Connected Viewing

Selling, Streaming, & Sharing Media in the Digital Age

Jennifer Holt, Kevin Sanson, Jennifer Holt, Kevin Sanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135081287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique de la télévision

As patterns of media use become more integrated with mobile technologies and multiple screens, a new mode of viewer engagement has emerged in the form of connected viewing, which allows for an array of new relationships between audiences and media texts in the digital space. This exciting new collection brings together twelve original essays that critically engage with the socially-networked, multi-platform, and cloud-based world of today, examining the connected viewing phenomenon across television, film, video games, and social media.

The result is a wide-ranging analysis of shifting business models, policy matters, technological infrastructure, new forms of user engagement, and other key trends affecting screen media in the digital era. Connected Viewing contextualizes the dramatic transformations taking place across both media industries and national contexts, and offers students and scholars alike a diverse set of methods and perspectives for studying this critical moment in media culture.

Part I
Industry Structure and Strategies

1
Regulating Connected Viewing

Media Pipelines and Cloud Policy

Jennifer Holt

Connected viewing activities such as streaming movies on Facebook, virtually attending BD-Live screening events, or chatting via social media apps about a favorite television show require a significant amount of telecommunications and information infrastructure. This includes everything from wires, cables, switches, buildings, and satellites, to computers, air-conditioning equipment, and vast networks that connect users to high-speed broadband service. These infrastructure elements are among the most basic necessities to sustain this new ecosystem of digital interaction and consumption. However, their ability to continually connect audiences to content cannot be taken for granted. Indeed, these connections between content providers and end users are increasingly at risk, threatened by various trends in regulatory policy and their impact on digital media infrastructure.

In fact, the policies governing broadband access, pricing, and data stored remotely, i.e., “in the cloud,” pose some of the biggest challenges to the future development and expansion of connected viewing. These challenges are increasingly difficult to navigate or anticipate, largely because policies governing cloud storage and its attendant infrastructure, or what I will refer to collectively as “cloud policy,” are currently in flux. Just as many of the strategies for distributing and engaging with connected viewing content are still evolving, so too are the policies that regulate the conduits on which they rely. In the United States, broadband has been so deregulated that customers currently have no protections against Internet service providers (ISPs) that decide to restrict traffic emanating from various websites, or to specific users.¹ As a result, the survival of net neutrality—a critical element of content’s digital flow and, in turn, of connected viewing strategies—is in question. Other similarly important policy debates, such as those affecting the “shareability” and accessibility of data and information stored in the cloud, are presently undergoing intense negotiations as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the broadband industry and ISPs, the Supreme Court, content providers, and public interest groups engage in protracted debate. Right now, little has been decided, and the current moment of deliberation is a crucial one for the future viability of connected viewing.

At its core, policy is about power, and this chapter is ultimately about who will have the power to control connected viewing in the coming years. In what follows, I detail the current issues in regulatory policy that will have the most significant impact on connected viewing for content providers and consumers, as well as for service providers. Content providers and audiences are two groups that often have opposing viewpoints on monetizing the digital entertainment space, but in the realm of connected viewing policy, many of their interests are surprisingly well aligned… usually against the ISPs (Comcast-NBCUniversal of course being a notable exception, as it is an integrated studio/content provider and the country’s largest ISP). Content providers in this context include film and television studios (e.g., Warner Bros., Disney), gaming companies (e.g., Zynga, Electronic Arts), and even aggregators such as Netflix and Hulu. Despite their conflicts over the availability and price of digital content, these companies and their audiences are actually united by their common struggle against the largely unregulated control of Internet and mobile service providers that have power over many dimensions of access in the digital spaces of connected viewing.²

Decisions about how broadband pipelines and servers are regulated, how much access costs for consumers, and how cloud-based data are governed will each, in part, determine whether connected viewing has a future. Policy makers can choose to promote consumer-friendly measures on issues such as access and Internet affordability, or they can continue to subject the connected viewing infrastructure to a regime that privileges the power of unregulated ISPs and, consequently, limits the free flow of content and information. As more media content, usage, and sites of engagement shift to the digital space, these issues of diversity, access, and media control are the current regulatory stakes for connected viewing initiatives and, by extension, the future democratic qualities of the Internet and the accessibility of “the cloud.”

My research focuses on the US context, but clearly these concerns are international ones, with global ramifications. The legal history of cloud computing and broadband policy in the United States, as well as personal interviews with FCC senior staff, former authors of the National Broadband Plan, public interest advocates, legal counsel for various connected viewing interests, and policy advisors for major cloud computing corporations, have all formed the basis for this chapter. It is clear after distilling these various perspectives that the key developments in the regulatory arena for the connected viewing ecosystem are related to 1) the enforcement of net neutrality; 2) the implementation and legality of bandwidth caps; and 3) the jurisdiction over data servers supporting the storage and transmission of cloud-based media across international borders. As the digital era of distribution unfolds, these issues will ultimately determine the dimensions and sustainability of connected viewing initiatives and, in turn, the future of access and engagement with online entertainment, information, and media culture.

Net Neutrality and Managed Services

Net neutrality—its adoption and preservation—is the most important policy matter for the interests of content providers (of all sizes) and consumers of cloud-based media today. Net neutrality is in fact part of the Internet’s original design principle, and it is only in recent years that its applicability has been contested. Essentially, it requires ISPs to carry all data (or “packets”) over their wires at the same speed, regardless of who is sending them.³ That means that ISPs could not be discriminatory in their distribution of content, and therefore could not send it faster—or slower—based on proprietary interests, competitive strategies, or financial arrangements benefiting those who own the digital pipelines. With net neutrality laws, the Internet would in many ways be a more “open,” competitive environment, and less susceptible to the consolidated power of ISPs.

That consolidation is quite significant at this time, especially in the United States. Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., AT&T Inc., and Verizon Communications Inc. currently control 62 percent of the US broadband marketplace,⁴ and there are no signs that the government will slow this trend down anytime soon. In fact, one of the former top lobbyists for the telecom and tech industries, Tom Wheeler, has been selected to chair the FCC for President Obama’s second term. Public interest advocates are unimpressed and concerned by this choice. Among them is Sasha Meinrath, who heads the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, which advocates for net neutrality, among other issues. Meinrath put some of the dangers for the connected viewing audience in perspective when he said, “I am skeptical that the former chief lobbyist of the wireless and cable industries will be capable of holding his former clients accountable for their ongoing shortcomings.”⁵ These shortcomings include the lack of adherence to net neutrality principles, without which those who control the broadband pipelines have unchecked power over how they deliver the data that flow through them.

The concept of net neutrality essentially applies the principle of common carriage to broadband service, similar to its application for telephone service. Common carriers are considered essential infrastructure for the national economy and public welfare, and include certain transportation and communications services, such as railroads and telecommunications. Therefore, they are subject to strict regulations, and they are and must be available to the general public without prejudice.⁶ In other words, their providers cannot discriminate against those who wish to use the services, or provide preferential treatment to certain customers. This standard of nondiscrimination, if supported properly through law and applied to Internet service, could potentially be used to wrest some measure of control from the highly powerful ISPs, and ensure the public a freer and more open Internet with less risk of interference from those controlling its distribution. Unfortunately, the present viability and realization of net neutrality as a legal standard for broadband regulation is in crisis. In the United States, Internet provision is currently being regulated without common carrier requirements, theoretically allowing ISPs to charge companies more to have their content delivered to consumers in a privileged digital “express lane” of sorts. Service providers are also able to privilege their own content if they are integrated with content companies (e.g., Comcast). This could have dramatic implications for what counts as “choice” in the digital television landscape outside public service systems. As Robert McChesney explains, if ISPs were allowed to legally discriminate among users, “they could effectively privatize the Internet and make it like cable television.”⁷ That scenario offers a model of already-deregulated, consolidated, government-sanctioned regional monopolies that could hypothetically begin charging certain users even more for the privilege of using their pipes, and shut out those who could not afford it. Smaller, independent content providers and digital audiences facing a diminished spectrum of online options will stand to lose the most.

Currently, the courts are deciding whether the FCC actually has any authority at all to regulate ISPs. This was debated as Internet providers were reclassified by federal agencies and the courts four times in five years between 2000 and 2005, ultimately coming before the Supreme Court in the Brand X case. The court’s decision in this case classified cable Internet providers as information services (instead of as telecommunications services, which are more stringently regulated), thus liberating these ISPs from any common carriage requirements.⁸ Shortly thereafter, the FCC reclassified all wireline broadband Internet providers as information services, even those provided by DSL technology/telephone companies. The agency used various rationales, including the argument that “[c]onsistent regulatory treatment of competing broadband platforms will enable potential investors in broadband network platforms to make market-based, rather than regulation-driven, investment and deployment decisions.”⁹ The FCC’s neoliberal approach effectively cut the public right out of the equation in the name of market-based efficiencies.

Brand X and the FCC’s subsequent reclassification of ISPs in 2005 would have dramatic implications for the connected viewing landscape, in that those decisions rendered the FCC somewhat powerless in the arena of broadband regulation, and put the bulk of power into the hands of service providers as gatekeepers. In fact, as law professor and former presidential advisor Susan Crawford has put it, the result of the FCC’s approach has been, incredibly, that “the essential communications network of our time, access to the Internet, has no basic regulatory oversight at all.”¹⁰ This bore out in the landmark Comcast Corp. v. FCC case, when Comcast— the largest ISP in the United States—filed suit against the FCC for attempting to regulate its network management practices in 2008. This case had its beginnings a year earlier when a software engineer and barbershop quartet enthusiast, Robb Topolski, noticed that Comcast was interfering with/slowing down his peer-to-peer sharing of rare audio material that was in the public domain, a practice known as “throttling.” An AP...