Digital Ephemera: the rebellion against on-demand

ALSO: Acast buys Podchaser and controls ALL THE DATA!

If I were Mark Zuckerberg (which I’m not) or Rupert Murdoch (which I’m not) I would invest some of my enormous capital in setting up a special department called the Reverse Engineering Squad. This crack team would do exact what you’d expect: take everything that happens and work out why it happened.

There’s an aphorism frequently trotted out in behavioural science circles, which says that “the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour”. Which makes sense, and is probably true (“best” representing, here, an imperfect supremacy). So why, from 2004, did Facebook become the dominant social media player for more than a decade, turning it into one of the biggest companies in the world? What itch did it scratch? And why did Netflix, when it pivoted to streaming video in 2007, catch fire? What was the genesis of the societal movement that ended up with Netflix having far more than 200,000,000 subscribers?

These are questions that have simple answers (They were good ideas! New technologies facilitated them! They were first in a market that rewards the early!) and more complex ones (Internet-induced disassociation creating the rise of the anonymity preference! Weakening social fabric at a community level! Erosion of work/life balance disrupting linear distribution!) but whatever. The boffins in the RES (Reverse Engineering Squad) will answer them.

Last week, in my side-hustle as a TV critic, I found myself reviewing the finale of the long-running Australian soap opera, Neighbours. American subscribers to this newsletter won’t have the foggiest about the three decades of goings on on Ramsay Street, the Melbourne cul-de-sac where the show is set, but Brits will immediately recognise that this was an important cultural event. Anyhow, the finale is pretty awful – the show has always be bad, in a naff way, though has become so irredeemably bad that its distributors have decided to put it out of its misery. All the same, my one-star review has not gone down particularly well with the legions of emotional Neighbours super fans…

Soap operas speak to something quite specific in our nature as cultural consumers. There are very few people who would call any of them “good”, nor do they fit comfortably within the highbrow-middlebrow-lowbrow axis. If Ulysses is highbrow and the MCU is lowbrow, then soap operas are un-browed entirely. They exist really as a sort of alternative life that runs concurrent to yours, the way that bored office workers in the early 2000s used to play Second Life and wish their meagre existence away. Every evening you get to clock back in with your other family, in their other house. And that relationship can last entire lifetimes – June Brown, the Eastenders icon, who died earlier this year, played the role of Dot Cotton from 1985 to 2020. Coronation Street’s William Roache (who plays Ken Barlow) has been performing that part continuously since 1960.

This newsletter is not about soap operas. It’s about digital ephemera. That sense that a thing can exist just for a short amount of time, and then fade into nothingness.

It’s a concept that runs contrary to a lot of the basis on which the ‘media’ has been run for decades. Film, books, music, theatre, and even television, have all wanted to improve the longevity of their product. And to take film as the ur-example: the desire for longevity starts at the point of writers, directors, producers and actors, who are incentivised, by the concept of ‘prestige’ to make something that stands the test of time. Francis Ford Coppola is going to be better remembered for The Godfather than Jack. But prestige is not the only incentive here. The more you can avoid that flash-in-the-pan issue, the better you can translate your content across multiple formats. Historically, this has meant that you want the film to do so well in cinemas that, six months later, you can sell a bunch of VHS or DVD copies. But now that long tail is even longer, and you want it to stand up to multiple re-watches across streaming platforms. That’s the reason why shows like The Office and Gilmore Girls have only accelerated in cultural currency since being off the air.

That’s the argument for permanency, and it’s the dominant argument. Conversely, fleeting media has become associated with the ol’ “today’s news is tomorrow’s chip wrapper” saying, which has helped contribute to the terminal decline of the print newspaper, and with disposable trash like, say, Neighbours. The shorter the lifespan, the less interesting the product, conventional wisdom would have us believe.

But despite that, mayfly media is, perhaps, having a comeback. At its most ephemeral, we might see the rise of the self-destructing message on Snapchat and Instagram – two formats that also have timed dissemination platforms, so you can push content for a limited period only, before it is (supposedly) lost to the mists of time. Why has this form of communication (and it is predominantly a form of communication, rather than a form of publishing) developed so strongly in the past decade? Well, that’s a question for the Reverse Engineering Squad, but my suspicion is that it has something to do with privacy, something to do with anonymity, and a lot to do with the new mechanics of bullying employed by social media-native children.

But, as I say, that’s predominantly a means of communication. Where we might see ephemeral media in a broadcast capacity is video streaming. For a long time, boomers, Gen Xers and millennials (like myself) have agonised about the capacity of media to reuse linear content in an on-demand capacity. This has led, directly, to the rise of the podcast: there is no way that podcasting would be as ubiquitous as it is in 2022 if it hadn’t been for the efforts made by public radio, in the US, and the BBC, in the UK, to rebadge its radio content for on-demand consumption. This allowed, at a time when there was little or no money going directly to podcasts, for consumers to find high quality broadcasting on their podcast app. And the same has been true for linear television: I am a TV critic who doesn’t have an old-school TV. I watch almost everything on some form of catch-up, and if I want to watch live I do so through an app.

The erosion of linear TV is an age old trend, since the days when TiVo and Sky started introducing the ability to pause, rewind and record live television (obviously, we’d all been taping stuff onto cassettes for many years before that). The question of how good this trend has been for TV is very separate from how much demand there’s been from consumers – clearly the last decade has been a fairly uninterrupted testament to the strength of on-demand programming.

And yet… I’ve already spelt out how Gen Zers are reverting back to digital ephemera. Streaming (which I mentioned briefly) is like live television, in that it runs and runs and you tune in when you can. The mechanic for making that content on-demand is through the process of clipping, i.e. taking specific short highlights and moving them over to an on-demand platform. But that tends (with many exceptions) not to happen for the entire multi-hour stream. Instead, the ability to access the long stream after broadcast is generally reserved for paying subscribers, and, even then, only briefly. It is, in a way, a form of vanishing television.

The payoff here is that pinning a broadcast to a specific temporal moment allows for that greater interactivity. Communication between watcher and streamer can happen in real time and there is no need to legislate for longevity. I myself was making a podcast last week when I had to reiterate to participants not to mention anything currently in the news (and there’s a lot of news here in the UK) because the show wouldn’t be broadcast until September. Such concerns are not part of the language of streaming, because it happens and it’s gone, and if you’re watching it as a historical document, you’re probably a freak.

But it’s not just Gen Zers who are in rebellion against on-demand content. I myself am kind-of sick of enduring the agony of choice that happens every time I open Netflix or Amazon. In a way, that explains away the success of rewatchable content like Gilmore Girls, The Office, The Simpsons or New Girl – people default to what they know they’ve enjoyed because the smorgasbord of opportunity is overwhelming.

The success of Love Island, a communal watch enjoyed by millions of Britons each summer, also reinforces the fact that linear television isn’t dead. And, on top of that, almost 20m people here in the UK watched the England women’s football team win the Euros last night. These are both examples of ‘event TV’, programming where you need to tune in live in order to experience the full impact of the broadcast (see also, for example, the number of people tuning in live for the Game of Thrones finale, not because its relevance was temporally pegged but because missing out on watching live meant missing out on some of the experience of watching).

It’s easy to assume that ‘event TV’ is distinct from TV in general, because it is. But if you silo the high ratings of Love Island and live sport away in a special category, you risk missing out on a trend. And I think there is a trend away from on-demand at the moment, towards a new low-stakes hybrid system. I don’t want to choose, I want to be told; I don’t want to watch alone, I want to be part of a community.

Free, for us in the UK, access to ITV Player, plus an open browser tab on Twitter, creates an experience for watching Love Island that is analogous to the most vigorous and vociferous streaming chats. Because there are mitigating factors (such as, for example, the fact that Love Island unfolds predominantly in real time, thus necessitating its rapid consumption) it’s easy to think of this as just something that people in their 20s do every summer. For a few weeks they hang up their reliance on Netflix and start watching linear TV again. But the reality is that it’s in keeping with a general trend, which, like all important trends of the future, starts with the youngest demographic of paying consumers.

If you reverse engineered the trend towards on-demand, you would see that it was a response to the proliferation of content. In the 2000s, Sky (the big cable TV provider here in the UK) were suddenly offering hundreds of channels to people who had previously been able to access 4 or 5 (in my childhood home, we got Sky TV before we were able to access Channel 5). Schedule competition in households expanded by about 6000% overnight (because households acquiring cable TV didn’t have an interstitial period where they had 20 and then 50 and then a 100 channels – it all happened at the flick of a switch). So on-demand became both a huge value-add and a way of ensuring that content creators were incentivised to participate in multi-channel cable television. Win win.

By the time on-demand came to the web, as late as 2007, it was an inevitable means of harnessing the changing way that we were using the internet. Before 2007, most households didn’t have good enough internet quality to stream video. It was much safer to use cable or satellite TV. Subsequently, as broadband reach has improved, it’s felt much more like a no-brainer way of distributing media. And with that current, the private market were also able to mobilise much more rapidly. Setting up a linear TV channel – let alone a whole linear TV marketplace, like Sky – was prohibitively difficult, expensive and subject to regulatory burdens. Setting up a VOD streaming platform has proven well within the capabilities of any mid-range distributor. And we’ve seen, very clearly, what market competition has done for streaming video: good prices (compare Day 1 Netflix price with Day 1 Sky price for a shock), better content, both licensed and original, but a hugely atomised ecosystem.

Those conditions now look positively quaint. Choice has, to a large extent, destroyed our brains, and Web3 (in so much as this is a real thing) places clear emphasis on participation in the internet. The conditions have changed and it would be the definition of insanity to expect the course of progress to remain the same.

So, when the Reverse Engineering Squad arrive back at today – August 2022 – where will they have come from? (I realise this is asking you to reverse engineer their reverse engineering). Where are all these strange consumer behaviours leading? And where will they end up? Stay subscribed (for a decade) to find out!