Given our many points of convergence, and that this is a blog-post and not a “real” review, I will merely point out a few cherished ideas from Coleman’s book and how they might relate to my ongoing concerns. The first is her use of the term X-reality to mark that place, experience, modality of being that I’m always tripping over when I try to describe the bleed and continuum of on/offline experience. Better yet are her picture-perfect snapshots of the mundane yet elegant ways we encounter X-reality daily.

Her discussion of the vividly actual, neither virtual nor real, and never inauthentic, to better understand X-reality also presses up nicely against my ongoing interest in the fake. In her discussion of the “uncanny valley” of felt virtual inauthenticity, I see my own considerations of the particular power of the productive fake-documentary that is and is undone in one view. The uncanny knowing of a thing and its reverse, a form and its fake, can liberate critique and self-knowing. However, needless to say, my more current understanding of this mode of seeing and knowing as being dominant and ubiquitous online in the ways that we see and show and know, and therefore defanged of most of its radical possibilities for unmaking and rethinking, raises interesting questions for Coleman’s ever more visible body of study (ha) the Avatar.

Finally, her careful consideration of both the changing nature of agency and presence, given her understanding that technology extends our capabilities of communication, community and collaboration, thereby pressing us to both ever more extreme and extended behavior, dovetails neatly with my newest work concerned with the what and how of these X-reality possibilities: can or should we bring previous norms of being and practice, learned from decades of organizing and thinking within the politics of social justice, to the places and ways that we are now human?

What’s HBO Go’s Problem?

“The new scarcity is content, content that is quality,” Digitas chief creative officer Mark Beeching said at the company’s fifth annual Newfront yesterday.

We all know about scarcity on television—or at least we think we know. There are only so many channels on television, and only a handful of them create the headline-grabbing or critic-worthy original programming most people care about. Of course, there’s a lot more television today than ever; whole seasons of television can now be made for $1 million or less. Still, channels don’t order hundreds of shows at a time. Selectivity gives television its power.

The web boasts much more programming, Beeching was saying, and that’s a problem for marketers. If the power of television is curation, web networks have been trying for years to emulate it. To get brands on board, companies like YouTube, Hulu, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft—with Digitas, the five founding partners of this year’s event—need to prove to audiences original web programming is worth watching. To do that, they feel the need to be selective: pick a few programs and push them. They need, in the words of future Participant television chief Evan Shapiro, to “help people know what to watch.”

Hence, the Newfronts. The Newfronts are the digital answer to the broadcasters’ Upfronts, where they parade shows and stars in front of marketers, while ad buys and deals get done backstage. These are also a way to get audiences interested in programs. Such conferences have two directives: watch this show (to audiences) and buy this show (to marketers). Backstage at Newfronts, held in SoHo, advertisers met network execs hungry for cash.

But digital networks have an extra task. They have to sell the medium. Judging from the event yesterday, and the many side events taking place all week, every network seems to have a different idea of how to accomplish these tasks, to position the web as the new television.

Web Programming execs, from left to right: Janet Balis (AOL), Rob Bennett (MSN), Jamie Byrne (YouTube), Andy Forssell (Hulu), John McCarus (Digitas) and Erin McPherson (Yahoo!)

Of all the founding partners—the Big Five to TV’s Big Four—Yahoo! and Hulu might be going the hardest for “big content,” the theme of this year’s Newfronts. Yahoo is branding itself the “first digital network” and is marshaling Katie Couric to help it back up the claim. If Yahoo doesn’t want to be TV, it wants to be bigger than TV:  “This is not TV. This is what I call before ‘TV on steroids,’” said Erin McPherson, Yahoo head of original programming. The network is heavily promoting its much-anticipated, 90-minute, post-apocalyptic animated series, Electric City, written and starring Tom Hanks, with co-starring roles for Holland Taylor and Jeanne Tripplehorn.

Hanks chose Yahoo because of its global reach, McPherson said. Yahoo can distribute a artsy blockbuster around the world, Avatar via the web (Electric City comes with a green message, naturally). “The internet could embrace ambiguity in a way that television can’t,” McPherson said. She has past hits to back her up. Intentional or not, Electric City follows in the footsteps of early web video hits Afterworld and After Judgement, both post-apocalyptic, sci-fi dramas.

Yahoo is choosing to go big, but Hulu has no choice. As the primary site for watching broadcast TV online, viewers who visit the site expect traditional formats.  “The bar is pretty high,” said Andy Forssell, Hulu’s senior vice president of content. The network says its focusing on picking up shows from television and film vets like Morgan Spurlock, Richard Linklater and Seth Meyers who have an interesting idea they couldn’t get on-air. The network’s first half-hour show, Battleground, has received mixed reviews, with Reuters and The Wrap calling it TV-lite, but other respected critics saying it’s must-watch web TV. Forssell encouraged marketers to look out for its shows in the upcoming year, signaling a shift from the very recognizable Battleground.

AOL, now with the powerful Huffington Post in its corner, is aiming to be the CNN of the web, with a live 12-hour news and entertainment program, The Huffington Post Streaming Network. The promo shown at Newfront looked like MSNBC meets Current TV, with young, hip hosts and a lot of swerving cameras. The network will try to leverage Huffington Post‘s high social media activity to get a jump on the competition. AOL’s Janet Balis boasted the site logged its 150 millionth comment yesterday: “It starts with television, but we hope it becomes a social experience,” Balis said.

Microsoft and YouTube are, arguably, moving the farthest away from TV. YouTube, which we’ve covered a lot on this site, has 100 premium channels in the mix, many of which have already premiered and been variously praised and scolded for deviating and emulating television. At the event, YouTube’s content head Jamie Byrne showed a clip from one of their many Latino-targeted channels, this one a reality show about Sofia Vergara from her son on the network NuevOn from former NBC entertainment head Ben Silverman’s studio, Electus.

“We think we’re just getting things started,” Byrne said. “We’re taking the risk out of the scenario for the content creators, so they can think about business.”

What Byrne means is the site, historically known as “a platform about individual videos,” is moving away from promoting the mass of “viral” videos and showcasing what’s marketable. YouTube-approved content will now define YouTube, the quirks smoothed out. Content creators will have a lot less marketing to do, less worrying about making their videos spread. YouTube, like any TV network, will market its own programming.

Most famously known in the web series world as the distributor of Felicia Day’s indie hit, The Guild, Microsoft appears to be focusing on innovation and interactivity. It hasn’t let go of the past: Day, a charming and intelligent spokesperson for the power of the web to support producer-driven content, was a strong presence at the NewFronts this week. She is, with good reason, a strong supporter of her employer, which has supported The Guild for four years.

For the post-TV future, Microsoft is focusing on Xbox and interactivity. The company unveiled a promo for an Xbox-distributed “show” called Kid’s Kitchen, which is kind of an interactive game where kids pick ingredients and make a digital meal, which “mom” can then cook. In the promo, the kids playfully interacted with a television screen, yet what the audience saw was anything but. Microsoft wants to reinvent television, but Kid’s Kitchen is also nostalgic for early television: those days when families gathered around one screen, not four or seven, in the heart of the house, the living room. Make room for web TV.

All in all, the afternoon of talks, promos and stunts was exhilarating, and there’s clearly a lot of innovation in the space, despite the overwhelming popularity of brand-friendly reality programming, the mainstay of cable TV. Nevertheless, a quiet anxiety pervaded the event, an uncertainty about who really owns the future of TV, the old or new media.

The opening panel set the tone. Piers Morgan moderated a group of saavy women from across TV’s long tail: Michelle Phan, YouTube’s pioneer beauty vlogger and Lancôme spokesperson; Felicia Day, web series mastermind; and Kristin Chenoweth, Broadway diva and star of ABC’s GCB (which in my mind will always be Good Christian Bitches). Piers Morgan, after acknowledging with breezy British superciliousness that he’d never heard of vlogging, Phan or Day before prepping for this event, ended the panel quite enraptured by the mastery Day and Phan have of the web space and their audiences (geeks and young women, respectively). Both women have big numbers to back up their efforts — a consistent theme in the event, with nearly event network, show and person boasting millions of followers, views, likes, comments, etc.

Chenoweth, too, was impressed. The new media neophyte, who plans to vlog during her upcoming tour but admitted to lacking any expertise, ended the panel in deference to the smart, young web stars.

“Basically, you’re going to be my boss one day!,” she exclaimed with delight.

The Big Five are certainly betting on it.

Credits:
-Digitas, 2012
-Digitas, 2012

There has been a recent public outcry in New Zealand (frothed ably by the news media) over the spending of broadcast funding. The announcement of the public funding of The GC, a programme being touted as New Zealand’s equivalent of Jersey Shore, alongside funding for New Zealand’s Got Talent, plus the announcement that public funds would be sought for The X Factor New Zealand, has caused a reasonable amount of consternation in some public forums, which I believe is worthy of closer inspection. However, in order to fully understand both the rationale behind the decisions and the outage that has fomented, a few points need to be clarified.

New Zealand has had a slightly odd mixed-mode model of public service broadcasting and commercial television, almost since its inception (a potted history of NZ broadcasting can be found on my blog here). Over 20 years ago, an organisation called NZ on Air was established to act as a primary funding agency for New Zealand content – the availability of cheap international content makes local content production a financially poor decision unless it is subsidised in some form. NZ on Air has several competing aims, laid out in our Broadcasting Act (sections 36 & 37 if you want to read them for yourself). It needs to fund content which reflects and develops NZ identity and culture; ensure content is available of interest to women, youth, children, persons with disabilities, and minorities; and, content which represents the diverse ethical and religious beliefs of NZ. So in other words, generally, fulfil a Public Service role which appeals to the breadth of NZ and NZ culture. So far, so normal. Not much Lord Reith would object to there.

However, where things gets tricky is in Section 39 of the above act, which covers what they need to take into account when deciding which programmes to fund. Two of the key factors are: the potential size of the audience; and, the likelihood that the programme will be broadcast. Given that by July 2012, New Zealand will have no channel which is broadcasting in a non-commercial environment, this means that any channel choosing to screen content needs to be convinced it will draw sufficient ratings to keep advertisers happy. And so we come to our Catch 22. It needs to sufficiently fulfil requirements of portraying New Zealanders, including variations in ethnicity, gender, age and religion, while still drawing a sufficient mass audience as to keep advertisers happy.

But there is another moment of context which needs to be addressed. TVNZ7 was a digital channel launched in New Zealand in 2008 to operate as a public service channel, airing without advertisements, and showing quality local current affairs, panel shows, and documentaries, as well as some purchased internationally. It was given 4 years of funding by the (then left of center) government, with the funding to be reassessed at the end of that time. Last year the (now right of center) government announced that it would no longer support funding for this channel, with the spectrum space to be given to a home shopping network, and the funding to be added to NZ on Air’s funding pool. The rationale given was that NZ on Air was best positioned to make decisions on funding the range of public service broadcasting necessary in New Zealand. Missing from this decision is any indication of who might air this content with TVNZ7 gone, and several of the shows currently airing on TVNZ7 have been told that they are unlikely to receive funding, as they are unlikely to find a broadcaster.

And so we find ourselves at a point where Public Service broadcasting is likely to disappear from New Zealand screens, with quite energetic campaigns being run in an attempt to gain TVNZ7 an eleventh hour reprieve, and simultaneously news stories are being published about several recent funding decisions for reality shows based on overseas formats.

Obviously, there are discourses of quality going on here, and I don’t personally want to enter that fray. I actually have no issue with the funding of television that is likely to be a ratings success – I think there are benefits to have programming like The X Factor New Zealand airing, and I recognise that such programming is unlikely to go ahead without some public funding, at least in the initial stages. But with NZ facing an uncertain PSB future, it has certainly brought to the fore the conflicting requirements that NZ on Air faces, and unless an avenue for PSB is found in the near future, it seems likely on which side of that conflict they are likely to err.

(I’m going to talk more about some of the race and representation issues that might be present in The GC in a forthcoming post on my personal blog)

[Image credit: NZ On Air Logo from NZ on Air]

Overt racism within a liberal institution, however, is not the scandal I am considering here. Rather, it was this following revelation: the white clubbers were performing their offenses while playing a role at the behest of three students of color. They wanted footage about racial silences at the college for a mockumentary they were making for a documentary class offered by my department.

Two weeks of difficult intellectual and ethical conversations ensued on the student list serve, in town hall meetings, and in our campus media: does the greater good of revealing what might otherwise be unspoken justify the pain of those who are misled along the way? Do various traditions like documentary, ethnography or even the news, have different standards regarding the treatment of human subjects? Do the time-honored institutions of artistic license and academic freedom protect students from other shared responsibilities?

Within our small campus community, we learned a great deal from talking together about these hard questions, ones not isolated to this incident. For our culture is littered with forms that mix truth and fiction, reality and entertainment, documentary and storytelling. Fake or entertainment news like “The Colbert Show” or “E Entertainment News,” fake documentaries and fact-based fictions like The Devil Inside or Cloverfield, and all of bogus “reality TV” are ubiquitous within and perhaps even definitive of our media moment. I believe that the larger culture could learn from the kinds of conversations we had about these issues on our campus.

In F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, I suggest that for talented artists, mocking forms known for their sobriety allows for harder conversations about truth, identity, or history. Meanwhile, in my more recent book Learning from YouTube, I express the less optimistic opinion that the faking of facts, authenticity, and expertise have become an accepted and even normative mode across our culture: for both every day YouTubers and much of the dominant media they emulate.

However, while most of these forms remain entertaining and pleasurable—instilling the satisfaction of insider-knowledge and the comedic reach of parody—we are also beginning to encounter instances where an ever-more uncertain or shifting blend between fact and fiction is causing pain.

For instance, the intense scrutiny by an international Internet audience on the factual ups and downs of the “Kony 2012” video may have contributed to the emotional breakdown of its director, Jason Russell, even as so many African vbloggers righteously attest to their own anguish caused by seeing the over-simplification of their continent’s political turmoil in the name of activating media-weary youth. In this case as well, its authors believed that a greater social good—produced by powerful story-telling forms and their associated feelings—gives them license to play somewhat loose with facts.

But in such confounding situations about the role and ethics of fact-based media, are we best served by only attending to the suffering of those who are misled, or by also asking larger questions about a culture of misleading and its new forms and old institutions? In the case of a retraction that ran on Friday, March 18 on “This American Life,” the players are as sacrosanct as National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Apple. Here, the discomfiting admixture of art and journalism occurred in “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” an excerpt of the acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” by Mike Daisey that ran on This American Life.

In “Retraction,” Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, thoughtfully and with some felt embarrassment and even seeming grief revealed that “the most powerful and memorable moments of the story all seem to be fabricated.” And so this story, too, inevitably played out in relation to the private pain of Ira Glass, and his listeners: “we are going to talk to Mike Daisey about why he lied to all of you, and to me, off the air, during the fact-checking process.” However, by playing the pain card, this story of real wrongdoing is only understood at the personal, and not formal, institutional or political, levels.

Certainly, deceiving a national radio audience, and its producers, about worker abuse in China is itself a violation worthy of attention. But the nature of this violation becomes less clear when that national audience is listening to “This American Life,” itself one of the range of contemporary media practices that structure reality like fiction so as to move, entertain, and inform audiences. Daisey explains, “Everything I have done is bent towards that end, to make people care.” He admits that he lied in pursuit of telling what he thought to be a greater artistic truth, but he continually insists, to an ever more aggrieved Glass, that he did so as a theater artist and not a journalist, and his mistake was putting his work into a new context.

In response, however, Glass doesn’t take the more transparent road: acknowledging that this context-confusion is partly of his own making. For certainly, genre-bending shows like This American Life influence the shifting norms of storytelling. Their programs may be fact-checked like real journalists, but other norms of the profession are adapted to allow audiences to feel. But Glass avoids larger and more self-critical conversations about the pervasive use of fabrication, entertainment, and fiction within contemporary media, or his own show. Instead he chooses to at once verify the journalistic chops of This American Life and vilify the behavior of Daisey. He brings in reporters from “Planet Money” and The New York Times to humiliate Daisey into his own retraction, making Daisey the scapegoat for a cultural and institutional shift, or perhaps spread. Glass says to Daisey, “I have the normal world view. If you say something happened to me, then it did.”

Given these changing norms, however, in our contemporary media environment we need more than a normal view from our best journalists. We need critical frameworks to understand how Daisey, Glass, and mainstream institutions, like NPR, are honestly thinking about, using, and changing the uses of subjectivity, fiction, storytelling—and the real emotions they bring to bear—to allow audiences to know, and to care, in an ever more noisy, unfeeling, and uncertain world.

NewTeeVee has a nice roundup of stats surrounding various set-top box products

The total number of Boxee Box users is around 200,000…still in line with an industry-wide trend: Smart TV set-top boxes haven’t reached a wider audience, and sales have often been below expectations. … [T]here are less than one million Google TV devices being used in people’s households. Roku recently fell short of its own goal to sell three million boxes, instead selling 2.5 million devices in three years, despite a recent massive marketing campaign. The only company able to move higher numbers has been Apple. The company revealed in January that it has sold 4.2 million Apple TVs.

The NewTeeVee story, from Janko Roettgers, paints the numbers as a disappointment for Boxee, but whether that’s the case is an interesting question.

While Boxee may have sold only 200,000 boxes, it has a total user base of 2 million when you count the users of its other non-flagship devices and the now-moribund desktop version of its software.  In particular, a lot more people are using the free desktop application—even at this late stage—than buying the dedicated Boxee hardware.

This result isn’t surprising if you look at Boxee’s initial two-step business strategy, which was to (1) make it’s interface as popular as possible by disseminating it for free to users who wanted to turn their ordinary computers into HTPCs, and then (2) turn around and use this hopefully loyal audience to convince consumer electronics manufacturers and content providers to use its platform.  By this metric, Boxee managed to convert around 10 percent of its audience to “paid” customers who bought the set-top box—perhaps a bit more, if we assume a handful of those users bought a Boxee-powered device other than the flagship box.  And while I’m not an economist, this probably isn’t a terrible figure, considering that this all occurred during a period when Americans had a rather meager expendable income to drop $200 on a  set-top box.

Of course, by removing the availability of its free desktop software, Boxee may be killing the goose that laid the golden copper egg.  No longer will users be able to try the interface out for free before deciding to buy.  And the Boxee Box is sold primarily through Amazon, which further limits the ability of prospective customers to try it before they buy it.  The upside here, for Boxee, is that it no longer has to offer multi-platform support for its software (which was available on Windows, Linux, and OS X in addition to the set-top box).

Related, and perhaps more important to Boxee, it can appease content providers, who demanded heightened security features be built into the set-top version of the software that conflicted with those built into the partially open-source and highly user-modifiable desktop version of the software.  This meant that cross-platform support became an even tougher proposition, since the technical specifications of the desktop and set-top versions of the application would begin diverging over time.

The tradeoff is a clear one: selling a set-top box is a one-time proposition.  Once those boxes are sold, if you want to continue making money off the customers, you have to continue selling them services and subscriptions—and hence, Boxee figured, it had to appease the content providers behind those subscription services.  Whether Boxee can continue to sustain itself and grow its user base without the exposure and word of mouth that the desktop software provided is an interesting and open question.  Two-hundred thousand purchasing users may not seem like a lot by the entertainment industry’s standards, but supporting two million non-paying users indefinitely isn’t necessarily a sustainable business model either (though numerous counterarguments could be made here, that’s another post—or a good topic for the comment thread).

In the meantime, game systems may end up owning this market—there are, after all, 66 million Xbox 360 units in the wild right now, dwarfing even moderately successful products like the Apple TV.  And as Cory Bergman notes, those Xboxes are now used even more often for music and video than for gaming.  Plus, while Microsoft is doing a handy business here and has an excellent interface, Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Wii probably also have respectable figures when it comes to their use for non-gaming content.

What’s more, gaming boxes like the Xbox and the Wii are helping to push the envelope when it comes to the sort of “ten-foot interface” design that’s necessary to comfortably use a set-top device from your couch.  As many commentators noted earlier this year while perusing various voice- and gesture-controlled television devices appearing at CES, one of the most frustrating aspects of using an internet-connected TV has been the fact that you so frequently have to type—to log into services, to execute searches, and so forth—on keyboards that are either microscopic or not designed for text-entry at all.

As usual, though, this has a lot more to do with the complex socio-technical system arrayed around the way we watch television, than with gadgetry by itself.  Gadgets are artifacts with politics.  As Daniel Chamberlain has argued, the values and politics of many actors are “invested and contested” in the design of the various knobs and twiddly bits that make up our connected television interfaces.

And with so many companies (and users) out there, all with different levers they can pull, it’s going to be interesting to see where this goes.

[Image Credits: Boxee remote by Boxee.tv; Xbox 360 image by Microsoft; Cross-posted to Josh Braun's personal blog]

Our hosting service tells us that there will be a brief service interruption sometime within the next 48 hours while our server undergoes an upgrade.  It should happen sometime overnight, so it’s doubtful you’ll even notice, but we wanted to let you know, just in case.

I had a great first post for Hacktivision planned out in my head. Coming away from the What Is Television conference, I found that there was a lot of interest and discussion about digital distribution, which was wonderful. However, I constantly found myself asking, on Twitter and aloud, what the ramifications were for the world outside North America. Coming from New Zealand, I am very used to channels of digital distribution being unavailable. Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, Spotify – all are geo-restricted, and present attempts to view with a screen which is sadly familiar. Apple’s iTunes Store is available in New Zealand, but with a different, significantly smaller range compared to the US version, and it only launched in New Zealand in December 2006, compared to April 2003 in the US.

The promise of the digital is ubiquity. The idea that anyone, anywhere can access anything. But the culture industries are still locked in traditional business models, where distribution rights are sold and controlled by different companies in different countries. This means that the digital rights for every piece of content need to be renegotiated for every country, and for smaller nations like New Zealand, this often just isn’t commercially feasible. But what this does start to trend towards is a digital media divide, where North America (and possibly just the US as opposed to Canada) has nigh-on ubiquitous access to culture, but other regions are left out of the discussion and the debate. Now, I want to go to great pains to point out, the lack of on-demand digital culture is not the end of the world, it is definitely a #firstworldproblem. But it still does create a form of exclusion from debate and discussion, especially in the age of social media and instantaneous global communication.

The other stimulant for these thoughts were an Oatmeal cartoon, and its New Zealand-focused remix. The final couple of panels of the NZ remix highlight the secondary issues around digital distribution in NZ, which include the high cost and relatively low speed of broadband internet. It becomes second nature for those of us outside the US to expect that we can’t engage with mainstream international distribution sites, either because of geo-restrictions, or because of long buffering periods. There have been limited attempts at On-demand television content from the three main television providers in NZ, but these have been restricted to the material they are currently airing, and usually at the most have the most current episode and the previous. They do archive some of the material that they actually create themselves, but that is a very small amount of content. And engagement with that material is frequently painfully slow and interrupted.

However, while I was constructing this post, a Netflix equivalent was both announced and launched in New Zealand. Quickflix seems to be an Australian service which is extending into the NZ market. However, it is launching with 650 films and the grand total of 10 seasons of BBC television content. By comparison, Netflix currently offers  30,000 titles, with a TV series being considered as one title (so many thanks to @EdieS for doing the research on that for me). Subscription costs seem to be relatively cheap (in NZ, we’re used to expecting it to be four times the cost of the US), but the content still does not seem to be sufficient to really draw in subscribers.

I’m not sure where this leaves digital distribution of television and film in New Zealand. As I understand it, iTunes made a loss launching in New Zealand, and was only able to launch here with the financial backing of already having been a success financially. Whether Quickflix will last with the financial backing of the Australian arm getting it through, or whether it will fail as several previous attempts have remains to be seen. But it still doesn’t answer the larger question of how the culture industries will respond to a world where geographical boundaries are becoming less and less important.

(A follow up post on the specifics of why I see Quickflix failing in New Zealand is available on my blog)