canarytrap.net

[Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog]

This weekend, as some of you might know, is the 6th Media in Transition conference here at MIT. The theme this year is “Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission” and centers on question around the preservation, circulation, and migration of media between places, formats, platforms, and text and the cultural implications these changes carry:

What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture? What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct? What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

I will myself be speaking on transnational audiences and fan-driven circulation of East Asian television dramas on Saturday.

Though the bulk of activities begins today, the conference has its official launch last night, with a communications forum on Global Media featuring C3 consulting researchers Jonathan Gray and Aswin Punathambekar alongside University of Georgia professor Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and award-winning African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako, moderated by our own Henry Jenkins.

A few of the key points and provocations brought up during the panel:

Looking carefully at the flows of media circulation in addition to production and consumption, provides us with a new and important means to understanding media on a global scale.
Brought up by Aswin towards the beginning of the panel but echoed in different ways by all of the speakers, the importance of circulation as a site of media power was one of the central problematics discussed. The question of how media gets from one place to another, through what channels, at whose behest (or against whose wishes) reappeared in different forms throughout the talk. Aswin discussed the varied, criss-crossing flows of Bollywood content. Carolina’s discussed different national forms of the telenovela throughout Latin America and which ones travels with the help of or despite national governments. Jonathan described the almost entirely pirate-led circulation of VCD and DVD films in Malawi and how media circulation into spaces neglected by corporations due to their unprofitability forces us to rethink the temporality, as well as the spatiality of global media. And Abderrahamane linked the power of distribution, of being able to show and export your media, to representation. He suggested that the unevenness in the transmission of media perpetuated the cultural domination upon Africa because as a place that often receives media from the outside but does not produce and distribute its own images, Africa is constructed as a place that has no culture to share.

Not just a question of legal versus illegal circulation
Another key issue was that role of piracy in global media, since illegal distribution channels are often the only means through which much of this media can move. Aswin was first quick to point out that illegal/extralegal versus legal was a false binary, that in actuality the systems are far more complex and overlapping. Jonathan added that, in a case such as Malawi, piracy takes multiple forms, the first being that piracy is the only way to bring outside media in because there is so little profit to be made in Malawi that media corporations never address the area. The second is that piracy stops production of local media because it makes it incredibly difficult for Malawian musicians to make money. In the case of telenovelas, piracy can also be an act of resistance, when national governments crack down on the export of media through official channels. And in Africa, the routes of media circulation are so complex and it is often difficult to trace where any given film comes from. Ultimately, the false binary between legal and illegal circulation makes us overlook the fact that cultures of distribution are simultaneously cultures of production

Down with “industry lore”
Finally, coming out of a discussion of which genres of media circulate, the panelists warned against the trap of “industry lore.” As Jonathan points out in the case of Malawi, that even as general patterns emerge as to what genres and forms are popular, there are constantly exceptions to every rule. Thus we must be careful not to make too broad of generalizations about what audiences want to see and why based on assumptions and speculations.

[Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog]

Apologies for the strange, late cross-post from C3. With the recent travel schedule, organization has escaped me. This post was originally written early last week, but somehow didn’t end up here. I should be returning to a more steady blogging schedule now that I’m back in Cambridge.

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Strange news from across the pond: due to a dispute over licensing, the Performing Rights Society (PRS) in the UK, YouTube is no longer going to host music videos in the UK. For a more detailed breakdown of the situation, cnet as a thorough write-up, but gist of it is that PRS want more licensing fees for the right to host the material, the costs of which YouTube considered “prohibitive.” There is also reported to be a lack of transparency about what content will be included in the licensing deal. Meanwhile, the PRS suggested that YouTube is not paying a fare share of their revenue.

It’s somewhat unclear as to what stands at the heart of the controversy, whether it is centrally a question of IP or of revenue share, though it does speak to the struggle and difficulty of finding models ownership and compensation in the digital space and takes us towards a much more complex problem of how to determine whether content drives people to YouTube or if the social relations on YouTube drive the circulation of content. According to the cnet article, there is also the question of if record companies are profiting from having their content on YouTube. Putting aside the issue of whether or not YouTube is sharing enough of its revenue, this issue of the “profitability” of putting music videos on YouTube seems, in my mind, to miss the point.

Music videos, to my knowledge, have generally been used as promotional materials. Attempting to charge google for high licensing fees in order to play videos seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding of both music videos and of youtube. Youtube is a fantastic place to discover new artists that may not be able to get significant radio play. What’s more, with youtube videos, you can send links to your friends to spread the word directly about songs you enjoy, which you can’t do with a song on the radio. In short, record companies and license holders may not feel as if they’re making money by having their videos on Youtube, but the truth is that they’re certainly not making money from NOT having them there. Youtube isn’t diverting potential record-buyers, after all. Streaming online video isn’t exactly the most flexible or portable way to enjoy music. What Youtube does provide is a source of low-cost, high visibility, robust promotion that has the potential to engage audiences in a way that broadcast mediums, even ones that pay high licensing fees, can’t. We only have to look at examples such as Soulja Boy to see that.

This speaks also to another key issue, which is the fallacy of “free.” By not charging licensing fees, record companies feel that they’re giving away their music for “free.” This has been the dominant discourse overall when media producers and critics alike talk about putting content on sites like Youtube or Hulu or last.fm. But we have to remember that just because you’re not charging people doesn’t mean you’re not getting anything in return. Putting things on Youtube is giving content away for free if the only measure of value you have is money, and more specifically, direct payment. By pretending all of it is “free” of any form of return, any for of profit or benefit, we mask the crucial forms of exchange happening between media corporations and audiences. Non-monetary exchanges are, in fact, the exact opposite of “free” in the sense that they create social bonds, community, and a sense of goodwill and exchange. These may be implicit, they may be ambiguous and informal, but they do exist, and for musicians and entertainers, this is the kind of value they need, because this is the kind of value that translates into fans.

Or to put it another way, Youtube and networked social spaces where people share, create, and circulate content are growing increasingly central to how we consume and engage with media. As as result, the real questions companies need to ask themselves is this: whether or not they feel they are profiting from being in these spaces, can they afford to not be there?

This was later cross-posted to the Convergence Culture Consortium blog

A funny thing happened on my way to check out the new Skittles homepage-as-social-media-experiment that’s been generating all sorts of attention over my twitter feed. I went to the homepage, and in my sleep deprived idiocy, entered today’s date in their terms of service agreement instead of my birthdate.
And since Skittles decided to take my word for it that I was born today, it deemed me underage and thus not the appropriate audience for it’s free-for-all social media aggregation scheme.

While it was indeed my own oversight that got me blocked from their page, the block speaks to the underlying problem with this stunt, which is that while the idea seems interesting, the execution and practical application might fall somewhat short of potential.

There is, of course, the technical side in which their terms didn’t manage to catch that I’d entered an impossible birth date. But beyond that, there are other practical issues, such as the overlarge navigation console pointed out by Stan Schroeder at Mashable. Moreover, as Christopher Carfi astutely observes in his blog, with no way to regulate the signal/noise ratio, the site runs the risk of people loosing interest because of the sheer volume of content.

However, what interests me is that my mistake this morning presents a dilemma that has yet to be discussed in the first flush of interest and excitement over Skittles.com’s new strategy. For all intents and purposes, in aggregating this content through their site, and thereby putting it under their terms of service, they are effectively taking content that is otherwise open to and created by the public — what is essentially public discourse — and branding it as their own, then resetting the parameters for access.

What in one way appears to be a handing over of control to the consumers to discuss and use the brand as they wish, is in another way an assertion of a measure of ownership. Skittles owns the site and set the regulations and protocols of interaction there, but the site is composed of content created totally outside of those regulations, content created through social relations that did not agree to the boundaries that Skittles requires for its site. In other words, by asserting their right to not only aggregate, but then redefine the conditions through which the content can be viewed, Skittles is suggesting that they have some claim over the content by virtue of it being about them.

Of course, though this echoes of the notion of “fan labor,” Skittles’ incursion is fairly minor . After all, your content is still available openly elsewhere, and the terms Skittles has imposed on it seem to only be limited to age to prevent minors from open access to potentially objectionable content, which is a perfectly understandable, if somewhat ironic, concern. But it makes you think: in talking about Spreadable media, we had always been so focused on instances of individuals and communities appropriating and claiming ownership of the content of corporations for their own ends, but media spread is by nature multi-directional, so we can only expect that it would work in the other way as well. Is it different when companies appropriate content created by individuals for their own purposes?

And while this stunt certainly generated the attention it was looking for, is any of that sustainable? It is merely a flash of PR hand-waving or does Skittles actually have an idea of how they want to begin facilitating relationships between both the brand and its audience and between audience members through the brand? And more importantly, is this really the right step towards the kind of relationships they will want to cultivate?

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog.
For details about how Carnival works in Bahia, please refer to Ana Domb’s post.

It’s fitting that we’re closing in on the end of our Spreadable Media white paper series on the blog just as Ana and I begin to discuss our experiences and research in Brazil, beginning with our time spent in Salvador for Carnival. In Spreadability, we propose a model of thinking about media brands and properties as not only consumer products, but as symbolic goods that circulate and thrive due to the adaptability and customizability of their social value. That is, media is spread when we can make personal and social use of it.

In particular, the use of the required camarote t-shirts caught my attention as a particular apt example of how to spread “media,” or in this case, brands. Referencing Fiske, we suggest that the in part 6 of the spreadable media paper that advertising becomes spreadable when it becomes “producerly,” that is, when it tried not only to speak to consumers, but allows for consumers to speak to one another — communicating community affiliations, performances of identity, social values and so on– through advertising.

Logo-splattered t-shirts were the required dress for the camarotes (large private tents with capacity into the thousands for viewing the parade) and to ride inside or walk along with the trios (enormous truck riggings that carried bands and dancers), acting as part of your “ticket.” Thus each trio or camarote had their own shirts, covered in the logos of their sponsors. Here we already begin to see a merging of brands and social affiliation declaration — the color of shirt you wore declared your membership to a particular group, and in some cases your devotion to a particular musician or your socioeconomic status (since the availability and price of acquiring these shirts can range).

More interesting, however, was the practice of customizing the shirts. While looking into a crowd, you see a mass of the same t-shirt and same logos, the close-up view shows extraordinary variety and detail. Customizations ranged from basic scissors and safety-pin jobs to professional level alterations with detailed paneling using other fabrics, zippers, draping, and gathering. And while on the whole, the women were more inventive than the men, there were some stand-outs, such as an older gentleman who had not only altered his shirt to fit him perfectly, but had used the excess fabric to construct a dress-shirt collar.

Even more surprising was that within our camarote, there was a station provided by one of the sponsors with several girls who could cut and decorate the shirts of attendees with ribbons and other accessories for those who didn’t come with their shirts already customized.

While they had a couple suggested designs on display, most people gave them specific instructions for how they wanted their shirts altered. This transformed our boring t-shirts (which, with our recent arrival and limited resources, we were unable to alter ourselves) into much more lasting symbolic goods that both Ana and I packed up into our already overflowing luggage as we left, fully intent keeping them for good despite, which we would not have otherwise.

Though it might seem trivial to think about how people might alter and customize t-shirts they’re forced to wear, this act is an expression of taste and as sociologist Don Slater suggest, “Taste . . . Is seen as a ‘cultural arbitrary’, a matter not of instrinsic value but of classification grounded in social processes. But it is not socially arbitrary: tastes correlate closely with social division” (Slater 1997, 160). Thus, we are seeing a case in which branded good that are monetarily not terribly valuable are being repurposed into objects of more lasting social value. Not only does the customization provides individuals with the ability to express take and cultural values, but the customization inside the camorotes, during the party, transforms the shirt into a unique artifact of that moment, turning it from a uniform, mass commodity, into something far more meaningful.

In addition to being an unparallel social and cultural event, it was evident from the 500% hotel mark-ups and tightly and intricately produced events that Carnival is also very much an industry, especially in Salvador. And much of that industry has to do with event-based advertising and sponsorship. Thus, advertising at Carnival serves as a provocative example of precisely this hybrid social/commericial space, as Ana suggested in her post with the notion of “brand syncretism,” in which brands provide rich materials for cultural expression and the articulation of community or loose social affiliations.

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium:

On Tuesday, the Participatory Culture Foundation launched version 2.0 of their non-profit, open-source internet video player, Miro. A detailed features list can be found at the Miro site and Ars Technica has a fairly thorough breakdown of the pros and cons of the interface.

What is immediately striking about Miro is the ability to aggregate, and share if desired, a library of videos from a variety of sites, platforms, and formats. Users have the freedom to create channels and libraries where broadcast content pulled from NBC.com can co-exist with the lasted vlogs taken from youtube.

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium

Last week I introduced Dramafever, a new content-distribution and community platform dedicated to bringing Asian entertainment content to the US (currently in closed beta) that is posing some interesting questions about engaging niche audiences in an increasingly global media landscape. This week, I had a chance to sit down for an informative phone conversation with the Dramafever founders, Suk Park and Seung Bak, about their goals, their tactics, and how they’re negotiating the space between fan communities and commercial interests.

Expect the full interview transcript in the near future, though for now (and for those of us pressed tight for reading time), after the cut is a brief summation of some of the stand-out revelations on how to approach established communities, unexpected surplus audiences and the broadening appeal of Asian entertainment, and what the future holds for global media flows online.

Asian Drama and Audience Engagement
One of the most provocative and compelling finding Park and Bak shared from their early data, was the fact that there was an unexpectedly large proportion of Asian drama fans and site visitors who were not of any sort of Asian decent. When the two first developed the idea for dramafever.com — they had noticed the enormous popularity of Korean dramas throughout Asia and in parts of the rest of the world, but there appeared to be a gap in the US market, where a majority of licensed Asian content (with Anime being a notable exception) was being distributed predominantly on premium satellite television stations and ethnic grocery stores. Even after taking stock of the flourishing online communities around the unauthorized circulation of Korean and Japanese dramas, they had expected their audience to be primarily Asian-American, and heavily Korean due to their currently all-Korean content and positioned themselves to advertisers accordingly.

What they discovered was that nearly half of their subscribers and fans were not of any discernible Asian lineage, and that the audience for Asian media was far broader than what the limited targeting of broadcast channels and grocery-store rentals suggested.
This finding, though preliminary and not strictly scientific, given the limited numbers of beta-subscribers (estimated around 13,000), fits in line with much of what I’ve found in my own research, regarding the much more ambiguous and diverse audiences in Asian drama communities that cannot be addressed by broadcast channels that target audiences based on a predetermined demographic. Furthermore, it suggests that online platforms are an ideal means to “test the waters” of new national markets and build a following for content without large capital investments, much in the way that unauthorized fan circulation of Anime in the 80s and 90s primed the market for its present mainstream popularity.

Community Relations
One of the seemingly obvious and yet refreshing tactics taken by Park and Bak when launching the project involved extensive familiarity with and observation of some of the central hubs of distribution and discussion around Korean dramas. They realized quickly that there was vast amounts of information available in terms of what dramas were popular with English-speaking audiences and why — they simply had to pay attention.
As a result, they’ve built a philosophy around being open with their audience, and highly responsive, listening to and soliciting suggestions from their users and from existing discussion forums.

Moreover, they seem to have taken on the controversy of monetizing fansubbed content in a straight-forward and thoughtful manner. The problem that other sites have faced with fansubbers, they suggest, is that they’re not in open communication with fansubbers when their fansubbed content is uploaded. The fact that these sites then make money from that content then exposes fansubbers to legal risk, without any consent or benefits on the part of the fansubbers. Dramafever.com seeks to avoid these problems, which often stir up bad blood between distribution sites and their audience base, by not only having licenses for the content (thereby negating the legal risk), but also opening up negotiations with fansubbers from the very start in regards to compensation and use of materials.

The future of global content
When asked about where they fit in between struggling satellite TV stations with their premium prices and limited content and fan-organized drama communities able to offer an immense range of unauthorized content, the pair stressed sustainability and quality as goal. They point out that unauthorized sites are wildly popular in part because they are filling a very real market need that wasn’t being seen to by licensed distributors. In comparing the situation to American mainstream media before readily available legal download sources like hulu.com, apple, and netflix, they suggest that the audience will follow the availability of content and the quality of experience.

“Even though we are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to of content selection, we’re offering an experience that’s clearly superior to the illegal sites out there that’s winning over an audience,” Bak says, noting that they’re already seeing consistent traffic even in the closed beta stage, with significant spikes whenever there is new content uploaded.

More to the point, they suggest that these illegal distribution sources might not be sustainable in the long run. Not only does their unauthorized status prevent sites like mysoju.com from developing major sponsor relationships for revenue, “Most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, have to base their existing infrastructure on existing platforms” says Park. As a result, as sites such as Veoh and Youtube crack down on IP violations, content is lost, creating inconsistent user experiences.

Ultimately though, as much of what we discuss at C3 has shown, the audiences aren’t just getting content from any single distributor. “I think if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game,” says Park. Emails from viewers and other observation suggest that people who have already seen dramas from one site will watch them again on dramafever.com, thanks to the quality of video and the ease of use. “We’re not trying to become d-addicts or mysoju or these other places where people are hanging out. We’re trying to compliment the overall ecosystem of Asian entertainment consumption in this country.”

The future of global content
When asked about where they fit in between struggling satellite TV stations with their premium prices and limited content and fan-organized drama communities able to offer an immense range of unauthorized content, the pair stressed sustainability and quality as goal. They point out that unauthorized sites are wildly popular in part because they are filling a very real market need that wasn’t being seen to by licensed distributors. In comparing the situation to American mainstream media before readily available legal download sources like hulu.com, apple, and netflix, they suggest that the audience will follow the availability of content and the quality of experience.

“Even though we are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to of content selection, we’re offering an experience that’s clearly superior to the illegal sites out there that’s winning over an audience,” Bak says, noting that they’re already seeing consistent traffic even in the closed beta stage, with significant spikes whenever there is new content uploaded.

More to the point, they suggest that these illegal distribution sources might not be sustainable in the long run. Not only does their unauthorized status prevent sites like mysoju.com from developing major sponsor relationships for revenue, “Most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, have to base their existing infrastructure on existing platforms” says Park. As a result, as sites such as Veoh and Youtube crack down on IP violations, content is lost, creating inconsistent user experiences.

Ultimately though, as much of what we discuss at C3 has shown, the audiences aren’t just getting content from any single distributor. “I think if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game,” says Park. Emails from viewers and other observation suggest that people who have already seen dramas from one site will watch them again on dramafever.com, thanks to the quality of video and the ease of use. “We’re not trying to become d-addicts or mysoju or these other places where people are hanging out. We’re trying to compliment the overall ecosystem of Asian entertainment consumption in this country.”

Some thoughts as Dramafever develops
The platform, of course, is still in development. They’re working out some bugs and implementing community-oriented interactive features. A couple of things on my wishlist as they move forward:

– Ability to share and embed clips and images taken from the videos, and easy screenshot tools to use while watching in order to facilitate what are known as “pimp posts” and recaps (like this one for the Korean version of Boys Over Flowers) that play a significant role promoting content.

– Places for fans to add their own self-created ancillary content: recaps, reviews, fanvids, fiction, etc.

– Tools or interfaces to schedule viewings with friends to share the experience, and possibly collaboration with services such as the open-source Boxee that Sheila just posted about recently.

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium

On of the fascinating results of the increasing speed and accessibility of the present media landscape is that as the global reach of media content broadens, companies are becoming aware of increasingly fragmented, niched, and narrow audience segments. Such as the case with a new online VOD platform, dramafever.com, a hulu-esque service dedicated to providing high-quality streams of television content from East Asia to US audiences with small commercial interruptions from sponsoring advertisers. What makes this site a particularly interesting case to follow, beyond the explicitly transnational dynamic of the media content and audience (though due to licensing, dramafever.com can currently only provide content to users in the US), is the site’s ability and willingness to engage in the fandom as well as the history of the circulation of Asian drama content itself in relation to IP.

While still in beta, the service currently provides over a dozen of the most popular Korean dramas in recent years (including the shamelessly addictive Coffee Prince and My Lovely Sam Soon, the latter of which has been licensed for a remake by NBC), all subtitled in English, with plans to expand into a broader range of television content from across Asia. At the outset, they seem to be taking the right steps in engaging with the fandom at large, having announced the beta through a number of korean pop culture and drama fan blogs and encouraging people to submit requests for dramas that they would like to see the site host. In addition, though most of their subtitles are provided professionally by the content producers and broadcasters, they are also said to be in talks with popular kdrama fansubbing group With S2 to provide subtitles for less established dramas.

This move to collaborate with fansubbers is particularly inspired as fansubbers determine what is available and when, thus determining in many ways which dramas become popular with international audiences. In addition, fansubbing itself and the social protocols around circulating fansubs are taken very seriously within fandom. There has been some controversy in the past with sites such as crunchyroll.com which charges for certain services on the site, hosting user-uploaded fansubs that explicitly state they are not intended for any sort of commercial use.

Dramafever.com is also an interesting step in the well-established legacy of piracy “grey” markets for East Asian drama outside the countries of broadcast, which rose with the circulation of pirated VCDs and then moved online through fansubbing, torrents, and direct download providers such as megaupload and the Korean service Clubbox. While we have seen more traditional, broadcast efforts at tapping diasporic Asian-American audiences struggle in recent years, the online grey market circulation of streaming video and Asian drama torrents and downloads have been flourishing. Dramafever.com seems to seek to create a bridge between the two, bringing the appropriate broadcasting licenses and video quality together with the flexibility and responsiveness of the online environment expected by Asian drama fandom, and how it all plays out will provide critical insight into engaging and monetizing niche audience appeal.