The slow pace at which MVPDs introduced VOD offerings and developed a robust programming supply is far more a matter of the complicated rights allowances required in a business of many middlemen and advertising protocols than of technological capability. The development of VOD libraries required extensive negotiation between content creators, cable channels, and MVPDs in order to identify a financial model that would serve all three entities and still be desirable to viewers.36 Throughout the mid-2000s, MVPDs rebuilt their infrastructure and offered VOD as part of top-tier digital subscription packages. By 2005, free VOD was available to 26 percent of cable subscribers, but primarily allowed them to view only “extras” and “bonus footage” rather than full episodes.37 Some cable services experimented with subscription video on demand (SVOD), but the model of paying specifically for the on-demand content was less popular (unsurprisingly) than the “free” access, which cable services included as a “value-added” perquisite to encourage digital cable subscription. Subscription services such as HBO did include on-demand access to much of its content as part of subscription comparatively early on, providing its subscriber base with the earliest access to full-length on-demand content.
The other impediment slowing VOD development resulted from finding a way to monetize content. Distributors lacked a motivation until VOD viewing could be “counted” in ratings. Not until around 2012 did technologies allowing “dynamic advertisement insertion”—or the capability to change the advertisements included in VOD streams over time or by subscriber zip code—develop. These systems could change the advertisements based on date or location of the viewer and provided an economic motivation for MVPDs to push VOD adoption.
In just the seven years between editions of this book, the VOD world has changed substantially—at least for subscribers of some cable systems. As concerns about viewers cutting cable subscriptions to access broadband-delivered programming through services such as Netflix magnified beginning in the fall of 2010, large MVPDs began creating libraries and “any device, anywhere” availability more comparable to the convenience and choice being offered by broadband-delivered programmers. By 2013, the cable giant Comcast, for example, offered subscribers unlimited free access to 30,000 titles, including episodes of 600 television series, through their Xfinity VOD television service, 270,000 titles on Xfinity.com, and 20,000 television shows and movies through the Xfinity app for iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. This was part of the TV Everywhere initiative launched by Comcast and Time Warner in 2009 as a way to allow authenticated subscribers access to their “living room” content on a range of devices and eventually outside the home.
MVPDs aggressively overhauled their value proposition to audiences in the face of widespread cultural adulation of the alternative Netflix offered, but as of 2014, it remains difficult to claim VOD as a victory for the cable and telecommunication industry. These industries underutilized VOD capability for a long time and developed them only when a threat emerged. The comparison of the development of VOD in the U.S. market with the iPlayer, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s on-demand application, reveals considerable insight into the implications of the public service mandate versus commercial mandate on innovation, particularly those operating with a functional monopoly, as was the case of the U.S. MVPDs. The BBC launched its iPlayer in 2007, which featured an interface more akin to Netflix’s graphic interface than the text-heavy and awkward-to-navigate interfaces still offered by MVPDs in 2014. BBC’s self-control of program rights and mandate to make programming accessible yielded far more immediate experimentation than evident in the United States, where publicly held companies are punished by the stock market for reinvesting in technological development, and filling libraries requires extended rights negotiations with a multiplicity of parties. The first MVPD to make an interface similar to the iPlayer available began rolling it out in mid-2012, but had not reached its full subscriber base a year later; availability seemed limited to those markets in which competition from a telco existed. Unsurprisingly, despite growing availability, research in 2012 revealed limited use of VOD, and the industry source Variety categorized the report as evidence that the cable industry had “fumbled badly with VOD,” missing “a $6 billion business” and “paving the way for the emergence of over-the-top alternatives like Netflix.”38
Despite its slow start, because VOD is an endeavor of the MVPDs—companies that connect 80 percent of homes to the Internet as well as cable—VOD has a structural advantage likely to secure its centrality to the post-network era.39 Robust and consistent libraries will leave viewers with little need to record programs on their own or to seek additional middlemen to aggregate content, so long as VOD offerings don’t include the bloated commercial pods characteristic of linear viewing. However, creating and maintaining robust and consistent libraries remains a significant challenge for MVPDs that own minimal content rights.
Convenience technologies—including the DVR, VOD, DVD, broadband-delivered program services such as Netflix (also known as SVOD, subscription video on demand), and mobile applications that can be used on devices such as phones and tablets—enabled viewers to more easily seek out specific content and view it on living room screens and in an ever-expanding variety of venues. These technologies increased viewers’ ability to select not only when to watch, but also where, and provided the most expansive and varied adjustments in the technological capabilities of the medium. Convenience technologies encourage active selection, rather than passive viewing of the linear flow of whatever “comes on next” or “is on,” and consequently lead viewers to focus much more on programs than on networks—all of which contributes to eroding conventional production practices in significant ways and to producing the distinctions among prized content, live sports and contests, and linear viewing highlighted in the introduction. The viewing behaviors these technologies enabled, in tandem with the vast choice among outlets that viewers could now access, were vital to the shift of television from what Bernard Miège theorized as a “flow” industry to something more like a “publishing” industry.40 Convenience technologies also increased the deliberateness in viewers’ use of television, which allowed for adjustments in how programs were created, funded, paid for, and distributed.
Matters of Space: The Convenience of Portable Television Devices
DVRs and VOD allowed viewers to capture television from the dictates of the networks’ linear schedules, but on their own, these technologies still confined viewers to conventional “living room” viewing. Freeing viewers to watch content anywhere they desired required another set of technologies that allowed portability. Viewers first experimented with this possibility by watching television series sold on disks on portable DVD players, but rapid technological diffusion quickly made portable viewing much easier. By 2005, the more elegant solution of downloading programs to iPod players and devices also used for gaming, such as the PSP (PlayStation Portable), freed portable television from requiring a physical medium. TiVo-brand DVRs also expanded the convenience of the device through the TiVo ToGo application, which offered easy transfer of programs it recorded to laptops and portable media devices. All this would soon seem most insignificant, though, as broadband-delivered program providers unshackled television from its domestic confines and enabled viewing on