Open TV

Innovation beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television

Aymar Jean Christian

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479843756
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

How the internet transformed television Before HBO’s hit show Insecure, Issa Rae’s comedy about being a nerdy black woman debuted as a YouTube web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, her response to the absence of diverse black characters on the small screen. Broad City, a feminist sitcom now on Comedy Central, originated as a web series on YouTube, developed directly out of funny women Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s real-life friendship. These unconventional stories took advantage of the freedom afforded outside the traditional television system: online. Open TV shows how we have left “the network era” far behind and entered the networked era, with the web opening up new possibilities for independent producers, entrepreneurs, and media audiences. Based on interviews with writers, producers, show-runners, and network executives, visits to festivals and award shows, and the experience of producing his own series, Aymar Jean Christian argues that the web brought innovation to television by opening up series development to new producers, fans, and sponsors that had previously been excluded. Online access to distribution provides creative freedom for indie producers, allows for more diverse storytelling from marginalized communities, and introduces new ways of releasing and awarding shows. Open TV is essential reading for anyone interested in the changing environment of television and how the internet can inspire alternatives to what’s on TV tonight.

1

Developing Open TV

Innovation for the Open Network, 1995–2005

How did the Internet become television for Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and independent agents? Announcing American Cybercast (AMCY), one of the most significant early web TV channels, former cable television executive Sheri Herman imagined in 1996 a clear shift from television to the web: “[E]yeballs that once were in front of the TV are now in front of a PC.”1 AMCY debuted to attract and profit from those eyeballs in all the ways legacy networks do: licensing original series, promoting them to fans, and courting interest from advertisers to finance more. AMCY positioned itself as television, and yet its shows were not video based but rather text based. Even without video, Herman still believed web distribution could rapidly transform television development: “The system has proven it works. The networks still have a lock on the business, but they also gave birth to the dozens of channels on cable TV. . . . The gateway model will work on the Internet because of the absolute proliferation of content. People want choice, but network-branded content can help sort out all the choices.”2 Herman tried to reconcile the advantages of networked distribution, its breadth of production and greater consumer choice, with the advantages of legacy television’s billion-dollar, advertiser-based business model. Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, executives like Herman differentiated the web from legacy network development practices by emphasizing greater choices for consumers and freedom for creators. They bet that preaching creative freedom, diversity, and choice could entice brands to shift campaign funds from legacy television to the new, open network.

AMCY betrayed these ideals by growing too quickly and top-heavily. Although they started with a mission to “husband their resources and grow slowly over a period of years, perfecting their shows, allowing the technology and business models to work out,” they decided to “build rapidly” and shoot for an initial public offering, which never materialized.3 Intense competition for small amounts of advertising, attention from passionate fan communities, and large investments for digital projects pushed networks like AMCY toward amassing scale and away from nurturing those who are essential to open TV series development: producers and fans, whose freedom and choice were essential to their pitch as better than television. Indeed, open TV distribution historically favors ingenious programs that producers can execute cheaply, fans can engage with immediately, or brands can use to tell more nuanced stories than in thirty-second spots on linear television.

How then does one distribute television via open, networked protocols? Legacy media companies like ABC grew into television “networks” by connecting broadcast stations across the United States in a tightly controlled system of licensing airwaves; owning and operating a station was costly and regulated. The Internet is different; its network is wider, with more access points. It is networked. By the mid-1990s, access to the web became available to the public, prompting media companies to experiment with ways to serve audiences entertainment through networked, peer-to-peer distribution. Entrepreneurs have been trying to develop television for the open network since it went public in the 1990s, long before streaming video. Most efforts lasted just a few years, as expected for new markets experiencing rapid innovation, particularly when venture-backed projects transferred legacy practices wholesale to the web.

In general, innovative open TV networks, start-ups, and programs harnessed the web’s decentralized nature of distribution—as opposed to legacy networks’ centralized distribution—to support a broader base of producers and fan communities than legacy television did. Web TV network executives and entrepreneurs adapted perceived weaknesses in legacy television: network control over monetizing viewers (namely, marketing and up-front buying) and the development system (namely, the pilot process and ownership and licensing of programs). The web opened the door to companies and individuals outside Hollywood, in Silicon Valley specifically and throughout the United States more generally, to experiment with series development. An unequal competition between distribution technologies ensued. Media conglomerates combined assets via mergers and acquisitions and refocused legacy television channels on owning intellectual property, reducing costs, and maintaining as much control as possible over audience attention.4 Stakeholders who lost power and access in this period—independent producers and brands—flocked to a new distribution portal that could one day surpass television. While broadcast networks have released and produced web programs since the beginning, some of the greatest, most enduring innovations came from those disadvantaged in the legacy system.

This chapter explores the history of episodic web programming—variously called web series, webisodes, bitcoms, web television, and, in its earliest form, cybersoaps—as producers and entrepreneurs developed channels and programs indebted to but also distinct from legacy television.5 From the time the Internet became available to most consumers, companies from Microsoft and NBC to independent production outfits and advertising firms have consistently declared the web the newest form of television. “Television” became a malleable concept through which Hollywood insiders, outsiders, financial backers, and artistic leaders expressed their hopes of media domination in a period of technological change and conglomeration among entertainment corporations. What they often meant was that the Internet would eventually amass a large, dedicated audience they could sell to advertisers to finance new productions outside the major studios.

New media markets emerge slowly and progress unevenly. From the telephone, radio, and film to the earliest forms of television, each medium has developed in fits and starts, responding to industrial, political, and cultural shifts. In new media moments, independents attempt to master new distribution technologies, promoting the possibility, however improbable, that the new medium might accommodate a broader base of producers and communities.6 The writers, executives, and producers of web entertainment are very aware of this history. Press accounts of new web series in the 1990s are littered with references to the early days of television and radio. The trajectory they describe is simple and inevitable: scrappy beginnings to market dominance and cultural hegemony for a small group of players. Despite the common narrative, this did not happen as quickly as open TV’s early entrepreneurs predicted. Instead, the largest surge in series production started over ten years after most Americans could access the web, long after large corporations and Hollywood producers like Steven Spielberg had attempted to turn the new distribution platform into television. The story behind that surge, starting shortly after YouTube’s 2005 debut and lasting until the 2013 premiere of traditionally formatted comedies and dramas on corporate web channels (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu), composes the bulk of this book.

This chapter is organized in four parts, grouped both thematically and chronologically. In the first section I briefly explore why television became a frame through which web producers viewed their efforts. I then narrate the development of web programming in roughly four key periods from 1995 to 2011: the 1995–1999 beginnings and first boom, when excitement over the web led to multimedia experimentation; the period preceding and following the dot-com bust; the 2000–2005 period, when short-form comedy and short films created by producers and curated by brands and networks seemed best positioned to revolutionize TV programming; and the post-YouTube era starting in 2006, in which streaming video developed and a broader base of producers created filmed content. The chapter concludes with what the history of web programming says about the possibility and meaning of innovation in television.

The Web after Television

Why television? At the time of the Internet’s introduction to the public, television was undergoing a revolution. Despite periodic shifts in business practices, the transition to cable made clear the stability of the “network era” of the 1950s through the 1970s—what we commonly understand as “television,” with its tight, central control of advertising and content—and opened the door to the “networked” era of the new millennium. This period of instability, the “multichannel transition” of the 1980s and 1990s as narrated by Lotz and John Ellis, marked a transition from mass audiences and scarce programming to niche audiences and available programming through pay cable (versus free, “over the air” broadcast). Television has expanded and fractured, from its production to its content and the ways in which its practitioners and executives understand and organize audiences. Television today can no longer hold one theory: “Now it presents a diffuse and extensive process of working through. This takes the form of a constant worrying over issues and emotions . . . the presentation of a riot of ways of understanding the world without ever coming to any final conclusions.”7 This process of “working through” has been documented by scholars like Henry Jenkins,8 John Caldwell,9 Vicki Mayer,10 and Amanda Lotz,11 but few scholars have examined the myriad ways in which web-based producers participated in this process by creating programming that borrowed from genres and formats established in the classic network era while experimenting with new storytelling and distribution practices from other media and technologies.

New media producers organized networked television in similar ways to network television, including adopting many of its genres and its tradition of serialization, to keep new audiences consuming on a regular basis. They also borrowed legacy television’s core business practices, including the formation of networks, sponsorship, branded entertainment, and licensing programs. Genres made web programming intelligible to viewers as TV. Dominant genres grew and declined as the online markets changed, as producers responded to technological and funding changes, and as fans directed their interests to new storytelling experiments. Producers and networks invested in genres based on their need to raise money, raise cultural awareness, or conform to technological constraints: “[W]e need to ask what a genre means for specific groups in a particular cultural instance.”12 For web creators in each period outlined in this chapter, different genres took on particular significance according to a range of factors: soaps in the 1990s gained prominence as companies sought to capitalize on the genre’s declining audiences on linear TV and harness serial dramas’ ability to attract regular viewers to a new medium; sitcoms and animation became popular in the early 2000s as technology allowed streaming video but bandwidth was still limited; and a broad range of programs took off in the late 2000s as new networks premiered and advertisers financed video to target various niches.

Web shows combine the modus operandi of scripted television programming (series and serialization) with new formats (primarily short-form, due to fewer resources and perceptions of audience attention). With the exception of events, specials, and movies, most television programs are structured around a series, ranging from the nightly news to weekly sitcoms and sports. Serialization, connecting narratives from episode to episode, has been an enduring and profitable staple, particularly with drama.13 The series and its serialization provide television its stability: narratives without closure keep viewers engaged.14 This lures advertisers in search of consumer attention.

Television’s standard formats, half-hour and hour-long runtimes interspersed with ad spots, were not common on the web until later in its development, when NBC, Fox, and ABC banded together to create Hulu to combat the piracy of their programs on YouTube and exercise greater control over their content. The original text-based web programs arose from producers’ need to relate long narratives with consumers possessing relatively slow modems, while the later trend of short, comedic videos and cartoons reflected the need for cost efficiency on the production side and a similar efficiency on the reception side as modem speeds climbed. If there is a consistent aesthetic of early web programs, it is, in the words of Max Dawson, an “aesthetic of efficiency, characterized by streamlined exposition, discontinuous montage and ellipsis, and decontextualized narrative of visual spectacle.”15 Producers needed to be efficient because the potential payout was low, often nothing at all. Throughout the 2000s, advertising agencies shifted campaign funds very slowly to web-based distributors, and even more slowly to web video (most ads were text and image, not moving image).

The web as a home to short-form, “cheap” programming is largely a result of technology. As bandwidths have increased, so have episode lengths and narrative complexity. By 2012, enough Americans had broadband for web-original full-length (twenty-two- and forty-four-minute) episodes to premiere on channels like Hulu and Netflix in 4K “ultra high definition” streaming. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that broadband quickly outpaced dial-up: in 2013, 70 percent of Americans had broadband at home, compared to just 3 percent in 2000.16 Program length, like genres, has ebbed and flowed. Early text-based stories were not limited by runtime, only by how quickly fans could read. The advent of streaming video introduced runtimes to online video: “Viewers could watch video as it was being transmitted rather than having to wait for the completion of the entire process. Because of Microsoft’s aggressive pre-installation of streaming video players, they quickly became an indispensable accessory to personal computers.”17 While some of the early 2000s animated projects were rather short (under five minutes), high-profile projects existed with higher production value and longer runtimes (e.g., BMW’s The Hire). Still, the dominance of the short format had a number of effects. Most importantly, it encouraged a diverse group of producers excited about cheaper production, and it contributed to the discourse of the web as “low quality,” since brevity worked best with brash—often infantile—forms of comedy.

Outsider efforts to reinvent television coincided with persistent anxiety among legacy development executives over who audiences were and what they wanted, starting in the 1990s as new media technologies—games and virtual reality, cable, DVRs, VHS, and DVDs—gave audiences more choices and as legacy networks’ “tight-fisted grip on their domestic audience had slipped.”18 Audience construction has been an essential function of financing media since the advent of advertising. Audience construction grew in sophistication throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as advertisers armed with more information looked for opportunities to sell to various audie...