Aymar Jean Christian, who co-edits the new Hacktivision blog on the future of television, has a nice round-up of the site’s recent discussion of YouTube. It’s worth checking out if you’d like a sampling of what’s going on on the blog—and the original posts are obviously worth a read, too. :)
[Image Credits: "YouTube Play at The Guggenheim" cc by-nc-nd Katie Killary]
—Kunur Patel, “Microsoft Reorganization will Shift Marketing Power Further into Product Groups”
Just as an aside, one of the interesting things to me about Xbox and other gaming consoles, when it comes to connected television, is that unlike many electronics manufacturers who want to sell you a new set-top box or TV for hundreds of dollars, just to let you watch more TV, Microsoft and other console manufacturers are taking gaming devices that are already in millions of living rooms and turning them into an access points for video content. It’s this trojan horse model that may well make consoles a winner in the battle for the digital living room.
[Cross-posted to Hacktivision]
GigaOm has collected these stats from Arbor Networks showing the hefty decline in traffic to the portions of the Internet that routed traffic to MegaUpload in the hours following the seizure and shutdown of the company’s sites—which included popular video sharing sites like MegaVideo—by the FBI. Fascinating stuff. Check out the original article and graphic over at GigaOm.
Ryan Lawler has an excellent post up at NewTeeVee on what he sees as problems with windowing—the practice in film and TV distribution of making content available for limited times in different venues. The piece not only contains some nice thoughts and background on the subject, but also some great links. Worth a read…
[Cross-posted to Hacktivision]
The venerable Nieman Lab has an interesting post today by Ken Doctor, who writes a regular column there on the economics of news media. He makes the rather interesting assertion that news agencies should copy aspects of Hulu’s and Netflix’s business model—specifically their recent forays into signature original content. Here’s a sample of his argument:
Netflix is planning to spend 5 percent of its expenses—or $100 million a year—on original, Netflix-defining content. Hulu is spending about a quarter what Netflix’s total, or $500 million in total, on all content licensing this year. We don’t know how much of that is for original content, but observers believe “Battleground” will cost $15–20 million for its 13 episodes. With its other forays, it will probably spend closer to 10 percent of its content budget on original content. Curiously, many newspaper newsrooms constitute only 10–20 percent of the overall expenses of a daily newspaper company. So we’re starting to see some new, and old, arithmetic play out here.
But while the article makes many interesting, and at times compelling, points, I can’t help but think there’s at least one problem with this logic, which is that the economics of entertainment content are often substantially different than those of current affairs content. Traffic tails off dramatically to a news item within hours of its posting. Meanwhile, people are still ravenously consuming (not to mention bootlegging) Star Trek and Indiana Jones decades after they were first produced.
When Hulu and Netflix produce their entertainment programs for a premium, not only can they potentially keep them in their back catalog for a long time and still enjoy reasonable demand for them, in cases where they own the rights they can also probably syndicate them to cable networks and other content services afterward for additional second-run revenues. That’s harder to do with, say, Brian Stelter’s column on SOPA coverage, which is a hot item today, but will be largely devoid of traffic six months from now.
[Cross-posted to Hacktivision; Image Credit: "The Times Paywall" cc by-sa 2.0 The Sociable]
—Michael Learmonth, “Soon Your TV Will Watch You, Too”
Back in 2005, trade journalist John Battelle imagined a world in which targeted advertising had come to television. And while TV is still a long way from having mainstreamed the business models he envisioned, trade journalists are beginning to pronounce the days of traditional television marketing numbered. It’ll be interesting to watch as the advertising ecosystem around TV content shifts in the coming years, and to grapple with what that will mean for new models of production and distribution.
[Cross-posted to Hacktivision]
Just a note to say I’m accepted to ICA 2012. See you in Arizona. :-)
[Clip: "Arizona Desert Sunset" by Dustin Farrell]
At the end of January, Boxee is killing its desktop application, which will bring to a close one of my favorite chapters in the world of connected television. Built on top of XBMC, an open-source software application that turns your PC into a fancy media-playback device, Boxee was one of the early operating systems for connected televisions. As a small startup without many industry connections, it didn’t wait for TV and set-top box manufacturers to come calling, but instead built a loyal fan base by releasing its software for free directly to the masses.
If you were savvy enough to connect your computer to television screen in 2008, you could download Boxee’s application and, using your smartphone as a remote, surf through hundreds of streaming video sources from across the Web. At the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, a demo of Boxee prompted NPR’s Mario Armstrong to remark that, when you had a remote in your hand, “[the video] could be coming from a Web site, or it could be coming from over-the-air networks. You really don’t know. And you really don’t care. The fact that it was so simple really just floored me.”
But what made Boxee interesting to a certain consumer niche wasn’t just its ease of use. It was something else: with the exception of a proprietary social layer, Boxee’s desktop software was largely open source. It even had a plugin architecture and an app store where users could share their modifications. Along with professionally produced apps from the likes of MTV, Netflix, and Major League Baseball, you could find plenty of plugins from tech-savvy users.
And users modified the hell out of Boxee. They developed a BitTorrent client for it. They developed software to turn originally unsupported devices into Boxee remotes. They even ported the application to jailbroken first-generation Apple TVs.
Boxee, the company, was smart about building its fan base. It needed them to woo device manufacturers into adopting its software as a connected TV operating system. It also needed content providers to think of it as a platform worth developing for. So the company did something that still seems unusual in the world of connected TV: it got behind all these user modifications. When the Apple TV port of the software became popular, Boxee began developing it as an official distribution alongside its versions for OS X, Linux, and Windows. It even allowed that BitTorrent client in its app store, as contentious as the decision might have been among content providers.
What was fascinating was to watch users tweak their noses at the tele-technological system—that entrenched ecosystem of technologies, cultural expectations, and corporate players surrounding TV. In 2009, when the media giants owning Hulu apparently became concerned that the application might be a cord-cutting tool and demanded that Boxee remove access to Hulu content from the software, users wrote screenscrapers (to grab video embed codes) and plugins that put Hulu right back on their Boxee-connected TVs within 24 hours.
After enough such exchanges between Hulu and Boxee users, Boxee itself eventually got on board, arguing that its software was basically nothing more than a highly specialized browser and therefore entitled to access Hulu content under the site’s terms of service. Over the course of several weeks in 2009, Boxee and Hulu went back and forth in a fascinating technological game of spy-vs-spy, in which Hulu found inventive ways to block Boxee from its videos and Boxee found equally creative ways to restore them. Boxee eventually went so far as to bolster its claim to be just a specialized browser by rebuilding part of its software on the same XUL framework that powers Firefox.
Why would Boxee do all this? A few possible reasons come to mind. First, Hulu was, at the time, the most-requested feature on Boxee; to keep its nacent user base growing, it needed to satisfy this demand. Second, there was the issue of precedent. If Boxee was indeed following the terms of service offered by Hulu, but backed down anyway, they would likely have been pressured into blackouts by other content providers, too. And finally, given that large portions of the application were open source, there wasn’t much of a way to stop users from making and releasing modifications to illicitly grab any content that Boxee itself refused to cough up. Worse, users might start ignoring legal content sources like Hulu altogether and using Boxee primarily as a set-top BitTorrent client—not a healthy reputation for the young company.
So Boxee, which after all started as a hack of open-source XMBC, got behind the maker culture of its fan base, and in doing so spurred a debate that spanned from Freedom to Tinker to the floor of Congress. But while it marshaled that user base to get noticed, unsurprisingly, Boxee later found it had to become “respectable” to content providers in order to stay in business. As device manufacturers began to produce set-top boxes built with Boxee under the hood, companies like Netflix, which had never much minded the lack of DRM controls in the Boxee PC software, began to demand heightened security features in versions of the application that appeared on other devices. To many content providers, the TV screen and the computer screen were fundamentally different spaces. It was fine to allow tech-savvy users and open source developers control over their computers, but not so much their televisions. Too many business models at stake.
And now, forced with the prospect of continuing to fork their application between an increasingly black-boxed version available in neatly manufactured TVs and set-top boxes on the one hand, and a messy, anything-can-happen user-modifiable version for the desktop, Boxee is dropping support for the latter. It recently released one last desktop version of the software, with a cleaner user interface—and fewer features—than its predecessor, announcing:
As a platform, we have been able to bring Boxee for Computers to about 85% of the Boxee Box in terms of features and functionality. Due to extensive DRM and certification requirements premium apps will not be available on the downloadable version of Boxee, most notably Netflix, VUDU, and Pandora. … This 1.5 release will be the last version of Boxee for PC/Mac/Ubuntu. It will be available on Boxee.tv through the end of January. … To our computer users… to those who have come out to our NYC and SF meetups, talked with us at Engadget, GDGT, and Giz Gallery events, or enjoyed Austin BBQ with us during SxSW, or simply messaged with us on Facebook, Twitter, and our forums… thank you for all your support—we would not be where we are today without you. But we can’t stay here.
And with that, for Boxee PC users its the end of an era. Boxee’s PC period is far from the first time TV users have engaged in acts of appropriation or creative rebellion. And people will continue to hack Internet-connected televisions, to write interesting TV-related software, and to scrape video portals, all to get content on their own terms. Existing user-developers may even create a fork of Boxee—Foxee?—and continue what they started there. But at least one chapter in this high-flying experiment of mashing up maker culture with the traditional television content industry is coming to a close. People will still be able to write apps for Boxee boxes, but probably never with the same level of freedom they enjoyed on their PCs.
The tangled relationships between Boxee, its users, and the tele-technological system it sought to appropriate and integrate itself into have been a fine, even beautiful, example of what Bryan Pfaffenberger called “technological dramas”—conversations about values and freedoms that by accident or by design get veiled in technical components. His notion helps us to understand technological innovation and appropriation—such as when Hulu, Boxee, and its users hacked back and forth, putting up and tearing down walls around content—as forms of public discourse in their own right, acts which are equal parts technical and symbolic, containing within them claims about who should have access to information and on what terms.
And as much as they are technical salvos that do jobs and symbolic work, they also serve as props in our more conventional discourse. Boxee’s announcement that its software would run on the same framework as Firefox was a technical improvement that made the software easier to use, but it was also a way of setting a stage, of creating a moment in which the company could attempt to exert control over the discourse surrounding its product—both formally in the form of the launch event and accompanying public statements about the new framework, and informally as users worked with and experienced the new interface components it brought about.
Put simply, Boxee’s software, along with the modifications users made to it, weren’t just interesting or important because of what they did—heaven knows there are other set-top boxes and pieces of media center software—but for what they said. That’s the thought that’s continually compelling to me: that code is speech, and that to study technology is, in effect, to develop our listening skills.
[Cross-posted to Hacktivision; Image Sources: Screenshot is of the Boxee desktop app's "Shows" view; Boxee and Hulu logo mashup by Josh Braun]
The posting tempo has slowed around here lately, and if you’re wondering what I’ve been up to, well a few things:
(1) Getting settled in the new job.
(2) Working on research loose ends following my dissertation.
(3) Starting a new Website! The site you’re reading this on is my personal blog and it’s not going away, and I will try to get back to giving it lots more attention. I’ll also keep a copy of all my content from elsewhere right here. But the news is, I’ve collaborated with a bunch of other folks who study or work on the future of television and online video to put together a blog, called “Hacktivision” that will cover these topics. It’s live today—a soft-launch of sorts—so feel free to check it out. And if you’re interested in contributing, let me know that as well.
As is becoming increasingly common, the Consumer Electronics Show has sent a tidal wave of news stories and press releases roaring into my RSS reader, full of information about the latest inventions aimed at changing the way we watch television and online video.
Three short years ago, such news was scant. In 2009, Brad Stone of The New York Times returned from CES to report that,
Piping Internet video into a television seems as if it should be simple—after all, a screen is a screen. But consumer electronics and media companies have been moving toward that combination with painstaking caution, both because of technical limitations and to protect their existing business models.
Not long afterward, some of those technical limitations began to lift, and sensing consumer demand, content providers also began to edge toward what they had long viewed as the precipice of digital distribution. By 2011, Internet-connected televisions had become a major focus of CES. And at this year’s show it seems every device manufacturer you can think of, including some who’ve never made televisions before, have a connected TV to sell you. With Panasonic announcing yet another television OS and app store, there are so many damned “smart TV” operating systems now that we even find companies springing up whose business model revolves around converting your content to run on all of them.
We’ve gone from relative silence in this space to cacophony. With multiple publications already having declared 2011 the year of connected television, others are now telling us that connected TV won’t peak for another five years.
CES 2012 brings televisions that respond to your voice, televisions that recognize your face when you sit down on the couch and automatically bring up your favorite shows, televisions that tell your friends what you’re watching, and more.
But even amid this maelstrom of announcements, the overarching theme of the connected TV coverage coming from CES is an intriguing one: boredom.
Peter Kafka, in a post titled, “Why the Future of TV Won’t Be Here Soon,” is incisive as usual on the subject:
This is the year for many big pronouncements about The Future Of TV, and we’re hearing the first round this week at the Consumer Electronics Show. Here’s how I’m sorting through the deluge: I’m ignoring almost all of it. Instead, I’m focusing on the ones that promise to bring me the TV I want to see, when I want to see it, without charging me a fortune. And without making me pay for stuff I don’t care about. Try it yourself. See? Things get quiet in a hurry.
What Kafka is getting at is that the various players in the television ecosystem—particularly on the content side—are highly entrenched. One only has to look at the Kafkaesque (pun intended) struggles surrounding new media distribution channels like Netflix, Hulu, Boxee, or Google TV to see that there are a lot of powerful forces in play here. Cable distributors want to protect their existing business and content providers want the most money possible for their content (which right now means selling it to cable providers). To uproot this system will take a lot of user demand. And while the intense debate surrounding cord cutting suggests that this demand probably exists, there’s another problem here.
The reason for Kafka’s pessimism is further apparent when you look at the marketing data on television manufacturers, which suggests that the basics of a good television—a nice image, good sound, and so forth—have become common enough across brands that consumers don’t really care who makes their TVs at this point.
There is little excitement or brand loyalty among consumers surrounding any TV manufacturer at the moment. So all the saber rattling by television manufacturers that’s going on at CES right now makes for a sort of divide and conquer scenario. Instead of one or two major connected TV platforms, we have at least eleven, and a user base that’s split between them. If you’re an app developer or a content provider, do you develop for Google TV? Yahoo TV? Boxee? Roku? Samsung? Panasonic? Or…I digress.
It’s going to take a lot of consumer demand behind far fewer and more standardized platforms before things start to shift in earnest. It’s fun to wonder if there’ll be clear winners among the current field of software and device manufacturers—whether an upstart like Boxee or an underdog like Samsung could carry the day and win the hearts and minds of the TV-addicted general public. I have my own favorites and I root for them. I marvel at the clever ways that they weave together business deals, marketing campaigns, technical resources, and legal protections—impressive feats of “heterogeneous engineering“—to rally users to their respective corners.
But a growing number of analysts and trade journalists are suggesting that the companies with the customer loyalty and clout to change the game aren’t at CES at all. When you think of tech companies with the power to influence the content industry, you tend to think of Amazon or Apple. And indeed, one of the memes to come out of TV trade reporting from CES is that nothing presented there will matter once Apple releases its oft-rumored television. Google, meanwhile, has its own deep pockets and is reportedly giving kickbacks to smart-TV manufacturers who use Android as their OS.
The problem, in other words, is that while CES is all about gadgets, the ecosystem that makes a medium like television work involves a lot more than just technical components. Television is not, and may never have been, a mere gadget. It is, in fact, what sociologists call a socio-technical system. Roger Silverstone called it the “tele-technological system“—a complex of technical, scientific, commercial, legal, and social arrangements surrounding the delivery of content that can’t be isolated one from the others.
When you think of a technology as involving all of these things, a new gadget—no matter how impressive—is fairly useless, absent a working arrangement these other important factors. It’s a hemi on a car without wheels. By itself, a new clone of an existing TV operating system can’t make app developers and content providers magically appear any more than the flopped 3D televisions of CES 2010 were able to make 3D content materialize. Or, as Raymond Williams put it, describing the American model of television in 1974,
Many of the creative possibilities of television have been frustrated precisely by [the system of which it's a part]….When there has been such heavy investment in a particular model of social communications, there is a restraining complex of financial institutions, of cultural expectations and of specific technical developments, which though it can be seen superficially, as the effect of a technology is in fact a social complex of a…central kind. (p. 31)
Long before we started talking about “apps,” “smart TV,” or the Internet, he wisely recognized the ways in which socio-technical systems are both enabling and constraining. They create possibilities for innovation, but also place limits on them. The more incisive of today’s trade journalists, like Peter Kafka, see this when they look at the gadget mania of CES. Gadgets are single factor in a messy and interrelated system of technologies, players, and interests. This is why technology trade shows, which give us a chance to obsess over shiny boxes and imagine their possibilities, have a poor track record of predicting actual innovation and market success. Some tech journalists call it the “CES curse.” Others prefer to think of it as the tele-technological system.
[Image Credits: "LG-HDTVs" cc by-nc 2.0 VentureBeat; "SLOW TV ... is on its way" cc by-nc-sa 2.0 Topsy@Waygood]