From Viewer to Participant
Lizzie Jackson, BBC

In July 2006 the BBC re-organised its Divisions to deliver the ‘Creative Future’, launching two Production groups, ‘BBC Vision’ and ‘BBC Audio and Music’, and placing ‘Marketing, communication and Audiences’ at the centre of the Corporation. This indicates a change of position from one which had been largely technologically determinist to a strategy which is more audience-led. This paper gives an overview of the opportunities audiences have to engage with BBC brands such as EastEnders and Dr Who, and to contribute ‘user-generated content’ to dynamic services. In 2007 BBC Children’s launches CBBC World, an immersive environment for children which shows a commitment to ‘virtuality’. It will be argued the BBC is beginning to be a ‘host’ organisation, a curator of public archives and provider of public space, as well as being a broadcaster and publisher. The Corporation must therefore foreground its role as mediator of content, facilitating audiences’ consumption and engagement with participatory media.

Digital Television and audience research: a sociological approach to capturing ‘user flows’.
Helen Wood, Du Montfort University

Audience reception is still a dominant concern at the core of media analysis, particularly as media technologies evolve and change. Sonia Livingstone (1999) has argued that the more fragmented audience engagements with the media become, the more important our understanding of changing audience practices for theories of social shaping. But capturing the ways in which audiences engage with television becomes even more challenging in an environment where the technology itself now demands differing modes of viewer engagement, responding to the digital environment. Digital TV packages offer ‘interactive’ choices coterminous with computer interfaces. John Caldwell (2003) has labelled the addition of new platforms to television as a ‘second shift aesthetics’. As the apparatus that mediates the interface between television and viewer changes, so might our methods for investigating the very nature of that relationship. This paper offers some suggestions for reconsidering our text/reader theoretical assumptions to deliver a methodology for television audience research within an evolving televisual landscape. By engaging with the phenomenological aspects of television in social contexts, this paper suggests that we may be able to capture the dynamic nature of viewer engagements as they morph and multiply with television’s evolving apparatus.

In 2001, BBC Director of New Media and Technology, Ashley Highfield, had announced, to some controversy, “The days of commissioning programmes are over. We are now only commissioning projects that have levels of interactivity” (authors italics).This paper explores the multi-platform ‘Project’ as a cultural form emergent in the early 2000s, as early experimental forays were made across channels, across media, across departments, across organisations. It sets out a typology of textual configurations: ‘granular’, ‘bundled’ and ‘woven’ before going on to map the aesthetics and textual workings of A Picture of Britain (2005) as exemplar of the ‘bundled’ configuration: an offering across channels and media under an umbrella brand, that consists of a disparate range of content exhibiting vastly different modes of address, production budgets, discursive formations. It concludes with consideration of the Project as a response, by the BBC, to some of the challenges -and opportunities – for public service content in the first phase of the multi-channel digital era.

My contribution to this conference will consider the aesthetics of these longer and shorter forms of television storytelling. In particular, I want to focus on paratexts that condense, digest, or otherwise disaggregate serial narratives into shorter units. Television paratexts have existed for decades, being most commonly associated with the soap opera updates offered in magazines, newspaper columns, and on telephone hotlines. In the current climate of digitalization, however, paratexts occupy a special place in both industrial programming strategies and the audience’s everyday viewing experiences. Increasingly, paratexts are called on to furnish programming for new video playback devices (including handheld media players, mobile telephones, and computers) and provide much-appreciated clarifications of the narratives of some of television’s more convoluted serials. That said, it is still unclear whether paratexts are, as one observer puts it, textual “parasites,” a convenient (yet provisional) solution to the technical limitations of digital hardware and the bandwidth restrictions of new distribution channels (Johnson 1997), or, conversely, whether they are examples of an autonomous televisual form with its own distinctive aesthetic and viewing protocols. My paper will approaches this question from a historical perspective, drawing insight from consideration of some of these paratexts’ antecedents, including the condensed Reader’s Digest novel and the Cliffs Notes study guide series. I suggest our answer to this question will have important implications not only for how we as television studies scholars define our object of study, but also for the ways in which we conceive of television’s visual and narrative pleasures.

“The Days of Commissioning Programmes are over…”: The BBC’s ‘Bundled Project’

Niki Strange, University of Sussex

This paper will address two aspects relating to a possible ‘aesthetics’ of digital television.

Firstly, I will discuss the effects of digital broadcasting. The proliferation of channels has enabled broadcasters (in some contexts) to abandon or disrupt the conventional narrative structure of television programming, so that programming is now no longer required to ‘fit’ a pre-organised schedule, but is now designed to ‘fill’ a schedule. This ‘freedom’ allows both for an ‘extension of’ and a ‘playing with’ television narratives. I am thinking here of the ‘live’ streaming of shows such as Big Brother (Endemol, 2000-) and the ‘interactive’ features of facilities such as Sky Sports’ ‘Player-cam’. Whilst the narrative structure in this kind of programming revisits, or develops experiences already common to pre-digital television – namely, boredom and anticipation – ironically both types of narrative have been re-imagined as ‘high art’ projects featuring ‘celebrity’ footballers. I am thinking here of Sam Taylor Wood’s ‘video portrait’ of a sleeping David Beckham and Douglas Gordon’s Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait (2006). Yet the real commercial end-game of such narratives is, I will suggest, ‘ITV Play’, where the commercial broadcaster’s imperative to engineer the exchange of money for time is firstly stripped bare and secondly, operates as a context in which the experiential qualities of anticipation and boredom can be played out (and pushed on and on and on).

Secondly, I will also address the effects of the digital production of television programming, investigating formal qualities such as image and sound as well the way in which ‘control’ – the power of the image in relation to the power over the image – is made explicit in several recent programmes. To review this contest, I will explore the nature of apparently benign ‘digital environments’ such as that constructed by the children’s programme Lazy Town (Lazy Town Productions, 2004-), as well as the more controversial use of digital compositing and CGI in historical documentaries such as the BBC’s Auschwitz (2005)and the Discovery Channel’s Virtual History: the plot to Kill Hitler (2004).
The Long and the Short of Convergence Aesthetics

Max Dawson, Northwestern University

The children’s television production sector has not been having an easy time in the UK. Producers often talk about the sector being in crisis, but this seems like the sort of crisis from which it may never really recover. First Ofcom is about to ban advertising of HFSS (High, Fat, Sugar, Salt) foods around broadcast programming targeted at the under 16s. Second, ITV the second largest investor in children’s programming after the BBC, has closed its production unit, Granada Kids, and is trying its utmost to discard its tier three public service commitment to transmit children’s programming on ITV 1. With the ban on HFSS advertising, the funding rug has been pulled out from beneath the children’s production sector, with little prospect of any alternatives coming to the fore. This is all happening at a time when the industry is facing the additional challenge of technological change, where even the very youngest children are supposedly ‘proactively recording, downloading and sampling content’ requiring broadcasters and broadcasters to reach out to them in different ways ‘through online, mobile and TV experiences’ (Michael Carrington, Creative Director, CBeebies, 2006).

This paper investigates the reality of the crisis in production for pre-school television, particularly as it relates to the production community in the UK, and investigates the extent to which new media offer new opportunities as well as threats. Drawing on interviews with broadcasters and producers, the paper investigates the extent to which pre-school television is currently conforming to multi-platform commissioning, and the degree to which this necessitates changes and adaptations in a multi-layered creative process. To what extent are commissioning structures being overhauled to work on a multi-platform basis, and how are broadcasters, producers and co-funders managing and creatively negotiating this process, which has both commercial and creative implications? To what extent is this type of ‘joined-up thinking’ possible in the digital era and what are the implications both financially and creatively for the preschool sector?
Session 2: The Aesthetics of Convergence

William Boddy, Baruch College, City University of New York

This paper addresses the uncertain status of traditional domestic television within an unstable and rapidly-changing media landscape marked by proliferating technological platforms, business models, and sites and styles of moving-image reception. Several recent developments in the US television and film industries, including the proliferation of hand-held display devices, the diffusion of digital video recorders and high-definition TV receivers, the growing popularity of internet-based video distribution, including self-programmed websites like Youtube.com, the launch of competing formats for high-definition DVDs, and the emergence of electronic distribution and exhibition of theatrical films, all suggest the need for media scholars to reassess the position of domestic television as an industry and social practice. These emerging digital platforms raise questions about the shifting business of television and film in a number of contexts. For example, the prospect of the electronic distribution and exhibition of theatrical motion pictures has provoked fearful, even apocalyptic, warnings from some in the contemporary Hollywood industry. Digital exhibition has inspired some filmmakers and industry observers to imagine an industry less dominated by the major studios, opening up untraditional venues for exhibition and new opportunities for traditional exhibitors to contract directly with filmmakers and develop alternative programming and uses for traditional public cinemas, including sporting events, music concerts, business conferencing, and video gaming. Electronic cinema has encouraged the growth of in-cinema advertising and has threatened the long-established practice of staggered release dates across the theatrical and domestic exhibition markets. Furthermore, some in the motion picture industry worry that electronic cinema will undermine the distinct aesthetic attributes and audience practices associated with domestic television viewing and public cinema-going. Emerging digital platforms like electronic cinema promise to confound some of the foundational distinctions between media forms, economic models, and reception sites and practices in the study of television and cinema, and the current proliferation of technological platforms, business models, and viewing practices related to the consumption of moving images beyond the domestic context of traditional television will have profound implications for the objects and methods of the study of contemporary media culture.

“User-Generated Content/Producer-Generated Consumption: How Outsourcing, Crowd-sourcing, and Industrial Identity Theory Fuel Digital TV”

John T. Caldwell, UCLA

Many media theorists have over-sold viewer-centrism as a defining characteristic of new media consumption. This paper offers a series of correctives to user-driven formulations of digital television: first, that producer-generated consumption (PGC) is as important as user-generated content (UGC) in media interactions; second, that production outsourcing is as determining as consumer crowd-sourcing in developing effective and resilient brands; third, that viral content production on the industrial side is as fundamental to contemporary digital television aesthetics as viral video marketing is on the consumer side; and finally, that decades-old strategies and conventions of broadcast “programming,” far from being displaced by new digital technologies, actually become more crucial in effective transmedia industrial practice. Digital TV is now being posed as a “war between uploading and downloading” (Lunenfeld), between data/software “importing and exporting” (Manovich), and between “fan poaching and producer spoiling” (Jenkins). While these important formulations richly mine the complexities of content and usage, re-mixability, and discursive interactions between media fans and producers, they are less effective in describing higher-order industrial interactions with viewers.
I hope to underscore the complex, and resilient ways that the new media conglomerates immediately engage and manage user volatility. Rather than simply talking about an unruly culture of deep “remixability,” for example, scholars would do well to examine the pre-conditions stimulating these practices, including the economic and technological characteristics involved in deep corporate “mixability.” Shifting research on digital TV in this way shows that production itself can now be understood as a viral process that helps industry rationalize consumer mobility, mitigate cultural instabilities, and minimize economic risk. Viral content production, furthermore, tends to work now for companies who have mastered not just the “imagined worlds” of complicated blockbuster television narratives (of, say Lost, or 24), but who have mastered “brand management” across multimedia platforms and technologies as well. Digital TV, that is, is not just about new kinds of technology-based narrative-user interactions or technological extensions of content. It is about the industrial construction and maintenance of responsive brand identities; something that can be profitably understood, first, as outgrowths and self-representations of “production’s imagined communities”; and second, as industrial performances authored in “corporate identity theory.”
Session 1: Producing Digital Television

Dislocated Screens: The Place of Television in a Mobile Digital Culture