Introduction

The impetus for this issue on connected viewing grew out of research being done by humanities scholars for the Connected Viewing Initiative, a partnership between UC Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center and Warner Brothers Home Entertainment. The collaboration created a space for original work that has resonated with industry and academic audiences and has expanded the impact of qualitative scholarly research on digital media. This special issue of Convergence showcases some of the projects that began during that initiative, and others that were independently conducted but intersect brilliantly with the questions and issues animating connected viewing as an area of inquiry. Indeed, media scholars have written a great deal about the myriad ways technology has transformed the media experience in the digital age, and the essays and ideas behind the work in this issue build upon their efforts. Such work on the varying dimensions of sociality, audience engagement, and community (Jenkins, et. al., 2013; Shirky, 2008; van Dijck, 2013); issues of surveillance, privacy, and the cultural power of data analytics in a connected media environment (Andrejevic, 2007, 2013; Nissenbaum, 2010; Schneier, 2015; Turow, 2013); formats, intermediaries, and infrastructural formations (Braun, 2014; Parks and Starosielski, 2015; Sterne, 2012); and the recalibration of business models and media economies (Mann, 2015; Lobato and Thomas, 2015; Vonderau, 2014) are just a small sampling of the research that has contributed to our understanding of the connected viewing landscape and its cultural implications.

Connected viewing essentially refers to the multiple ways viewers engage with media in a multiscreen, socially networked, digital entertainment experience. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the ways in which distribution fits into this experience (Curtin et al., 2014; Iordanova and Cunningham, 2012; Lotz, 2014; Nelson, 2014). Moreover, it has been said that connected viewing is ‘more than digital distribution; it is the broader ecosystem in which digital distribution is rendered possible and new forms of user engagement take shape’ (Holt and Sanson, 2014, p. 1). As such, the study of connected viewing also encompasses the social and cultural experiences now available for digital media audiences, technologies shaping viewing habits and building online communities, and even the infrastructure necessary for access, dissemination, and control of cloud-based media. For the film, television, and gaming industries, all elements of the life cycle of content – from production through distribution and consumption – have been altered by digital technologies, in ways that have enhanced efficiencies but also have threatened traditional business models and long-standing relationships among media companies and various stakeholders, including the connected audience.

In the connected viewing environment, content is distributed across platforms (mobile devices, gaming consoles, and other over-the-top boxes), in real time or on demand, using a variety of business models (ad-supported, electronic sell-through (EST), and subscription). Media companies have been chasing connected viewers since the advent of online distribution in 2006 and have developed various services to facilitate cross-platform access to content for cable subscribers, and increasingly, over-the-top options for cord cutters (i.e. Time Warner’s TV Everywhere, Comcast’s Xfinity, HBO Go, Hulu Plus). Hollywood distributors have likewise sought to facilitate such access for EST customers via digital ecosystems such as UltraViolet and Disney Movies Anywhere (Steirer, 2015). Although cross-platform access to video games still remains a dream for gamers (Steam’s efforts in the PC market notwithstanding), video game publishers have also sought to capitalize on the increased usage of mobile devices through a variety of systems including Ubisoft’s Uplay, Warner Bros’ WBplay, and Microsoft’s Smartglass (Payne, 2014).

As the devices on which we consume content have changed, so too have the structures – affective, functional, and social – of media consumption itself. For many consumers – and for the media and technology companies marketing to them – the living room remains a hub for media consumption, but the growth of smart TVs, over-the-top boxes, and mobile devices have shattered taken-for-granted notions of how consumption takes place there. From the entry into our media lexicon of ‘binging’ and ‘Netflix and chill’ to the phenomenon of ‘cord cutting’ and the retirement of digital video disc players, at-home film and television consumption today scarcely resembles that of even 10 years ago. Media and home electronics companies have struggled to respond to, let alone shape, such change. For every massive success (Netflix, Hulu, Steam), there have been numerous ventures that have either underperformed (Flixster, Apple TV) or failed outright (Microsoft’s Kinect, Apple’s Ping, Amazon’s Fire Phone). YouTube is particularly interesting in this regard, as Google has struggled to translate its massive popularity as both a space for consumption and distribution (both professional and amateur) into a viable business model. Indeed, in an unusual reversal for the media industries, which at various times have all benefitted from oligopolistic industrial structures, business models must now be crafted in response to consumer behavior rather than as a means of engineering or controlling that behavior.

What connected viewing means and how audiences and media companies engage with it largely depends on the quality, cost, and availability of the Internet in the many geographic, architectural, and institutional spaces (schools, cars, homes, workplaces) in which media is consumed. And yet despite consumers’ increased power, Internet access remains a limited resource for many. In the United States, as Susan Crawford has written in Captive Audience, there are few incentives for established Internet service providers (ISPs) to upgrade their infrastructure in a noncompetitive environment (2014). A 2015 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development survey suggests that although developed nations like the Nordic countries, Australia, Japan, and Korea enjoy widespread broadband penetration, this is not true for all developed nations. Countries that are underserved include Italy, Chile, Turkey, Hungary, and Mexico. Emerging markets like Brazil and India lag in terms of home Internet service, with smartphones serving as the primary means through which consumers access the Web at home and beyond. Despite the fact that access to content globally has increased due to the spread of mobile and wireless technologies, Crawford cautions that wireless is a complementary service to broadband (home high-speed Internet), not an adequate substitute. This is especially true when considering a high-capacity activity like video streaming. With companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast not only expanding their power over access in the United States but also experimenting with discounted streaming services supported by advertising, the greatest power in the connected viewing ecosystem is increasingly in the hands of those that control the distribution of content to the eagerly awaiting media audience.

The economics of connected viewing are often driven by data, with Web-connected devices delivering extensive, detailed information about consumer viewing patterns, priorities, values, and experiences and evoking anxieties about privacy and consumer protections. Big data is an obvious buzzword, but the ways these data are accessed, parsed, analyzed, and mobilized (by marketers and by governments) remain relatively invisible, and consumer attitudes toward data collection, privacy, and security continue to evolve. Metadata, whether created by streaming services like Netflix or generated by users themselves on sites like IMDb, has also become a key means to understand better how users discover, sample, and collect content. Data also often operates as currency, and information about consumer habits is now a primary commodity in its own right for digital media companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. We are making the bargain, again and again, as Bruce Schneier has argued, to exchange surveillance of ourselves and our data for free services (2015: 4). These bargains which increasingly power the connected viewing business model will continue to extract terms that complicate the future of connected media, and force us all as audience members to consider the cultural and political consequences of this exchange.

In addition to highlighting points of connection among distributors, creative laborers, technology firms, and consumers, we view the term connected viewing as also conveying an implicit critique of points of disconnection among these different actors – or even, as the case may sometimes be, within a single actor or stakeholder category itself. Despite a host of seemingly straightforward new ‘rules’ for media in the Internet era (‘consumers won’t pay for content’, ‘the DVD market is finished’, ‘disintermediation and de-bundling are on their way’, etc.), media markets have, in many regards, never seemed so uncertain, provisional, and improvisatory. By examining the network of actual processes and industrial relationships that constitute media as an object, connected viewing highlights this uncertainty and helps focuses our attention on the complex, incomplete, and sometimes counterintuitive transformations taking place behind the scenes. Indeed, as Patrick Vonderau suggests in his contribution to this special issue, the study of connected viewing ideally brings with it a critical approach even to such seemingly useful concepts as ‘ecology’ and ‘platform’.

As a mode of research, connected viewing’s commitment to complexity, and its insistence upon examining together actors and processes normally studied separately, constitutes not only a broadening of our object of study but also a broadening of the means by which we study it. The essays that make up this issue draw on a wide range of methods, including ethnography and thick description, interviews (with both consumers and media professionals), interface analysis, historical narration, discourse analysis, surveys, and market analysis. Such methodological heterogeneity stems, in large part, from the interdisciplinary nature of connected viewing as a research project. The connections that constitute connected viewing thus take place not only at the level of our research object but also in our modes of thinking, thus bringing together the perspectives of production studies, technology studies, economics, the digital humanities, globalization and media flows, regulation and policy studies, consumer behavior research, cultural studies, and fan studies, among other research paradigms. In its flexible, adaptive approach to methodology, connected viewing thus resembles what sociologists such as John Law have named ‘mess’ research (Law, 2004) or what Charles Acland, echoing Harold Innis, has called ‘dirt research’ (Acland, 2014). But it also represents what the humanities do best, letting the research object itself dictate where the researcher needs to go and how he or she needs to study or view it.

Our goals for this issue included sparking greater discussion, analysis, and connection among scholars doing similar work, and showcasing some of the most provocative and original research currently being done in this area. To that end, we are excited to present here some of the first scholarship on multichannel networks (MCNs), a relatively new breed of intermediary firm operating primarily within YouTube’s advertising-supported online video infrastructure. An understudied aspect of the online video ecology, MCNs sell advertising, cross-promote bundled content, and help popular ‘amateur’ producers develop video brands. As the contributions of Ramon Lobato, Patrick Vonderau, and Stuart Cunningham, David Craig and Jon Silver demonstrate, MCNs have become an integral component of YouTube’s ecosystem, and their integration – increasingly apparent over the last 5 years – reflects the specific market logic on which YouTube operates. Situating MCNs within the traditional constellation of screen industry intermediaries, Lobato examines the consequences, both structural and cultural, of the emergence of MCNs on the YouTube ecosystem. Building off of Lobato’s essay – and drawing on the work of Michel Callon – Vonderau uses MCNs as a means of highlighting the ways in which YouTube has been framed (or not been framed) as a market. The transformation of YouTube, he argues, should be understood not as the encroachment of market forces upon an erstwhile cultural space, but rather in terms of shifting market processes or frames. Adopting a similar position, Cunningham et al. analyze the emergence of MCNs as the product of contradictory but interdependent understandings of how commercial markets work, specifically that of the technology industry (what they call ‘NoCal’) and the entertainment industry (‘SoCal’). Although these three essays differ subtly on how best to characterize the significance of MCNs, all three agree on the need for a new, more commercially attentive phase of YouTube scholarship.

As the articles in this issue attest, there are profound disparities and dissimilarities in terms of access, content availability, and even cost for audiences across the globe wanting to connect with media online. Scholars have been examining these challenges, including the ways traditional forms of engagement are being adapted, transformed, or intensified due to the facilitation of new technologies, particularly within fan communities and with a focus upon English-language media content (for more, see the ‘Fandom and Feminism’ In Focus section of Cinema Journal (Busse, 2009), the ‘Fandom and/as Labor’ special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (Stanfill and Condis, 2014), and many others, including Burgess, 2011; Jenner, 2016; Hills, 2010; Russo, 2009; Scott, 2007). In addition, scholarship committed to exploring situated studies of connected viewing audiences within national contexts is increasing to account for the persistent expansion of transnational media flows and the continued importance of international markets for media producers and distributors (Couldry and Curran, 2003; Evans, 2011; Kraidy, 1999). In this issue, for example, Fernanda Pires de Sá and Antoni Roig Telo examine audience reception of a Brazilian telenovela, accounting for fans of the genre but also expanding their focus to include casual viewers. They found that viewers are well-versed in the conventions of the programs, and find great satisfaction critiquing them with others online, even while they continue traditional co-viewing practices with family at home.

Like de Sá and Telo, Evans and McDonald et al. feature a grounded consideration of international media markets through research about the audience experience of connected viewing. The authors explore the utility of a cross-national analysis of connected viewing across three major, and growing, media markets: India, Brazil, and North Korea. Conducting audience research within urban centers of each national context (highlighting the wide range of variations within each of these national contexts as well), they position their data within the context of infrastructure as a crucial measure of access. Carefully balancing the tension between the global and the local, they describe the stakes of access for all viewers, which include ideologies about the Internet as an open-access database. The authors identify a fundamental conflict between user’s expectation of access to content and infrastructural limitations like reliability, speed, and cost. In both of these articles that have undertaken audience research, connected viewing embodies tensions between a range of ideals and the more complex realities of use.

Media infrastructure, interfaces, and technologies are critical components of the connected viewing landscape architecture, albeit less often studied as such. The contributions by Michael Lahey and Lisa Parks point to new ways of thinking about technologies, their networks, and their cultural significance in the context of the connected viewing arena. Lahey focuses on the role that Web application programming interfaces play in the television industry’s social media efforts, using the USA Network’s Psych as a case study. By examining these coding interfaces that allow different databases of information to communicate with one another, Lahey explores the practice of information sharing among television companies and ‘transparent intermediaries’ (Braun, 2014) that help design social media experiences and track audience attention. He also argues that these invisible actors in the connected viewing environment allow for new forms of industry–audience alignment, aesthetic forms, and social experiences related to second-screen media. Lisa Parks looks at connected viewing through the lens of cross-platform media producers and consumers who navigate limited resources and access in her ethnographic study of rural Zambian audiences. Her findings about the ways in which these communities have expanded and innovated connected viewing practices demonstrate that it is often the audiences, not the ISPs or telecommunications companies, that occupy the space on the cutting edge. Even as many of them live off the grid, frequently ‘disconnected’ from power sources and the Internet, these audiences continue to find ways to consume, produce, share, and mobilize media technology and content as they navigate seemingly insurmountable challenges in their quest to connect and create a version of television scaled to their own particular reality. These two articles offer productive models of how to successfully bridge disciplinary avenues of inquiry, and combine analyses of the technological and the cultural that ultimately reveal their interdependent, mutually constitutive influence on one another.

Although one issue of Convergence could not possibly begin to cover the range of topics essential to the area of connected viewing research, we are hopeful the work by these six authors demonstrates the potential and importance of this arena for scholars of digital media industry and culture. We are also excited by the range of methodologies and interdisciplinary modes of inquiry collectively represented by these rich and diverse essays. We have been truly inspired by the contributors as we put this issue together and look forward to future interventions from all of our connected colleagues.