Article on Friday Night Lights (and a little Arrested Development) for Media Industries Project
April 30, 2008
Came across the following article on the Television Without Pity website and beamed at it’s level of appropriateness for our MI project. It sheds light on the current situation regarding Friday Night Lights, and echoes the sentiments of fans regarding the show’s future prospects. The article also draws comparison to other examples of ratings-starved casualties.
Here’s the link: http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/brilliantbutcancelled/2008/04/can-satellite-tv-save-friday-n.php#more
Read on:
Friday Night Lights fans couldn’t ask for more. Just as the show’s second-season DVD set hits shelves this week (at the bargain list price of $30), the ratings-challenged fave also gets saved from extinction: NBC, home of the first two seasons,strikes a deal with DirecTV to split the improbable third go-round starting this fall.
Of course, Passions fans couldn’t have asked for more, either, when the same two entities found a way to keep their soap alive last year. Right after NBC dropped it last September, DirecTV picked up fresh episodes, and all was happy. For awhile. Then the satellite company also found continuing Passionsunworkable, trimming it from four days a week to three, and finally announcing it, too, will give up the ghost (literally, in the case of this supernatural soap) in August.
So what does this mean for Friday Night Lights fans? Probably we shouldn’t bet on too long a life for our beloved small-town Texas clan-and-community saga. It isn’t only the lack of passion for Passions. We’ve seen the same dearth of support shake the foundations of Jericho after its cancellation reprieve. Despite last summer’s loud fan campaign (peanuts to CBS programmers!), and despite promises by devotees to rally new viewers to the renewal, the ratings for the seven second-season Jericho episodes this midseason were disappointing. Yes, you could argue CBS scheduled the show badly (10 PM, when it had previously aired at 8). Or that the penny-pinching return lacked loads of the characters, action and sweep of the post-nuke saga’s first season.
But you couldn’t argue with the evidence that people who didn’t watch it in the first place didn’t try it in the second place, either. That’s the likely scenario for Friday Night Lights, with viewers who’ve done without it for two seasons figuring they can’t or don’t want to jump in with the third.
Of course, maybe the critically acclaimed Friday Night Lights has something else to recommend its continuance — affluent viewers. It’s the second most “upscale” series (behind The Office), reports The New York Times, which makes it the broadcast networks’ strongest drama in well-to-do homes. Advertisers like to reach people with lots of money. So do satellite TV companies.
And so do DVD distributors. Friday Night Lights is owned by NBC (as was Passions), and produced by its Universal studio subsidiary. Continued airings are like continuing ads for the Universal DVD sets, not to mention the repeats on digital cable’s Universal HD channel, web streams on the NBC-partnership video site Hulu.com, and rabid-fan traffic to NBC.com. Synergy, my friends — that’s the name of the digital age game.
But the pre-digital history of prime time television doesn’t bode well for Friday Night Lights enduring in its network form. Few shows “rescued” from cancellation during the past five decades have lasted long.Cagney & Lacey in the 1980s was an exception, uncancelled early in its run thanks to producers’ savvy in generating viewer activism in the snail-mail age. (Fans writing stamped letters! What an effort!) More usually, shows that get a death-row reprieve or a pickup by another network are soon to expire anyway —Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Roswell from The WB to UPN (which was about to expire itself), Family Matters from ABC to a final limping season on CBS, ditto ’60s fave Get Smart from NBC to CBS.
The reported possibility of Scrubs shifting from NBC to ABC next season is most likely a way of enabling the cult fave to conclude its run in style after this truncated strike season. That could well be the case forFriday Night Lights, too. Though NBC ordered 22 episodes this year, only 15 got shot pre-strike. That leaves seven scripts ready and waiting. And next season’s order is for just 13 episodes. Sound like a fond farewell?
NBC’s DirecTV deal calls for the series’ third season to debut on the satelliter’s original entertainment channel The 101 starting Oct. 1. (A Wednesday, you’ll note. Not Friday.) NBC later runs those same episodes for the nation’s majority of non-satellite homes starting after the February 2009 Super Bowl. (On Fridays, again, at 9 PM) By then, NBC will need of replacements for the inevitable fall failures, and can promote the show in NFL playoff games, away from the fall-season promo flood.
For all the good it will do. Just ask fans of the Fox casualty Arrested Development. The third(-season) try is not always the charm.
Individual Progress for Media Industries 1
April 24, 2008
COMM 2320 Media Industries 1
Assessment Task 2: Individual Progress
- My role in the research group is to research the level of fan power and influence on the status of television programmes in this technological era. My research would include case studies on the shows Arrested Development, Friday Night Lights and Everwood. These are shows that were pre-maturely cancelled or faced the possibility of cancellation during its telecast run on network television.
- The progress I have made so far includes research on the case studies, drawing up rules and guidelines on what constitutes ‘quality’ television and having group discussions on conceiving potential solutions, like alternative funding for studio production, to our research problem. I have made several blog entries regarding our research project brief and the collaborative contract, as well as links to various articles that have relevance to our topic, as part of the research done.
- The strategies we have employed include taking a public opinion poll in the form of surveys and interviews to gather information about our target audience, as well as interviewing several industry professionals to gain insight on why television shows with devoted fan bases get cancelled and to also grasp a better understanding of the inner workings of the television industry.
- The problems that we’ve encountered include not being certain about the exact scope of our research topic initially, how we intended to define ‘quality’ television programmes and the measurement of fan activity on the Internet or other mediums that would classify a certain programme as a victim of pre-mature cancellation.
- We have drawn up rules and guidelines that would help to define our interpretation of ‘quality’ television. For example, only scripted television programmes are considered, the show has to be critically lauded by reviews from industry critics, there has to be a certain amount of fanfare or web-based activity on social forums.
- Our project might connect with other projects focusing on enhancing the quality of television content, such as the one researching on the state of comedies on Australian television and the one researching on interactivity for television.
Came across the following article on Yahoo!..it talks about the creation of a new TV channel that basically brings to life Jenkins’ convergence cultures theories on how different mediums such as television, film, Internet should co-exist in the future. This new concept relates to theories explored in PP1 and Media Industries; regarding the resurgence of re-distribution of media content via new avenues.
Here’s the article and the link to the webpage:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080421/ap_en_tv/viacom_studios_new_channel
Viacom, 5 Hollywood studios to create new TV channel
Sun Apr 20, 10:15 PM ET
LOS ANGELES – Viacom Inc. and five Hollywood studios are joining forces to create a television channel and video-on-demand service, the companies announced Sunday.
The venture, starting in fall 2009, will show movies and television series from Paramount, Paramount Vantage, MGM, United Artists and Lionsgate.
It could provide competition in both programming and viewers to Time Warner‘s HBO and CBS Corp.’s Showtime.
“This venture has the potential to be a game changer for the industry,”Viacom president and CEO Philippe Dauman said in a statement. “We are building an innovative service that will use traditional and newdigital distribution technologies to bring great film and television entertainment directly to the consumer.”
Viewers will have pay-per-view access to big-budget releases from the studios, such as “Cloverfield,” “Iron Man” and “Star Trek.” Movies from the companies’ archive libraries and new TV series created by the studios also will be featured.
The combined companies have a collection of thousands of films and hundreds of TV shows. MGM owns the world’s largest modern film library, comprising titles from United Artists, Orion Pictures and other studios. Paramount has 3,500 motion pictures in its library, including recent blockbusters such as “Transformers” and “Beowulf” and Oscar winners “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country for Old Men.”
Viacom owns the content of more than 100 television channels, including MTV, VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central.
Viacom will provide marketing and other operational support through its MTV Networksdivision.
Follow up on group meeting for Media Industries
April 16, 2008
Had our weekly group meeting for Media Industries today and we sorted out our research topic and what areas to cover for research. We also allocated various case studies for the group members to undertake. The television series I will be researching on include Arrested Development, Friday Night Lights and Everwood. Emma will be researching Buffy, Veronica Mars and Firefly. Xavier will be researching Family Guy, Futurama and working on setting up some interviews with producers on Australian television programmes with his contacts in the industry.
Final Project upload
April 14, 2008
The final interactive video project has been uploaded and can be accessed at Wye Keen’s website:
So we’re in control!! Well, not totally…
April 14, 2008
In finalising our eZedia project and fiddling around with all our editing, it became apparent having stills for ‘losing control’ and moving images for ‘gaining control’ was not going to work. One, because the editing and footage was not clear cut enough, and two the line between what losing and gaining control entails are too blurred. Take the example of Maz putting on her glasses. Initially this was meant to be part of the shots for ‘gaining control’ but if you think about it, yes she is gaining control of her sight by using (the intervention of man-made technology,) her glasses BUT it was out of her control in the first place that she lost her 50/50 sight.
This was becoming of our entire project, as we had material that both included elements of losing control initially, but showed potential of gaining control as well. You can’t have ‘gained’ control until you’ve ‘lost’ control of something, much like we as a convergent culture are subject to the limitations that technology binds us to. We cannot move forward in the culture of media until we’ve tested all waters of media and explored all avenues in the realm of media. Convergence culture, as our project portrays in its interactive form, encourages participation and allows for multiple outcomes. Thus, always being engaging and exciting and guarantees that one never knows where they’re going.
By Michelle and Justine.
More on control project
April 12, 2008
Just recalling back to the particular day when the weather took a crazy turn and cyclone warnings were all over the news. We were actually out shooting footage for the project and while we managed to get some shots with the leaves being blown into a whirlwind, we had to cease shooting because the weather got worse. Just another instance of how we don’t have control over anything in life, particularly, mother nature, in this case.
Then on to editing, some unplanned edits actually worked out well for us, as the music seemed to fit the beats and it was pure coincidence that the clips fit together with the sound. These are just more instances of how we, as humans, lack control and use oour human abilitites to gain control of the situations we’re placed in.
Just like how we encountered unexpected problems during the editing process and the eZedia software, continued persistence and various explorations of how we could go about solving our problems, was a form of how we ‘escaped’ the constraints of our boundaries and overcame ‘control’.
PP1 Control Project Write-up (Framing Statement)
April 7, 2008
An alarm goes off, panic sets in. A train is late, stress occurs. Your iPod battery dies at the start of a long bus ride, you’re upset. A red light stops you when you’re in a hurry, you feel anger.
Why is it that we react so emotionally to something, when nothing necessarily HURTFUL has been said or done to us? Do we react like this because deep down in some superseed, we ourselves, man, made these machines and gadgets? Were we in turn limiting ourselves when we created them? Did we want inevitably limit our control over ourselves? Or were we simply trying to implement ways of keeping the peace and creating control in society, and somehow, funnily enough it’s all come back to bite us in the butt?!
This project focusses on losing control and gaining control, but more importantly, the human responses in these situations. We hone in on the way in which humans react emotionally negative to man-made mechanisms, and the way in which we take control over situations in our every day life, we would not normally even consider.
Not only is this project convergent in it’s content, showing off a paradoxical circle of human wants and needs and their consequential impacts to our lives; it too is convergent in it’s eZedia form.
Jenkin’s book argues that ‘convergence encourages participation and collective intelligence’ (p. 245) and makes the point that the biggest change in media industries may be ‘the shift from individualised and personalised media consumption toward consumption as a networked practice’ (p. 244).
The above-mentioned quotations shed light on the constantly evolving media industries of today, which have to contend with the rapid rate of introduction and invention of new media forms. The average consumer patterns are shifting towards more user-generated content and less reliance on the passive roles of merely absorbing what was ‘fed’ to them.
The use of the eZedia format in our project relates to how the general ‘audience’ of today relish the position of being in control, having the power to make choices and determine their future outcomes. Hence, by allowing the viewer to select which clip he wants to play from the range of clips offered, we’re allowing for a new level of interaction between content provider and user. It also means that there will be different results generated for every viewer that watches the project.
Media Industries 1 – Project Brief & Collaborative Contract (Draft)
Question: How to sustain television shows/ television content in other forms of new media (not necessarily on TV).
- Background: We’re all interested in TV and keeping quality TV around. We want to reduce/avoid the cancellation of ‘quality’ shows that have huge and loyal fan bases. We also want to know how creators of content can interact with fans more efficiently.
- Aims: To come up with a solution to extend the story world of TV content not necessarily on network broadcasts. Eg. New media: web, fan-fic, comics…etc. (Professionally produced not fan-produced)
- Scope:
I. Research TV industry, egs of TV shows that were prematurely cancelled, do case studies out of them.
II. Explore alternative funding for production of these shows.
III. Research fan influence on TV shows.
- Research Questions:
– What’s causing the premature demise of good, popular TV shows? (Bad ratings?)
– How to persuade networks to fund shows, regardless of advertising factors.
– How influential fan power is within the TV industry.
- Research Design:
– Case studies: Arrested Development, Family Guy, Buffy, Firefly, Friday Night Lights, Veronica Mars, Jericho.
– Interviews: Vox pop, TV producers, creative heads in Media, surveys to general public.
– Research websites, fansites.
- Outcomes: A report documenting the project, including data collection, analysis, research conclusions and recommendations. Conclusion: How successful our project/solution is realistically?
- Timeline: The project will start at the beginning of April 2008 and be completed by the 10th of June 2008.
Collaborative Contract
- Group goals:
– To meet regularly with all members present.
– Be prompt in communicating regularly. (eg. Blogs, Facebook, Email)
– Come to a conclusion that everyone’s happy with.
– To ensure every meeting is productive.
- Responsibilities:
– Check email, Facebook and respond swiftly.
– Be contactable at all times.
– Be punctual and responsible.
- Dispute resolution procedure:
– Discuss and listen to everyone’s viewpoint.
– Unanimous vote settles all issues.
Apple: No. 1 in…music?
April 4, 2008
Came across this article about Apple taking over the music industry and surpassing the industry leaders in sales. It’s relevant to how new digital media is proving to have more penetration in media industries today.
Relevance to PP1: Power shift into the hands of the consumers instead of the record industry. Users gaining control over what they want to own and consume, instead of being fed what to listen to over the radio years ago.
Relevance to Media Industries: Introduction of new media changes the core of the music industry in this case. Dynamics are different now compared to years past and media conglomerates have to constantly change their business plans to keep up with technology and audience behaviour. (Applicable to film and television industry as well.)
Relevance to Pop Music and Society: Evolution of music industry in this day and age of technology. Assimilation of two previously separate industries (computer and music) together.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080402-apple-passes-wal-mart-now-1-music-retailer-in-us.html
Apple passes Wal-Mart, now #1 music retailer in US
By Eric Bangeman | Published: April 02, 2008 – 10:45PM CT
Over the past few years, we have watched Apple climb the music sales chart courtesy of the iTunes. Last month we learned that Apple passed Best Buy to become the number two retailer in the the US in December. Now, Apple has ascended to the top of the charts, surpassing Wal-Mart for the first time ever, according to an NPD MusicWatch Survey for the month January contained in an internal Apple e-mail which was leaked to Ars Technica but has not been officially published.
The news was announced in an e-mail sent this afternoon to some Apple employees, a copy of which was seen by Ars Technica. It includes a screenshot of an Excel file showing the top ten music retailers in the US for January 2008, and Apple is at the top of the list. The iTunes Store leads the pack with 19 percent, Wal-Mart (which includes the brick-and-mortar stores as well as its online properties) is second with 15 percent, and Best Buy is third with 13 percent. Amazon is a distant fourth at 6 percent, trailed by the likes of Borders, Circuit City, and Barnes & Noble. Rhapsody is in the tenth slot with 1 percent.
The fact that a digital-only retailer has ascended to the top of the sales charts is not unexpected, but it does demonstrate just how much the music landscape has changed since the beginning of the decade. The NPD Group has been tracking a “sharp increase” in digital downloads over the past several months as physical sales dry up. According to NPD’s research, 48 percent of US teens didn’t buy a single CD in 2007, compared to 38 percent in 2006.
Apple sits atop the NPD Group’s list. At the request of the NPD we
have removed screenshots of the documents in question
It has been a dizzying climb for Apple, which only managed to pass Amazon to become the number three music retailer in June 2007. The biggest surprise is Amazon’s drop to the number four slot, which might be explained by consumers using iTunes, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy gift cards to buy music after the holiday season—and those gift cards certainly helped propel Apple to the number-one position.
For the music industry, there is a dark side to Apple’s ascension to the top of the charts. Buying patterns for digital downloads are different, as customers are far more likely to cherry pick a favorite track or two from an album than purchase the whole thing. In contrast, brick-and-mortar sales are predominantly high-margin CDs. For 2007, that translated into a 10 percent decline in overall music spending according to the NPD Group, and it’s a trend that’s expected to continue for the foreseeable future.
Overall, paid downloads accounted for almost 30 percent of all music sold in January, a number that would have been unthinkable just a few short years ago. With the Big Four labels throwing off the DRM shackles and experimenting with new delivery models like Last.fm’s free streaming service, the future looks bright for digital music distribution.
Update: note on “debunking”
We have seen some stories this morning claiming to have debunked this report based on conjecture (no factual detail or analysis). We repeat: the document says what we said it says, and you can see it for yourself. The documents were also distributed to Apple employees, and show Apple as the number-one music retailer during the period in question. That can’t be debunked, sorry. (Sure, you can claim that the data is bad, or sampled incorrectly, but there’s no proof of that yet.)
Also, I already noted that the results are influenced by gift card usage, and I noted that other retailers on the list have gift cards, too—don’t forget that fact. A sale is a sale, as well. We could also argue forever over whether or not gift cards sales matter, but note that no one was bothered by Apple’s December results which included a great deal of gift card purchases as well (but didn’t inspire any debunking that time around).
This is a monumental event for Apple, because while the company may not be guaranteed the top spot for eternity—or even the following month—it is something many thought would never happen. But in closing, rest assured that this report is accurate.
Michelle's Space 