Newsgroup: it.fan.startrek
Titolo: In a Social Networking World, What's the Future of TV?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henry-jenkins/in-a-social-networking-wo_b_292014.html
As the news media focused on Jay Leno's relocation into a regular five
night a week prime time spot, the veteran Tonight Show host expressed
growing confusion about the state of his medium. He told The Los Angeles
Times, "I don't know what TV is anymore."
Well, if Leno doesn't know what TV is, who does?
He's not the only one scratching their heads these days. Joss Whedon, the
veteran television producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the current
Dollhouse, expressed confusion over the Emmy he won for Dr. Horrible's
Sing-A-Long Blog, a program which was never aired on television (broadcast
or cable): "If we were on TV, maybe we would've won an Oscar...We don't
understand."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4ys5sM3TLM
Whedon had produced Dr. Horrible as a personal project during the
television writers strike, circulated it for free via the web for the first
week, and then began selling it on iTunes (and now through DVD, not to
mention screenings and singalongs at movie theaters). This top flight
television creator taking his latest brainchild directly to his fans
without passing it through the hands of a network. Felicia Day, Dr.
Horrible's leading lady, has developed her own cult following around the
series, The Guild, which has been primarily funded through PayPal
contributions from her fans and is now being distributed through the Xbox
360.
Meanwhile, Susan Boyle made headlines through her appearance last week on
America's Got Talent, having amassed an American following primarily on the
basis of content pirated from the series's British counterpart and
circulated via YouTube. More than 26 million viewers watched the finale of
American Idol last season, constituting a significant broadcast hit. By
comparison, over that same time period, the Boyle video was watched more
than 103 million times across 20 different websites within the first nine
days of its circulation. Her success depends less on the decision of some
network executive to give her airtime than on the decisions of hundreds of
millions of people to pass her video along to their friends.
Some call this a "post-network" era and are suggesting that it constitutes
a change as dramatic as the shift from broadcasting to cable. Yet,
actually, television may be in the hands of a different kind of network --
Facebook or Twitter rather than ABC or Fox.
Is this television? It depends on how you define your terms. My students at
University of Southern California are watching more television content now
than ever before but relatively few of them own television sets. They are
watching television series through boxed DVD sets and off sites like Hulu
(for free) or iTunes (at a price), or through illegal downloads. They are
watching television on computer screens and through their ipods. And those
who own television sets may be watching it through their game systems
rather than subscribing to cable. So, television without TVs?
Is television the stuff we watch on our TVs? My local cable company allows
me to watch grainy YouTube videos on my big screen television and allows me
to download movies directly from Netflix or Amazon to watch on demand. And
of course, I can play Wii games through my television set. But is any of
that television?
Is it television if it doesn't get distributed by the networks? Whedon and
Day are demonstrating that television may be a genre or format of
entertainment -- which looks and feels "like television" even if it is
never broadcast. Here, television may refer to a form of storytelling which
comes in short chunks which are organized as part of longer series which
unfold across seasons. We may not know what television is but we recognize
it -- in this case, with an Emmy -- when we see it.
Susan Boyle's success suggests that decisions about what kinds of
television are being watched may rely increasingly on consumers who are
able to scan the planet for interesting content and spread it through their
social networks. Witness the growing number of Americans who are watching
Japanese Anime, East Asian dramas, or Latin American Telenovelas, series
that may be marketed commercially only after they have established a solid
fan following through illegal circulation. Call it spreadable media. In a
world shaped by social networks, if it doesn't spread, it's dead.
The networks are trying to rethink their programming practices in the
context of this unstable and ever expanding media landscape. The move of
Leno to primetime is one more marker of a shift away from dramatic series
and sitcoms and towards lower-cost reality-based programs as the economic
core of American broadcasting. The networks announced surprisingly few new
series this year, choosing to stagger the release of series year round,
rather than roll them all out in one big September splash.
Increasingly, these television programs come bundled with a range of other
media "extensions" as part of what people in the industry are calling
"transmedia" or "crossplatform" or "360 Degree" strategies. New series,
such as Glee, Melrose Place or The Vampire Diaries, have been building up
their fan followings all summer, rolling out advanced content via the web.
In the case of Melrose Place, fans could do a walkthrough of the famous
apartment complex by visiting a fake realtor site, while fans of vampires
could watch videos dramatizing the events leading up to where the new CW
teen drama begins.
More established series, such as Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, and
Ghost Whisperer, have tested and refined this transmedia strategy: Heroes
has now produced nearly 150 web comics, Lost has staged Alternate Reality
Games, basically informational scavanger hunts or puzzle quests through the
fictional world of the series; Battlestar Galactica's producers encouraged
fans to rewatch recent episodes by offering podcasts with director's
commentary; and Ghost Whisperer made secondary characters from the aired
episodes the focal point for web series, "The Other Side".
Industry gurus believe such sites attract new consumers and allow existing
fans to dig in deeper, opening up more "touchpoints" with the media
franchises and their affiliated brands. Transmedia content is part of a
shift away from talking about "appointment-based television" where we race
home to watch our favorite show when it is aired and towards
"engagement-based" television, where our passionate interest leads us to
seek out the programs we want when we want. Transmedia content is designed
to intensify our engagement and generate fan loyalties rather than offering
the "least offensive option" available in a particular time slot.
Is this transmedia material marketing or content? Increasingly they are
being used to introduce new characters or provide backstory and
foreshadowing; they are part of the creative development of the series,
often taking shape in the writer's rooms rather than outsourced to hired
guns. Indeed, the nature of transmedia content was a key issue in the
Writer's Strike several years ago since writers get compensated differently
if they are doing promotional work or contributing series content.
When transmedia is done well, the result is a richer, more "complex"
entertainment experience, one which may continue even after the series is
taken off the air. Javier Grillo-Marxuach, the showrunner for The
Middleman, a little seen ABC Family series, used a graphic novel to provide
closure to some of the many plot points dangling after the program's
cancellation. Coming full circle, Wheedon has declared the comic book
series he penned after Buffy's demise "Season 8," suggesting that fans
consider it as much part of the television series as any of the aired
episodes.
For the moment, there's a strong imperative to "protect the mother ship,"
as industry insiders put it, by treating the extensions into other media as
non-essential and keeping primary focus on the television series. But, in
Japan, we are seeing series which unfold simultaneously across comics,
games, film, and television, without having a dominant medium. This may
well be the future not only of television but entertainment more generally.
As the content expands across media, when does it stop being television and
become something else?
As we enter the traditional fall television season, we should pause and ask
"Do you know what television is anymore?" Jay Leno doesn't know how to
answer that question and neither do I.
-- 
Jolan Tru
Filippo "Hytok" Simone
http://perestroika.iobloggo.com/

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