Lifestyle vlogs on the rise

Not sure if anyone else has stumbled upon this banner on their YouTube front pages, but these playlists really remind me of how reality TV genres are sometimes programmed in genre chunks on TV. I've always found a parallel between reality TV genres and lifestyle vlogs, and this is sometimes confirmed by YouTubers saying they wish they had their own HGTV series or cooking show. Conceptualizing lifestyle vlogs in this way really emphasize how much YouTube is remediating reality TV, finding many of their industry models from Hollywood rather than from the Silicon Valley. Because, alternatively, you can view lifestyle vlogs through the YouTubers themselves, which would foreground celebrity rather than genre. Within a YouTuber's oeuvre, you'll see a mix of these lifestyle videos: many make-up gurus also do a "what I eat in a day" video, many fitness gurus also do "outfits of the week" video, etc. When their name becomes the structuring principle, YouTubers look more well-rounded and entrepreneurial in a variety of ways. When structured as a part of a genre, like what YouTube does here, the image of YouTube becomes a lot more, well, generic. It de-emphasizes individual appeal in order to highlight the common strands within the content, mimicking TV by emphasizing its ability to organize and program itself. This might also be a tactic to advertise to newcomers, people who might not be well-versed in YouTube celebrity to navigate the variety in lifestyle vlogs. In embracing this convergence, YouTube is making itself more legible to a TV audience, almost as if convergence was front-and-center in their marketing strategy.

Core Post #5: Convergence Television and the Launch of Quibi

While I haven’t downloaded the app or streamed any of its content, I’ve been loosely following stories of Quibi’s roll-out over the past week. For those slightly less informed than I (which is to say, pretty uninformed to begin with), Quibi is a new subscription streaming platform helmed by Jeffrey Katzenberg. Viewed as the first “Silicon Valley” foray into TV production, the platform raised $1.75 billion in seed funding before its launch and currently has about 50 original programs available for streaming. These range from reboots of Reno 911! and Punk’d to food and travel programming. Major draws of the platform include its significant star power (Jennifer Lopez, Idris Elba, Offset, Kevin Hart, and Chrissy Teigen are all involved) and the bite-sized length of its episodes that all run under ten minutes. The difference between Quibi and services such as Hulu or Netflix is that the former is available for mobile exclusively.

That Quibi’s launch dovetails with our reading of Caldwell’s article on convergence TV seemed a useful coincidence. In particular, I was taken by Caldwell’s claim that in our recent model of platforming, streaming, and distributed entertainment commerce “TV has argued for a low resolution” (51), replacing “programs” with “content” (49). While none of these terms seem especially unique to Quibi’s model, I am curious about the means by which the mobile-only platform will succeed in keeping viewers engaged beyond their airing. Rather than the “convergence” model of distributed entertainment, merchandizing, and others sites of user intimacy, Quibi seems to instead be working off of a model of quick and dirty consumption, looking for breadth rather than depth of viewership. Each series only seems to have a handful of episodes currently available and, if logic serves, would take an hour or two to watch in their entirety. Will Quibi be able to keep up with viewer demand and the endless stream of content available on more amateur mobile platforms such as TikTok?

Equally unclear in Quibi’s model are the kinds of typical “institutional interactions” (57) that contour its programming. What was the pitch process for the app? And what might we understand as a mark of the interests of its angel or seed investors? Beyond the stakes of advertisers, which include Google, Anheuser-Busch, Walmart, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble, I am curious to think how the “start-up” model of TV production on this scale might influence aesthetic decision-making. Does Quibi employ writers, actors, and content developers? Producers? Showrunners? All of the current job opportunities at the platform relate to advertising, communications, and software development. As for Quibi’s success, I am not holding my breath.

[12] Ray Kyooyung Ra – “Future of Film: Studios Will Have to Take Their Cues From TV Networks” (Week 12)

I am not sure when Jenkins’ and Holt’s chapters were published, but it was jarring to read how accurate their predictions were of the changing landscape of entertainment television. Let me share an interesting piece I read on the topic:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/future-film-studios-will-have-728428

This was a Hollywood Reporter article I came across that discussed the changes that were already occurring in 2014: the collapse of windows, global expansions of streaming platforms, shifting story-telling techniques… Richard Greenfield prescribes that “In a sense, movie studios will need to morph into television studios, which tell ongoing stories” in order for the movie studios to keep up with the constantly evolving TV networks/streaming platforms, which I wholeheartedly agree with and already see trends of. Holt questioned in her chapter, “Will the networks ever become the equivalent of the movie studios in the corporate paradigm”—I would say television has surpassed the studios even, in many aspects. And I am so, so glad it has, because without my Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, and Disney+ subscriptions available at my disposal in the comfort of my own home, I would have gone CRAZY in the quarantine. Thank you, Reed Hastings!

Social Distancing in the Industry

Hey Everyone!

Since we are doing Industry Studies this week, I have been thinking about what COVID-19 and social distancing means for the TV industry.

Here is a Vanity Fair piece on the subject!

In a recent episode of the podcast Show Your Work, hosted by Lainey Lui and Duana Taha, the hosts discussed what social distancing means for their own jobs in the TV industry (they are based in Toronto).  Lainey, in addition to owning and running the celebrity gossip site LaineyGossip, is a host on Canada's version of E! News and The Social (basically Canada's version of The View) and Duana is a TV writer.  I know we don't talk as much about celebrity and star images in this class, but I think it's also interesting to think through the ways that COVID-19 has changed/will change what celebrity gossip looks like.  What happens to the celebrity gossip ecosystem when there aren't events to cover?  Will everyone from People to Perez Hilton need to rethink their photo strategies and their contracts with paparazzi photographers?  Will we just be reading run downs of celebrity Instagram stories?

I hope everyone is doing alright, and I'm looking forward to seeing faces tomorrow!

Popular Documentary and Its New Aesthetics?

This is some contemplation derived from my intensive watching of some of the Netflix documentary series during this stay at home period. I am also among the ones who binge-watched the whole series of Tiger King that Ray recommended to us, and it also has lingering emotional effect on me. The recent surge of popularity of TV documentaries, including Netflix's original documentary series is very interesting to me in terms of thinking about the drastic change in wider documentary ecology as well as contemplating some of the ontological characterizations of documentary texts and their contexts. When watching documentaries like Tiger King, I feel it has become more and more difficult to pin down documentary definitions within the concept of “discourse of sobriety” that originally come from the Griersonian approach to documentary. As the forms of reality-based entertainment have been proliferating, I think it is needed to investigate how this infrastructural change in documentary exhibition and circulation has formed new documentary aesthetics, especially in terms of the emotional or affective aspects of the interface of documentary texts and their audience.

Social Distancing TV

I'd like to use this blog post as an opportunity to share how our television viewing patterns have changed since social distancing. Surely, I don't speak only for myself in saying that my television viewing has changed drastically since social distancing. I find myself bouncing between three types of viewing/shows that I'm watching: 1) Not too different from pre-COVID, I'm keeping up with hour long "complex TV" type dramas, but my interest in doing so has plummeted probably because their aesthetics are generally so gritty and dark. 2) In proportion with my declining interest in quality TV, I've found myself rewatching a few shows, mostly sitcoms or animated shows. I hypothesize this to be a comfort-viewing/escapist tactic to relieve myself of the anxieties of an uncertain future. 3) Finally, with the extra time (and to be honest, little motivation) I've been driving into genres that I previously had little interest in, namely romance and competition reality TV, as well as some docuseries.

What's changed about your TV viewing in the days of social distancing?

In defense of online activism

It's refreshing and thought-provoking to see some of the responses to Jenkins' piece this week, and particularly the focus on forms of activism through online engagement, even though this is far from Jenkins' last word on the topic. For me, personally, the piece was a lot more descriptive rather than celebratory. It spoke to a current observed reality, which, for us all, typing away at our blogspots, should be somewhat relatable.

To first assume that activism can and should have material consequences on working class people in particular is a strange proposition. Am I not an activist if my cause fails? Am I not an activist if my cause is to change attitudes rather than materiality? To secondly assume that there is a clear distinction between those who perform activism online and the working class, as if the working class requires effects done unto them, is rather uncalled for. Despite rhetorics of the digital divide, the online environment is much more complex and filled with many voices of the working class, and so if their choice is to blog and have that as their resistance, arguably the material effect has already occurred.

Finally, access and articulation are in and of themselves forms of resistance. Personally, I've had a qualm about calling this resistance as well, but from where I'm standing, any form of online engagement is valuable regardless of whether it can be considered resistance, and resistance writ large is also not always the ultimate goal (but that's a discussion for another day). Given my iffy stance on the matter, I would still argue that, for many parts of the world, blogging itself is very very risky. Putting the colour of a flag on your profile picture or using a hashtag could get your account taken away or worse. Although this is hopefully not the case in our world, people hold onto those attitudes and cultures, and so for them, resistance and activism might be pushing themselves to post something that someone else won't hesitate to. Just as voting has a different meaning and significance to each individual that votes (and doesn't vote), to dismiss online forms of engagement was ultimately not as powerful as traditional forms of activism, to me, is to deny the work of those who perhaps find the online sphere as the only outlet of political expression, in whatever form and for whatever reason. I think that's ultimately why, time and again, I stand by Henry's work. Rather than starting from definitions of activism for content to live up to, it starts from the content itself, as well as the content creators, to see what activism and resistance might mean for them and for the mediascape they find themselves inhabiting.