Opening Note

Last week, the first part of this essay ran in the Opening Note of the C3 Weekly Update. In it, Joshua focused on the Hulu business model and some user responses to the site. This week, he expands on that analysis and looks at other examples, such as CBS' Jericho.

The complaints about Hulu I highlighted at the end of last week's piece, of course, are not new, and I don't wish to suggest Hulu has in some way produced this attitude. Ratings systems and audience measurement are not democracies nor true free markets, and to a certain extent, the idea of being a slighted viewer in a marginal audience segment, the value of whose viewership is ignored, is somewhat fundamental to the television audience experience. If anything, Hulu merely makes this experience visible by providing an avenue alongside insubstantial schedules where the audience can speak back. Where previously these activities took place in lounge rooms and on Internet forums, all Hulu does is bring them into direct contact with the program itself.

At the same time, however, there seems to be a suggestion undergirding these comments that the service, given its official status, is bound to respond to the market. In his 2007 Film Quarterly essay "YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge," Lucas Hilderbrand, writing about the disappointment of finding content removed from YouTube, suggests expectations for availability have been extended and exaggerated by "[t]he Internet, Google, and YouTube," such that "[e]xpectations for access have developed into a sense of access entitlement" (p. 50). While I'm not sure I would go so far as to suggest a sense of access entitlement, certainly looking at negative comments on Hulu reveal an expectation of access and demands of availability. In one sense, these viewers seem to be holding the entertainment industry to its message that digital distribution needed to be legitimated through a business model. Rather than routing around official sources, these audience members are using the currencies they've been prescribed to go through the front door and ultimately finding them lacking. Maybe had the industry not criminalized file-sharing and the redactional (see p. 112 of John Hartley's 2007 book TV Truths) activities of YouTube, some audiences would be more forgiving.

These patterns of relation reveal mixed messages about the value of audience attention and Hulu certainly isn't alone in sending them. CBS' recent decision to resurrect post-apocalyptic drama Jericho after a determined and attention-grabbing fan campaign suggested initially that perhaps non-broadcast audiences were enough to influence the economics of the industry. After all, the myth goes that Jericho had been especially popular with DVR viewers and those using CBS' Innertube service, and a fan campaign was enough for CBS to recognize they were out there. No sooner had the program been revived, however, were fans told in order to show their continued support they would need to transform into a different sort of viewer - the regularly-scheduled-at-8pm-kind planted in front of the broadcast. Not just that, but they would need to encourage others to join them. Adding insult to injury, fans were offered a somewhat compromised second season, with a smaller cast and less sophisticated production.

That Jericho didn't survive season two should come as no surprise; the program was ultimately made dependent upon none of the audiences who made it popular in the first place. Indeed, it would seem that the network itself ultimately disavowed the very modes of attention that supported the show and characterized the viewers who rallied to bring it back. Similarly, there is a sense at times on Hulu that audiences who are doing everything that they're asked are ultimately being ignored.

This is, of course, too broad a perspective on Hulu; relationships between the site and its viewers are much more complex than an ignored and demanding audience and broadcasters defending existing revenue at the expense of new. While the value of online advertising is on the increase, particularly in relation to traditional television spending, the industry is still organized according to a series of logics and practices that privilege first-run broadcast economics. This is a fact audiences are aware of; even if they don't fully appreciate the constraints such logics and conditions might place upon networks. Yet the broadcast model doesn't wholly fit the patterns of audienceship across the site, and we need to rethink the way audience attention is accounted for, and the expectations of behavior imposed by the adaptation of broadcast models to the online space.

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Closing Note

Last week's Closing Note featured the first part of this essay, in which Lotz looked at the recent past of women's cable channels. This week, she concludes by looking at how distinctions among women's cable channels are lessening, as well as how the channels have all seemed to target the same demographics.

With the context of recent developments established in last week's piece, I want to begin this week with one of the most unexpected things I learned when interviewing programmers and researchers at the three women’s channels (Lifetime, Oxygen, and WE) in the early 2000s: the degree to which they didn’t see themselves as competitors.

I attributed much of this to competitive rhetoric, but there seemed a kernel of truth given their different competitive positions. Although "women’s cable networks" seems a meaningful category from the outside, the folks at Lifetime explained that they viewed TBS, TNT, and USA as their primary competition--and this was the case at the time as Lifetime was coming off twenty-six months of ranking as the most watched cable network. Similarly, the executives I spoke with at Oxygen listed VH1, E!, Comedy Central, and TLC as primary competitors, which was also a legitimate claim, as the network was likely to be considered an alternative destination for female viewers of these more generally-branded channels.

So what does it mean that Oxygen is less explicitly hailing women and calling out now instead to Generation O, and that Lifetime has dropped its "Television for Women" brand identifier and attempted to make its brand more youthful while emphasizing "escape" (which had been the domain of WE). Researching these networks in the early 2000s with my feminist media scholar hat firmly affixed, I argued that the multiplication of networks targeting women was a significant and positive development because it contributed to the increase in stories told about women and their lives and range of programming identified with women. This multiplicity is important because media offering a variety of depictions or stories about groups who’ve been less common in media or stereotyped when appearing there are the most powerful ways to combat these stereotypes. In contrast to Washington Post television columnist Lisa DeMoraes, who pejoratively dubbed WE (at the time rebranding from Romance Classics) as the "unthinking woman’s network," I suggested that the traditional femininity constructed by the channel was tempered by melodramatic attention to issues on Lifetime and the smart-fare of Oxygen’s first iteration. If WE had been the only "women’s network," its narrow construction of female identity would be a cause for greater concern than was the case in the early 2000s when other "women’s networks" constructed different identities for their audiences and a range of lead female characters could be found at the center of an unprecedented number of dramas on broadcast screens.

The recent moves by Lifetime and Oxygen leave me wondering how well my claims hold up now. Both networks are looking more and more like each other, and like WE. There is frankly little that now distinguishes the formerly women’s channels from competitors that have not relied on an explicitly gender-specific appeal in the past.

The other conundrum that emerged from my initial examination of the women’s cable sector was that despite the fact Lifetime, Oxygen, and WE were offering some really different programming, they were all fundamentally seeking to attract the same segments of the female audience deemed most valuable by advertisers. So despite real differences in programming--they all really wanted the same viewers. Lifetime took more of a big tent approach by drawing larger overall audiences, only a subset of whom were those most valuable to advertisers, while Oxygen demarcated its audience more narrowly, but with a greater proportion of the desired subgroup. The channels’ challenge remains the same, however, their strategies are becoming more similar, which reduces the range of programming and types of stories about women available and adds to the disenfranchisement of those audiences who advertisers don’t most desire.

So what will the new Oxygen look like? It will probably house off-net runs of NBC’s more female skewing content (particularly those series created by NBCU), and perhaps the NBCU ownership will afford it the budgets to create some original series that will help establish it in the manner the conglomerate has achieved with USA and Sci Fi. Although it is difficult to imagine what might be distinctive about this content, given that it targets the same demographic as most other broad-niche networks and channels.

Maybe this is just a momentary trend, but these moves may suggest changing thinking about the economics of gender-specific targeting on cable. Perhaps as a function of ongoing fragmentation, it is simply that a group once seen as a niche (women) has been identified as much more varied and complex (not entirely a bad thing for viewers), and is now seen as problematically broad--much like the general "broadcast" audience. The aspect that gives me pause, both as a feminist scholar and as someone with at least a rudimentary understanding of business, is of the increasing similarity of the identities of the former "women’s" cable channels and many other established channel brands (E!, Bravo, TLC, Style, WE) and the narrow audience that they are all targeting. It may be easy to sell a "young, trend-obsessed" audience to advertisers, but is that audience big enough to go around?