or the resources to make this kind of project happen. Or do they? That’s my challenge to the web today. Web producers should be proud of where the medium has come from and where it is today, because they’ve worked hard to get it here. But now it’s time to make like Doug, and think big. Let’s raise the bar, stop wishing the medium was legitimized and make it legit ourselves.
Cable networks are understandably scared of giving away their content for free; it would completely up-end their business model, and in the end it would hurt all of us who love shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Men. I like the solution of creating some sort of openID standard that would allow cable subscribers to be able to log into a protected site (hopefully Hulu or YouTube, or both and more) and view cable content online. It just makes the most sense – you pay for it, you get it – and if they could get the interface working seamlessly enough to be unnoticeable, people will do just that – not notice it. If you pay for you cable TV, you can roam all that content online with no limitation. Don’t pay for it? Pirate it.
Yes, this definitely encourages piracy amongst non-cable subscribers. Both of them. Cable penetration is in the 80% range these days, and of the remaining television households, I’d say a nearly negligible number even know how to pirate television. Assuming the networks can keep control of the third-party, overseas sites posting last night’s Damages with Japanese subtitles, piracy should remain under control until broadband expands to the point that downloading an hour of television is as quick as downloading a 5 minute Justin Timberlake song. By that point, people will be used to this model already. And remember, more piracy = more legal viewers.
You'll pay...you'll ALL PAY!
There is a deeper, more apocalyptic counterpoint here, one raised loud and clear last year when Jim Griffin first proposed a “piracy surcharge” to be tacked onto your internet bill allowing you to download as much music as you want, from wherever you want. But while there is a valid argument that music is free and paying a sort of “tax” on it is unfair, no such argument can be made in regards to television. Unlike music, it costs (increasingly less) money to make movies and television, and it requires (increasingly less) expensive technology. You can sing “American Pie” around a campfire; you can’t make 30 Rock. And unlike music, the public is used to paying for television – 80% of them already do!
So let’s all stop worrying about what’s going to become of watching our favorite cable shows online for free. Make them available to subscribers in an easy-enough, seamlessly integrated interface, and we’ll thankfully have great cable shows for years to come. While we’re at it, let’s give some of that cash to Hulu and the other sites and help them achieve viable business models.
Last year I had a lot of fun working on Outrage with director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering Kofman. The film looks at closeted gay politicians working in the highest echelons of our government, and talks about the ways their remaining closeted is incredibly harmful to the gay population. Here’s the trailer:
Even though they cut out the segment I produced for them (it didn’t end up fitting into the argument they were making…or at least I like to think that…), the film is really effective at showing the concrete consequences of a very cerebral, personal issue. Two things struck me in particular: they look at closeted politicians who are crafting anti-gay policy, and take a moment to pay close attention to those who are voting down AIDS funding legislation. Quite literally, these closeted gays were allowing mass murder in the late 1980s and early 1990s, allowing the disease to go unchecked and spread like wildfire all because the politicians were too afraid to ally themselves close to the issue for fear of being labeled as a homo.
More relevant to this blog however is their examination of the media’s complicity in allowing these powerful men and women to remain closeted and commit heinous acts of hypocrisy. It’s interesting how taboo being gay really is, and how even talking about it raises eyebrows that people would just rather not raise. The homosexual population is in an interesting place in terms of civil rights; while they are most certainly denied them, it’s much easier for the mainstream media to find a way to rationalize not talking about homosexuality because “gays don’t have it that bad.” The signs of their suffering are not necessarily as visible as, say, blacks being forced into slavery or Muslims being overtly racially profiled, but trust me, gays have it bad. And it’s not right. Just think of it this way:
So do your part to support the Constitution and equal rights for every human on Earth. See Outrage this weekend at one of the following convenient locations:
San Francisco, CA: Landmark Theatres Embarcadero Center
West Hollywood, CA: Sunset 5
Washington, DC: E Street Cinema
New York City, NY: Clearview Chelsea 9
Philadelphia, PA: Ritz at the Bourse
No offense to the very-promising Streamy Awards but the Webbys are kind of a big deal, especially for indie web producers who finally get a chance to be put on par with the big guns.
I especially like their Jimmy Fallon love this year – what a cool project his new show has been so far. I think he’s the first (or second) techie to have a nationally televised broadcast forum in front of him, and since he tapes daily, he can take advantage of it so well. The digital shorts before he went on the air completely sold me on his self-referential, honest humor (which I never thought was honest until he vlogged about it). His first week, he organized a twitter campaign for a random person – hysterical! And the blog at latenightwithjimmyfallon.com is coming along nicely. He’s a great example of just how powerful a cross-media experience can be, especially when it then leaks over into real life. Next step: having Colbert on the show.
Now if only the Webbys felt a little more important. All the internet awards beg the question of whether real genius can ever really exist in a completely democratized medium like the web? Or is that feeling of self-importance that comes with blogging and making an independent web series one of the defining characteristics of creating content for the web?
Marshall Herskovitz (of quarterlife internet fame) had a few things to say about TV working on the web the other day:
Marshall Herskovitz, best known for Thirtysomething on TV and Quarterlife online believes an HBO-like subscription model would work if it was backed by known quantities like himself, Steven Bochco and David Chase. “If it had the marketing money behind it, it could succeed,” Herskovitz said at the AlwaysOn conference in Hollywood Tuesday.
I don’t think he’s right about a subscription model working (Dr. Horrible had Joss Whedon’s web-savvy fan base behind it, and I’m sure most of the streams still came for free on Hulu…despite the huge BUY ON iTUNES button on their main page). But the more important part of his quote: I do think he’s right about marketing.
When’s the last time you saw a web show that had some decent marketing behind it? I’m not talking about email blasts from the creators or setting up a Twitter for the show. I’m talking full on banner ads on relevant websites, integrations on social networks, Google AdWords, and maybe even a “This Hulu video is brought to you by My Roommate the Cylon.”
Most independent web producers will tell you they just don’t have the budget for it. And I’m not going to tell you they’re wrong. But come on; marketing has to be a part of your business plan if you’re going to draw any sort of viewership. Anyone in television will tell you the age-old school of thought: marketing gets audiences to your first episode, and the content has to bring them back. Sure the timeline is different on the web – it’s easier to jump into a web show half way through the second season since it doesn’t take long to catch up on a back log of shortform episodes. But don’t just wait for the long tail to catch up to you.
That’s not to diminish the potential impact of a viral marketing campaign, which obviously can be very effective on the web. But don’t fall into the trap of using viral marketing as an excuse not to market at all – as Seth Godin recently said, on the web “media is free but attention is not.” I have read casual estimates that an effective nationwide viral marketing campaign should cost about $1 million.
Eek, that’s a lot of cash. But you can do a lot of it yourself. My friends The Fine Brothers are masters of the low-budget viral campaign; they’ve been around the web so long they’ve developed a Rolodex of influential people to blast their content to, and those people listen to them. That’s why Ben and Rafi have been on Deadline Hollywood Daily, HuffPo, the front page of YouTube a few times, and many more.
All this leaves me wondering why big media companies haven’t stepped up the marketing for their web shows. It’s disappointing really, because if a big media company stepped up to the plate and put some marketing power behind a web series, the show could really take off, proving the model for all of us. And really, it wouldn’t take much, just a celebrity with a decent web presence to promote enough to get the show to the early adopters. That’s what Herskovitz is referring to in thinking a celebrity could power a subscription-based web show: the power celebrities have for built-in audiences. Maybe it seems counter intuitive to a big network to promote their advertiser-funded web shows (when we make commercials for our commercials, what have we become?) but isn’t that what they do on TV all day, every day?
