Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Max Dawson
Department of Radio, TV, & Film
Northwestern University
1920 Campus Drive
Annie May Swift Hall Room 213
Evanston, IL 60208
max@northwestern.edu
Fax: 847-467-2389
2
Abstract: Services that transmit television programming and other video content
to mobile phones over wireless networks have struggled to gain a foothold in the
failure in the U.S. market, focusing on the promotional texts that introduced this
gender, history
Media historians have gained valuable insights into the processes by which new
and various other kinds of ephemeral promotional materials do much more than
simply proclaim the desirability of the devices they promote. Even more
significantly, the images and narratives they contain can influence subsequent
such matters as the content, uses, regulation, and cultural meanings of new
well before the majority of their participants have had opportunities to experience
within these negotiations are based primarily, if not exclusively, upon encounters
fanfare is adopted by consumers. Time and time again devices that were
discussions of media change. But piecing together these stories presents its own
technologies are rarely eager to publicize their missteps. Accounts of failures are
frequently absent from (or downplayed within) “official” histories, and for many of
provide historians with our primary sources of access to information about those
shortage of these ephemeral texts for historians to draw on: advertisements and
other promotional materials in many instances survive long after the products
depicted within them are withdrawn from the market and consigned to history’s
landfill. But what kinds of historical insights are to be gained by examining the
advertisements that launched a new media technology that was later designated
What can advertisements and other promotional materials tell us about the
consumers who rejected or ignored this technology? What can they tell us about
media technology that in recent years has struggled to gain a foothold in the
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number of services that transmit television and other forms of video programming
to mobile phone handsets and other portable devices via wireless networks.1 In
the U.S. the launches of these mobile television services was accompanied by
amount of buzz in the mainstream media and the specialized trade presses of
services took center stage at that year’s CTIA (Cellular Telephone Industries
and video services would “galvanize” a global mobile entertainment market that
Fierce Mobile Content, 2006). “Mobile television burst onto the radar screens of
carriers, content providers and a few marketers in 2005,” the website Cellular-
News reported in March of 2006. “A year later, it’s clear that something major is
going to happen with mobile TV, and sooner rather than later” (Cellular-News,
2006).
the biggest names in the media and telecommunications sectors, from early on
the new U.S. mobile television ventures experienced great difficulties in signing
television ventures into crises from which many would not recover. The first
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major casualty was Mobile ESPN, a full-service wireless company that enjoyed
the patronage of Walt Disney Co.’s lucrative cable sports network. Mobile ESPN
announced its 2006 launch with a $30 million advertising campaign, including a
television broadcast of the year, the Super Bowl (System Mobile, 2007). Seven
months later ESPN pulled the plug on its mobile service, having attracted only
30,000 subscribers (Lowry, 2006).3 Next to fall was Amp’d Mobile, a youth-
June 2007 bankruptcy filing came less than two years after the service’s
inception, during which the company had accumulated more than $100 million in
debt (Marshall, 2007; Riley, 2007). More recently, Qualcomm announced that it
which the company had developed at a cost of more than $800 million (Murph,
subscribers, far fewer than was necessary for the FLO TV service to achieve
2007 consensus was building behind the notion that mobile television was
was ample cause for this dramatic reversal. Still, the designation of U.S. mobile
to the ones that have floundered in the U.S. have elsewhere proven
growing as well, leaving the U.S. (along with Europe) as one of few remaining
regions where mobile television adoption has failed to meet its backers’
That mobile television services similar to the ones that have struggled to
gain traction in the U.S. should succeed at attracting audiences overseas hardly
counterparts in most other nations when it comes to the adoption of mobile data
services (Kedrowsky, 2006). But rather than contradict the chorus of voices that
has called mobile television a failure, mobile television’s uneven global diffusion
for that matter) are always context-bound. As Frank Lipartito (2003) argues in his
the 1970s, there are no set criteria that, when met, justify the designation of a
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function” (54). A media technology such as mobile television may fail because it
does not “work” correctly – in other words, because it does not adequately
perform the job(s) it has been designed to do. It also may fail because it is
example, the economic climates or cultural traditions that exist within specific
mobile television a failure have for the most part based their conclusions on
its relatively brief existence, but offer little insight into why. In this essay, I
interest of resituating the abstract financial data on which these designations are
(2003, p. 54), in the following sections I turn my attention to the venue where
television: that is, the promotional materials that were many consumers’ primary
(if not sole) source of information about and access to this new medium in this
period.
The emphasis I place on these texts and the representations they contain
reflects my contention that the launch of a new media technology is akin to an act
users. Simply put, producers and/or promoters attempt to create and convey
all goes according to plan, compel them to adopt it. Within the context of these
messages between senders and recipients, but also groom and organize the
new media technology such as mobile television may have many relevant points
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falls to promotional materials (and the larger campaigns to which they belong) to
tease these disparate points of reference into coherence, and to make the
what may occur when these acts of communication are somewhat less than
in their address, and even narrower in their conception of this new medium’s
uses. The tropes they referenced excluded large portions of the audience from
taking part in the fantasies they depicted, and wrapped the emergent medium of
technology in the U.S. Beyond that, an engagement with these materials also
create and convey meanings that resonate with consumers’ values and
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expectations.
commercial that aired during television coverage of Super Bowl XL. Four years
later, mobile television made its return to the big game, this time under slightly
to produce and air three commercials for its FLO TV system during CBS’s
coverage of Super Bowl XLIV. Mobile ESPN’s Super Bowl debut had come at the
sectors questioned whether mobile television in fact had a future in the U.S.,
as somewhat of a “Hail Mary” play – that is, a pass thrown out of desperation as
the clock ticks down on the final seconds of an American football game (Duryee,
2010).
with their intended recipients. Within nine months, Qualcomm would announce
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that it was discontinuing FLO TV sales (Tartakoff and Kramer, 2010). But if
between 2003, when the first U.S. mobile television services launched, and 2010,
medium, its uses, and its users in promotional contexts. A significant number of
these stock narratives placed mobile television at the center of gendered conflicts
over space, leisure, and consumption. One Qualcomm commercial, for instance,
staged these conflicts within a shopping mall. In this spot, entitled “Injury Report,”
play” account of a poorly timed trip to a department store. The commercial begins
young man who has accompanied his girlfriend to the mall. “As you can see,”
Nance explains in his classic announcer’s baritone, “his girlfriend has removed
his spine, rendering him incapable of watching the game.” Following Nance’s
First, he is made to hold his girlfriend’s shopping bags as she rifles through racks
of undergarments. Next, she drags him away from the electronics department,
candles. As if these indignities are not bad enough, throughout the commercial a
red brassiere remains draped over Jason’s right shoulder. Comments Nance:
dilemma a FLO TV personal television receiver that, as Nance explains, will allow
him to watch the game anywhere, including in what is perhaps the most
feminized of all retail spaces, the department store. But in this scenario mobile
television offers far more than just the convenience of watching television on the
FLO TV subscription and “Change out of that skirt.” In fact, “Injury Report” is
description of FLO TV’s technical features, and makes no mention of the types of
Though noteworthy for its unabashed misogyny, “Injury Report” was far
from the only mobile television advertisement to place the new medium at the
crux of conflicts between men and women over spectatorship and consumption.
More often than not, these conflicts centered on the ability to watch live televised
shows a couple enjoying what appears to be a romantic dinner above the slogan
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reached across the table to hold hands, but her date’s attention is focused on the
ballgame playing on a small screen he has hidden just beneath the table’s
from work so that he can steal away to watch the final inning of a baseball game
the case in “Injury Report,” mobile television factors in Nokia’s and Slingbox’s
viewing and viewers outside the home that have their origins in television’s own
postwar period of novelty. During this period, as Cecilia Tichi (1991) notes, the
anxiety in the U.S. (89). According to Tichi, postwar leisure reformers, social
theorists, and pundits came to regard the sedentarism of the nation’s male
physical activity with economic productivity, good citizenship, and moral hygiene.
In books, magazine articles, and lectures television’s critics linked the diminishing
fitness of male viewers’ bodies to the overall fitness of the body politic, making
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1991, p. 90), and of transforming “‘real men’ into passive homebodies” content to
portability, and portrayed viewers watching television out of doors, where they
combined the virtual experiences of mobility that television afforded its audiences
with the excitement and adventure of travel and tourism. Inverting Raymond
Williams’ term “mobile privatization,” Lynn Spigel (2001) coins the term
incarceration at the hands of television, literally freeing them from the confines of
the feminine sphere of the home. Portable receivers became symbols of “potent
Television technologies have come a long way since the 1960s, when
transistors were the state of the art and a 19” receiver still qualified as “portable.”
technologies have in many ways remained consistent over this span. Much as
television receiver manufacturers did in the 1960s, the mobile television services
compromised bodies and masculinities. In “Injury Report,” the abject figure of the
mobile television allowed Glasby and other similarly “spineless” men to “take off
their skirts” and assert their masculinity via conspicuous (and conspicuously
enables Jason Glasby to reinstate what the commercial portrays as the rightful
allows an aggrieved middle class white man to assert gender- and class-based
prerogatives.
Mobile television may have been a new medium, but within the context of these
instance, in “Injury Report” Jason Glasby’s problem is not that television has
rendered him immobile, but that his mobility is involuntary, and controlled by his
girlfriend. Mobility here comes at a cost, that being that the mobile man is
The mobile television receiver stands in this and many other contemporaneous
the possibility of recreating the most desirable aspects of the domestic television
front of his set. In these updated fantasies of privatized mobility, the bus, the
train, the city street, and the shopping mall became extensions of the living room
entertainment center, presumably the place where the Jason Glasbys of the
devices that made possible instantaneous, on-demand access to the full range of
media platforms that comprised the home entertainment center of the mid-2000s.
For the most part, however, these updates were superficial. Despite displaying a
portable televisions within the context of active consumer lifestyles that took them
outside of their homes and allowed them to step outside of conventional gender
roles (Spigel, 2001, pp. 76-80). These appropriations might have been
opportunistic and exploitative, yet they nonetheless recognized and valued the
mobility was often conceptualized as a zero sum game; hence in “Injury Report”
mobile consumer lifestyle of Jason’s girlfriend is telling. Even more telling is the
fact that this commercial is one of the few mobile television advertisements that
consumption. Far more frequently, as I discuss below, women were absent from
inert elements of urban landscapes that existed chiefly for the consumption of
their potential market should be self-evident. Women in the U.S. are avid mobile
phone users, and comprise an important growth market for smartphones and
essentially left this potentially lucrative market on the table in their single-minded
commercials aired analysts had already begun to express their concerns about
by gender. For instance, in 2005 the branding consultancy Third Way criticized
featured a prostitute banging on the chest of a dead John (Mallo 2005). Given
the difficulties that Amp’d Mobile, Qualcomm, Mobile ESPN, and many of their
promotional campaigns. Granted, young men are the population that is most
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U.S. mobile television services’ promotional materials have as much to say about
had been expressly designed to exclude and even offend anyone who did not fall
possessive spectatorship
“Injury Report” concludes before Jason Glasby has had a chance to demonstrate
mobile television’s uses and features for the audience. Far more frequently,
mobile television advertisements from this period picked up where “Injury Report”
left off, depicting mobile male viewers’ victories in zero-sum contests over control
featured their own versions of Qualcomm’s Jason Glasby character using mobile
television devices to claim public spaces for their own spectatorial pleasures. The
texts, spaces, and people, all of which blended together on the liquid crystal
displays of their mobile devices. They were modern-day avatars of what Eric
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collect, control, and assemble the experience of the city” through the use of
impulse to “possess” the city in more or less literal ways, inviting consumers to
noted above, these invitations were not extended to all consumers. Rather,
web, employs tromp l’œil special effects to convey the manner in which the
multimedia cell phone reduces the urban landscape to a much more intimate and
shots of a smartly dressed young man traversing its streets. The man spots a
phone booth, which he lifts off the ground and places in his bag. His motions are
accompanied by a sudden shift in scale that reduces the phone booth to the size
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surroundings in this fashion, collecting items that represent the multiple functions
of his Nokia mobile phone, including a billboard (photography) and the neon sign
screen, which he plucks from the top of the building on which it has been
mounted. In the palm of his hand, the screen appears no larger than a mobile
phone. As the scaffolding that had formerly held the screen in place buckles and
explodes, the camera swivels 360 degrees. Once this revolution has concluded,
it is revealed that the giant-screen television has morphed into a Nokia phone.
With each of its tromp l’œil sequences Nokia’s advertisement restages the
scale that miniaturize it and enable its possession. Miniaturization, in the words
shopping malls, and consumer capitalism itself, each of which “expands the
privatization, not unlike that carried out by the individual who uses a Walkman,
iPod, or handheld gaming device to carve out and inhabit “‘media saturated’
spaces of intimacy” within shared public spaces (Bull, 2004, 278). In these
scenarios, portable media devices supply their users with means of creating
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advertisement the mobile phone transforms the city itself into one of these
“‘media saturated’ spaces of intimacy.” The private audiovisual bubble and the
city become one and the same, rendering the urban environment a space where
and that the mobile viewer subject may safely, comfortably, and pleasurably
consume.
solely for the entertainment of the mobile male viewer. For instance, in Mobile
downtown business district that is overrun with athletes who perform a variety of
interact with the people he encounters on while traversing city streets. One
installment of this series shows the mobile viewer amazed to learn that a gum-
popping frosted blonde bimbo can intelligently discuss his phone’s “seamless
the same man finds common ground with a coarse and garrulous hot dog vendor
over their shared appreciation of the ability to channel surf on his phone. Despite
Instead, they take place at the mobile viewer’s behest, and within own personal
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audiovisual bubble. Like voice calls and text messages, these interactions occur
through the mobile device’s interface, a frictionless environment within which the
characterize urban life. Within this environment, the mobile male’s interlocutors
network. As noted above, during its brief period of solvency Amp’d Mobile went
target market (men between the ages of 18 and 24) to imagine using their mobile
everyday travels. In one such advertisement, set onboard a city bus, yet another
young white male begins issuing orders to his fellow passengers in a flat,
man to fight, and they immediately spring out of their seats and begin pummeling
each other. Then, he instructs a man in mechanic’s coveralls to turn up his radio,
performs a perfunctory pole dance on one of the bus’s hand rails. Finally, the
man tells the bus driver to hit the brakes. The commercial ends with the bus’s
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passengers flying in all directions, and the slogan “Have the Power to Entertain
which the male, middle class urban adventurer can decode (and accommodate)
allows this figure to collect, sequence, and consume the people he encounters in
his travels like any other form of digital content. In addition to resonating with
the “power to entertain yourself” with the power to use digital video technology to
producers plied homeless people with cash, alcohol, and crack cocaine in order
viewer’s will. Amp’d Mobile’s urban traveller does not use technology to withdraw
from his surroundings. Rather, via the act of watching television in public spaces
performers in dramas that unfold for an audience of one on the tiny LCD screen
cultural meanings could not possibly have been clearer. Mobile television
bestowed upon its viewer the ability to transform even the most inhospitable of
where he could enjoy the same feelings of power, omniscience, connectivity, and
thus functioned a potent weapon in conflicts over control of the shared spaces of
who are already at liberty to indulge their wanderlust, the fantasies of privatized
reflected their privileged audience’s social and economic status back to them via
There is some small satisfaction to be taken from the fact that mobile
such blatant sexism, classism, and racism to promote their services. But what of
the many millions who could not (or preferred not) to identify with the privileged
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men who were the subjects of these promotional materials’ address? In their
texts all but barred women, people of color, and working class people from
they depicted. However, they could not prevent members of these same groups
television, mobile phones, and other media technologies in shared public spaces.
As Anna McCarthy (2001) has noted, on a daily basis women, people of color,
and working class people are exposed to various forms of out-of-home media
such as the ones discussed above likely would have triggered associations with
these very sorts of indignities. For instance, Amp’d Mobile’s “The Power to
ride home after a long day of work with an inconsiderate young urban
tales about his nightlife as he talked loudly on his mobile phone. Along similar
lines, Nokia’s trompe l’oeil special effects might have reminded some urban
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dwellers of their own experiences of the very real (as opposed to metaphorical)
For reasons that will likely remain obscure, advertisements for mobile
television services appear to have left their target market of young male early
adopters cold. In all likelihood, these same advertisements went a long way
towards persuading people who did not fit this consumer profile that mobile
television was certainly not for them, and moreover quite possibly was a weapon
to be used against them in conflicts over the shopping mall, the city street, and
public transportation. Herein lies what was arguably one of the most damaging
missteps made by mobile television’s backers during the period of the medium’s
U.S. launch. For while Amp’d Mobile, Mobile ESPN, Qualcomm, and their
competitors for the most did quite admirable jobs of rapidly assembling
infrastructure and content for their systems, their promotional materials rarely
these conflicts, mobile television’s backers placed artificial and arbitrary limits on
the size of the new medium’s potential market. Under the constraints of these
limits mobile television has struggled unsuccessfully to break out of the early
adopter ghetto that its U.S. backers fought so hard to gain a foothold within. As a
result, after more than seven years U.S. mobile television services have only
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Conclusion
Amp’d Mobile, and FLO TV were all brought down by unique confluences of
events falling both within and beyond these companies’ control. In the case of
Amp’d Mobile, for instance, particularly damaging was the company’s policy of
allowing people with poor credit ratings to sign up for its services. After many of
these subscribers did not pay their monthly bills, Amp’d Mobile was plunged into
a liquidity crisis that prevented it from paying off its own creditors, and that
ultimately brought on its demise. By the time Amp’d Mobile filed for bankruptcy in
2007, the service had only about 175,000 total subscribers, 80,0000 of whom
have on a new media venture’s prospects for success. Then again, perhaps
Amp’d Mobile would not have been compelled to extend credit to risky cases had
it been more successful at signing up subscribers in the first place. The question
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remains, then: “Why did so few people sign up for Amp’d Mobile and the other
Over the course of this essay I have argued that an engagement with the
in the U.S. can be an important first step towards answering this question. Far
than had chances to experience its technologies or content first hand. These
consumers did not reject mobile television so much as they rejected a particular
thus requires that we first consider the processes by which these meanings were
made, the channels through which they circulated, and the values and
expectations that shaped how adopters and non-adopters interpreted them. This
facilities, and establishing retail distribution networks. But it also involves telling
stories and making meanings. Though a breakdown at any of these stages may
question that began this essay – “What insights, if any, are to be gained by
else these texts make clear that with regards to new media technologies often all
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Routledge Classics.
programming is viewed synchronously with its transmission. Contrast this to portable video
technologies which store content on hard drives for later viewing. For more on this distinction,
2
Mobile television’s backers have at various points included Verizon, AT&T, Walt Disney Co.,
3
Amp’d and ESPN Mobile were mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) that leased
wireless spectrum from larger mobile networks and bundled their television services together
4
Raymond Williams (2003) argues that television expresses and to a certain extent
attenuates one of modernity’s defining contradictions: namely, the tension between, on the
one hand, modern forms of conveyance, social mobility, and patterns of population
distribution, and, on the other, the decidedly privatized character of modern life. According to
Williams, television’s amenability with this thoroughly contradictory way of life derives from its
ability to afford its audiences experiences of vicarious mobility that could be enjoyed within
the privacy of their own homes, a mode of experience he terms “mobile privatization” (19-21).
5
A companion piece from the same campaign features a woman in a similar position of
control, only in this version the action takes place inside during a family reunion, where the
woman commands her family members to engage in similarly demeaning stunts. Here,
however, the control is divorced from geographic mobility, and is confined to the domestic