13

The 800-Pound Gorillas in the Room

The Mobile Phone and the Future of Television

Max Dawson

Both wireless carriers and entertainment companies are used to being the 800-pound gorilla in any room. Now that they're in the same room, something has to give.

Kanishka Agarwal, Vice President of Mobile Media, Telephia (quoted in Kapko, 2007)

If you thought UHF had gone the way of eight tracks and Betamax, think again. The broadcast spectrum could be the future of television.

Om Malik (2005)

To publicize the June 2007 debut of its latest mobile phone, the consumer electronics giant LG hosted a party “celebrating the past, present and future of television” at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, California. The small-screen theme of LG's Mobile TV Party was a nod to the new phone's defining feature: inside the LG VX9400 was a chip that enabled it to tune in specially encoded live television signals transmitted over a vacant channel in television's UHF (ultra-high frequency) band. Joining LG in celebrating the phone's launch was a bevy of “TV icons,” including The Brady Bunch's Chris Knight, Star Trek's George Takei, and Happy Days' Scott Baio. After walking the red carpet, LG's guests made their way through a museum-style exhibition of television technologies that began with black-and-white receivers and culminated with the VX9400. This exhibition, which LG dubbed the “living timeline of television history,” opened up onto a massive soundstage on which had been erected scale reproductions of the sets of some of the best-loved programs of the 1960s and 1970s. For the rest of the night partygoers mingled within a recreation of the Brady family's living room, posed for photos in the captain's chair of the Space Shuttle Enterprise, and dined on cheeseburgers and shakes in Arnold's Drive-In (Fathom4, 2007).

LG's placement of the VX9400 at the conclusion of the “living timeline of television history” translated into spatial terms an argument advanced by many in this period: that mobile devices were “the future of television.”¹ The Mobile TV Party's retro theme and guest list, however, made it difficult to ignore the many parallels between this vision of television's future and the medium's past. Like the black-and-white receivers that greeted partygoers at the entrance of the “living timeline,” the VX9400 featured a tiny, low-resolution screen, used an antenna to receive a handful of channels that aired fixed schedules, and lacked the ability to record, pause, fast forward, or rewind programming. In many respects, this “television of the future” owed more to the 1950s nostalgia sitcom Happy Days than it did to the fantastic world of Star Trek. For aside from its portability and $15 dollar a month subscription fee, there was little to distinguish mobile television from the broadcast television that Happy Days' Cunningham family would have enjoyed within the comfort of their living room in 1950s Milwaukee.

LG was by no means alone in promoting the notion that television's future would involve the revival of broadcasting by mobile media companies. During the 2000s consumer electronics manufacturers, mobile communications companies, broadcasters, Internet companies, and global media conglomerates poured billions of dollars into the development of technologies for delivering television programming to mobile phones and other portable devices. The first mobile television solutions to emerge from these ventures were patterned after early Internet video platforms and used mobile carriers' voice networks to transmit television programming on an on-demand basis. As the decade progressed, however, mobile television's backers doubled down on their investments in technologies that emulated or refashioned aspects of broadcast television. These solutions, which included Crown Castle Communications' Modeo, Aloha Partners' Hiwire Mobile Television, Texas Instruments' Hollywood mobile digital broadcast platform, mobile DTV, and Qualcomm's MediaFLO (the technology that powered LG's VX9400), moved mobile television signals off of carriers' voice networks and onto portions of the radio spectrum that had until recently been occupied by television broadcasters. Each system capitalized on the latest advances in video compression, radio spectrum optimization, power consumption minimization, and mobile chip design to accomplish something that television broadcasters had done quite well since the 1940s: deliver multiple channels of linearly scheduled programming over the air and in “real time” to an unlimited number of viewers located within a defined geographic area. Mobile television's backers have not dodged these comparisons with television's past, but rather have invited them. Via their product designs, programming strategies, and promotional texts they encouraged reporters, regulators, and consumers, often explicitly, to regard mobile television as an extension of and improvement upon the technologies and practices of broadcasting.

The “irony” that the developers of these “futuristic” mobile technologies should aspire to emulate broadcasting at a time when fewer than 10% of US viewers received their television signals over the air was not lost on contemporary observers. In a review of one of the many commercial mobile television services introduced in this period, a Chicago Tribune reporter acknowledged with a smirk that mobile television was “a bit like TV in the '70s: no VCR-style recording, only eight channels, and in some areas you'll have to raise the phone's antenna to improve reception” (Gwinn, 2007). Media scholars have likewise taken note of the various ways that mobile television adopts, reworks, and comments upon – or, in the terminology of media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000), remediates – the technologies and protocols of broadcasting. Studies published in recent years have detailed the parallels that exist between mobile television programming and the heavily segmented formats that predominated on US network television in the late 1940s; between mobile phones' tiny screens and the playing card-sized cathode-ray tubes of early television receivers; and between the promotion of mobile television in the 2000s and of portable television receivers in the 1950s and 1960s (Carey & Greenberg, 2006; Dawson, 2007; Groening, 2010; Orgad, 2009).

Why have the backers of mobile television, an emergent medium touted by many as “the future of television,” so aggressively sought to revive the residual protocols of broadcast television? What are the factors that motivated the shift from the on-demand paradigm of the United States' first mobile television services to technologies that behaved more like conventional broadcast receivers, and services that offered fixed daily programming schedules? And what are the larger implications of this paradigm shift for media industries, policies, and audiences? This chapter takes up these questions, exploring the overdetermined contexts and consequences of mobile television's remediation of broadcasting in the United States. It argues that the anachrony of mobile television is more than just an “ironic” historical curiosity or a marketing strategy employed to familiarize a novel technology. Rather, mobile television's remediation of broadcasting must be understood within the context of broader institutional conflicts that predate the advent of technologies capable of delivering television to mobile phones. For nearly a decade the adversaries in these lengthy conflicts used mobile television – or, more accurately, the prospect of its widespread adoption in the near future – as a weapon within fights over resources and policies. In fact, many of the conflicts over mobile television had less to do with the technology itself than with the terms under which these adversaries would compete and collaborate with one another in the future in media markets that had yet to be established or defined. And yet despite these adversaries' mutual preoccupations with positioning themselves for this uncertain future, both sides have gone out of their way to assert the links between television's broadcast past and mobile future. In these fights between “new” and “old” media industries, anachrony proved equally effective as a rationale for change as it did an argument against it.

The following sections offer a sketch of the sides within and stakes of the conflicts that have shaped – and continue to shape – mobile television, paying special attention to the clashes between mobile communications companies and broadcasters. The war between these two “800-pound gorilla[s]” has been waged on multiple fronts, and has involved shifting configurations of temporary alliances with various other stakeholders (Kapko, 2007). It is not the only conflict that has influenced mobile television's development, yet it is the one that has most impacted peripheral skirmishes over technical standards and programming formats; content licensing agreements; hardware and monthly subscription pricing; and the division of costs and profits amongst producers, distributors, and various middlemen. By examining the contexts of this particular conflict, this chapter identifies mobile television's remediation of broadcast television as an institutional practice. Within the field of new media studies, the concept of remediation is most often employed to describe the interaction of the artifacts, forms, social practices, and modes of perception associated with multiple media. Mobile television's brief history in the United States highlights another dimension of remediation: the interactions of corporate cultures, business models, ideologies, traditions, and reputations that take place when institutions and industries are thrust together by technological convergence and regulatory reform.

The Uncomfortable Proximity of Convergence

Although the “jurisdictional conflicts” that have surrounded mobile television are “complex and multisided” (Altman, 2005, p. 22), the factors that initially provoked them may nevertheless be conceptualized in rather straightforward spatial terms. In brief, the primary adversaries in these conflicts were stakeholders who in the 2000s found themselves in close and oftentimes uncomfortable proximity to one another, first within the marketplaces in which they operated, and then later within the progressively cramped quarters of the nation's radio spectrum.

As Carolyn Marvin (1990) argues, the public launch of a new medium often involves the rearrangement of physical and/or social spaces, and may alter the literal and figurative distances between groups engaged in negotiations over “power, authority, representation, and knowledge.” “New media,” she writes, “intrude on these negotiations by providing new platforms on which old groups confront one another. Old habits of transacting between groups are projected onto new technologies that alter, or seem to alter, critical social distances” (p. 5). Marvin's observations about new media and the uneasy proximity they may engender pertain specifically to relationships between and amongst a medium's various cohorts of users. But they are equally relevant to institutions' and entire industries' “habits of transacting.” The introduction of a new medium may destabilize the customary terms governing competition and collaboration within various markets, altering the balances of power that such customs typically maintain. For this reason hegemonic institutions often find it in their collective best interests to actively or indirectly impede the dissemination of innovations that alter the distances between industries and/or markets (Winston, 1986).

Between the 1980s and the 2000s, the distances separating participants in telecommunications and media markets contracted quite dramatically in the United States. These entities' new proximity recalled a much older arrangement of the “spaces” of US telecommunications and media markets, namely that which existed during the first two decades of the twentieth century, when the infrastructure and the institutions of telephony, telegraphy, and broadcasting were all thoroughly integrated. The reunification of the US telecommunications and media industries was a gradual process, but was sped along in the end by digitalization, and specifically by the refinement of methods for distributing digitized voice communications, Internet Protocol packets, and video over the same wired and wireless networks. The technological integration of media and telecommunications distribution infrastructures encouraged and facilitated the flow of capital, intellectual property, personnel, expertise, and business models between companies. For decades, these companies had collaborated under a collection of formal and informal rules that were quite specific about the division of their roles and the limits of their respective jurisdictions. But as these flows have intensified, and as cross-industry mergers have grown more common, these rules have become easier to ignore. As the 1990s wore on, customary distinctions between, for instance, phone companies, cable television multiple service operators (MSOs), and Internet service providers grew more and more blurry and less and less binding.

As infrastructural integration gained momentum in the 1990s, prominent libertarian cyberboosters and high-tech industry executives prophesied the imminent and inevitable reunification of the telecommunications and media markets (Gates, 1995; Gilder, 1990, 2000). However, industrial convergence was not, as its most vocal proponents insisted, a logical and necessary outcome of infrastructural integration, but instead a product of legislative intervention. The comprehensive policy reforms enacted by the United States Telecommunications Act of 1996 formally ended the enforced segregation of telecommunications and media markets. Though it would be a number of years before viable cross-industry competition occurred, by the mid 2000s companies such as Comcast and AT&T had expanded their services to include “triple play” packages that bundled together voice, video, and broadband Internet services.

In addition to removing policy obstacles to cross-platform competition, the reforms of the 1990s created conditions amenable to the reconsolidation of United States telecommunications markets, which since the breakup of the Bell System monopoly in the 1980s had been compartmentalized by region and platform (Fotheringham & Sharma, 2008, p. 200). Amongst the biggest beneficiaries of these reforms were mobile communications companies, and in particular the operators of nationwide mobile phone networks. In the 1990s the United States' major mobile network operators embarked on an acquisition spree, swallowing up smaller regional competitors, long-distance and local fixed-line telephone companies, and retail Internet service providers. By the mid-2000s, the mobile communications retail market was dominated by four major networks: Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile.² The first two of these networks were subsidiaries of massive telecommunications conglomerates with portfolios that included fixed-line and mobile telephone services, wholesale and retail Internet services, and, by the mid-2000s, multichannel television services.

The United States' four major mobile network operators benefited from massive economies of scale and, in the case of Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility, cross platform synergies, such as the ability to bundle their mobile services along with their parent companies' “triple play” packages (Fotheringham & Sharma, 2008, p. 15). However, these companies came into existence at a particularly challenging time for the mobile communications industry. By the early 2000s, the retail market for mobile communications services began showing the first signs of saturation (Nuechterlein & Weiser, 2005, p. 260). With a dwindling number of potential new customers available to them, mobile network operators turned their attention to luring subscribers away from their competitors. The fierce competition that ensued sent voice call revenues – “the flywheel” of the industry's growth over the previous two decades (Fotheringham & Sharma, 2008, p. 206) – into decline, placing mobile network operators – and their voice-centric business model – in a “precarious” position (Charny, 2004; Nuance Communications, 2006).

To stave off the industry-wide slowdown predicted by many telecommunications analysts, mobile network operators diversified, introducing an array of premium-priced data services in the early 2000s that included text messages, web browsing and email, adult services, videogames, and music and ringtone downloads. In conjunction with the rollout of these services, operators invested heavily in network upgrades, including the construction of third-generation (3G) mobile networks designed to provide faster data transfer rates. The first of these premium services to pay off was text messaging, which generated $2.5 billion for the mobile telecommunications industry in 2004. But network operators had their eyes on the even bigger potential windfall represented by multimedia services, and mobile television in particular. Mobile television services had recently been introduced by mobile network operators in Europe and Asia, and even in their embryonic stages these services made a significant impression upon North American telecommunications analysts. Between handset sales, subscription and data transmission fees, premium pay-per-view charges, and advertising, mobile television presented network operators, as well as chip makers, consumer electronics manufacturers, and media companies, with an impressive range of revenue opportunities. Optimistic analysts predicted that mobile television could replace voice communications as the mobile phone's “killer app” (Goot, 2003; Hellweg, 2005), and forecasted that it would generate between $6 and $27 billion annually by the end of the decade (Reardon, 2006).

For mobile network operators locked in cutthroat competition with one another over shrinking voice margins, mobile television's multiple revenue streams represented a promising solution to the dilemma of how to maintain growth in a decelerating marketplace. As reported by the technology website CNet, by 2004 enthusiasm for mobile television had grown to the point where some mobile industry executives were publicly claiming that mobile television's revenues would “save the cell phone industry” (Charny, 2004). But mobile television also represented a potential bridge to a future in which mobile network operators would no longer be solely or even primarily in the business of voice communications. By adding television packages to their lists of services, the United States' mobile network operators began the process of reinventing themselves as fully diversified entities that would compete in multiple media markets, as opposed to exclusively with one another.

“The Future of Broadcast Television is Mobile”³

Mobile network operators' multimedia ambitions led them into new markets, as well as into new portions of the radio spectrum. In these spaces they encountered old partners under new circumstances, as well as institutions that they had limited experience in dealing with. Amongst the latter were broadcasters, a group that shared mobile network operators' interest in the possibility of delivering television programming to mobile devices.

Whereas mobile network operators' multimedia ambitions were driven in large part by their industry's growth imperatives, broadcasters' interests in mobile television were survival oriented. The period of the mobile industry's rapid growth coincided with the unraveling of the hegemony of US network broadcasting (Lotz, 2007). As mobile network operators' subscriber rolls expanded, US broadcast networks' cumulative share of the national television audience fell precipitously, from approximately 75% in 1985 to 43% in 2010 (Seidman, 2007). Broadcasters' advertising revenues followed this downward trend, spurred by the ascendance of cable, the advent of new commercial-skipping technologies such as the digital video recorder (DVR), and the recessions that bookended the first decade of the twenty first-century. National broadcast networks' local affiliate stations were particularly hard hit by the industry's economic downturn. While most of these stations continued to be profitable, their future viability became a subject of much debate within the popular press and within the industry itself (Schechner & Dana, 2009). Questions about the sustainability of free-to-air broadcast television were broached with increased frequency (and urgency) in the press during the 2000s. A 2006 IBM Business Consulting Services report captured the pervasive sense of crisis surrounding broadcast television in this period. “Today is the beginning of ‘the end of TV as we know it,’” the report explained, “and the future will only favor those who prepare now” (IBM Institute for Business Value, 2009, p. 1). Amongst those not expected to survive this paradigm shift were broadcast stations, which, as one journalist put it, appeared to be “head[ed] for extinction” (Wasserman, 2004).

As these debates over television's future – and free-to-air broadcasting's lack of one – unfolded, the owners of the nation's more than one thousand broadcast television stations did as the mobile network operators discussed above and began to explore alternatives to their traditional business models and revenue sources. The range of options available to them was more diverse than ever before, thanks again to legislative intervention. As discussed by Lisa Parks in her contribution to this volume, during this period every local broadcast station in the United States was required to convert its facilities to the nation's new digital television broadcasting standard, or DTV. When crafting the rules governing this changeover, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had been extremely charitable toward free-to-air broadcast stations. In addition to granting each station what essentially amounted to a rent-free lease on a second channel for the duration of the conversion (allowing them to simultaneously transmit in analog and digital), the FCC also refrained from placing stipulations on how stations would use their digital channels. Stations were at liberty to use these channels as they saw fit, provided they continued to offer at least one free-to-air channel that adhered to the vague public interest principles that govern the licensing of free-to-air broadcasting in the United States.

The potential uses of these new digital channels were many, and included high-definition broadcasting, multiple channels of standard-definition broadcasting, subscription channels, wireless data services, or mobile television transmission. While the majority of local stations elected to use their digital channels to transmit high-definition video, mobile television held a particularly strong appeal for broadcasters (Dickson, 2007a; Whitney, 2009). Having initially been shut out of the deals that broadcast networks struck with companies such as RealNetworks, Apple, and Google to deliver their programming via the Internet, station owners appreciated the opportunity that mobile television presented to directly tap into a new and potentially lucrative revenue stream (Dickson, 2007b). Broadcasters' investments in mobile television also promised the return of substantial symbolic dividends. By insinuating themselves into the incipient mobile multimedia market, broadcasters stood to remediate their own and their industry's reputations at a time when both were suffering. Bolter and Grusin (2000) contend that remediation often entails the reform (or more precisely, the rhetorical rehabilitation) of one medium by another, as when a new medium's promoters present it to the public as an improvement or upgrade on an already established medium. They write: “Each new medium is justified because it fills a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfills the unkept promise of an older medium” (p. 60). Although the very possibility of this reform is predicated upon an acknowledgment of the perceived inadequacies of an older medium, as an institutional practice remediation may also involve the rehabilitation of an older medium's tarnished reputation. Material and/or figurative associations with new media may imbue established media with a sheen of novelty, and may even provide new justifications for their existence. Through these associations, “old media” may shed their customary uses or their sedimented cultural meanings, in a sense becoming “new” once again.

In the case of mobile television, the nation's beleaguered broadcast industry had much to gain from an association with the mobile communications industry, which despite having its own economic problems nevertheless continued to enjoy a reputation for innovation within policy circles, the investment sphere, and public opinion. The pressures on broadcasters to reform their industry's image were particularly acute during this period. The steady stream of popular media reports forecasting the impending demise of free-to-air broadcasting placed the national networks and their affiliate stations in a position in which they were continuously required to justify their relevance. Another source of pressure originated from within policy circles. The costly and protracted conversion to DTV exacerbated anti-broadcasting sentiments that had been percolating within think tanks, academic departments, and media watchdog organizations for quite some time by this point.⁴ Local stations' repeated failures to comply with the deadlines specified by the FCC's conversion timetables resulted in the postponement of the commission's reclamation of analog television's portion of the radio spectrum. These delays prolonged stations' rent-free leases on their second channels, blocking the transfer of the analog television spectrum to the mobile communications companies and public safety organizations that had obtained the rights to occupy it following the conversion's completion.

The economic and public safety ramifications of these delays resulted in a wave of negative publicity for the broadcast industry as would-be users of the spectrum joined policy experts and media activists in demanding a reexamination of the terms under which the FCC licensed broadcast stations. Some proponents of reform made more radical recommendations, which included, for instance, “Tak[ing] TV off the air” and reallocating its spectrum to more “efficient” or “intelligent” uses (San Miguel, 2008). The crux of many spectrum reformers' arguments was that broadcasters – a group that, according to one critic, had grown so complacent that “its idea of a major innovation is the miniseries” (Platt, 1997) – were squandering the immense value of one of the nation's most important and valuable resources. Signals transmitted in television's portion of the radio spectrum travel long distances and are capable of passing through walls and other obstructions, making them attractive for a wide variety of uses, and extremely valuable on the open market. Proponents of spectrum reform estimated the cumulative market value of broadcasters' spectrum holdings to be upwards of $60 billion, and projected that in the hands of more “innovative” users this spectrum could generate an additional $1 trillion in benefits for the country in the future (Eggerton, 2009). As the DTV conversion dragged on, and as the US economy sunk into recession, proponents of spectrum reform found support for their platform within the FCC and the White House. Following the election of President Barack Obama, who had pledged during his campaign to make the universal provision of broadband Internet access a priority of his administration, the FCC began formal investigations of the feasibility of reallocating spectrum from broadcasters to mobile companies and other new users.⁵

Under pressure to demonstrate to an increasingly unsympathetic policy community and public their worthiness of the choice spectrum they occupied, the nation's broadcast station owners scrambled to ready a free-to-air “mobile DTV” standard that would enable them to simulcast their channels to handheld devices. Though for the time being mobile DTV remained “vaporware” – that is, a product that is under development and thus exists only conceptually or in a prototype stage – this did not stop broadcasters from trying to sell the public and the policy community on its importance. John Caldwell (2000) describes the routine practice of promoting vaporware as “both a corporate theoretical exercise and a marketing high-wire act” (p. 6). Broadcasters in this period busied themselves with both activities, working on the one hand to stoke anticipation for a product that was still years away from being ready for the market, and on the other hand to establish a theoretical framework through which to understand the future of US media. This theoretical framework was buttressed by the structuring ideologies of free-to-air broadcasting, which since the early twentieth century have included localism, liveness, and public service (Boddy, 1990).

In various speeches, public service announcements, and press releases, industry lobbying groups such as the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) made the case that this vaporware represented the best bet of ensuring these cherished principles' survival in the “digital future” (Whitney, 2005). Apart from reasserting their members' commitment to free-to-air broadcasting's structuring ideologies, these groups also highlighted the important contributions a healthy and innovative broadcasting industry would make to this future. For instance, a 2010 press release issued by the OMVC stated that:

The broadcasting lobby's defensive maneuvers played liberally with linear chronology: by hyping a throwback mobile DTV standard that was not yet ready for commercialization, broadcasters made retro vaporware a central element of their efforts to rhetorically create for themselves and for their industry the future that their critics and competitors argued they lacked. But despite the assuredness that characterized these lobbying campaigns, a sense of desperation persisted around mobile DTV, growing stronger as its development dragged on. As one trade journalist observed, “Mobile DTV provides a means for broadcasters to remain relevant in the 21st century. That's important, for if broadcasters don't use their spectrum efficiently to serve the majority of the population, there are many other companies out there willing to pay a high price for that spectrum” (Lung, 2009). Amongst the many groups circling broadcasters' spectrum were mobile network operators, whose own multimedia ambitions hinged upon their annexation of television's airwaves.

Emergent Technologies, Residual Protocols

During the 2000s broadcasters and mobile communications companies each identified mobile television as key to their respective industries' futures. At least initially, agendas shaped by distinctive institutional cultures, industrial legacies, and technological considerations led these two groups to pursue diverging mobile television solutions. However, the multimedia ambitions of the mobile communications industry and the survival tactics of free-to-air television broadcasters would, over time, place these two industries on a collision course. By the end of the decade, broadcasters and mobile companies' preferred methods of delivering television programming to mobile devices shared a number of attributes in common. Though these methods continued to employ incompatible transmission and reception technologies, the user experiences they offered were similar in that they both owed much to the protocols of free-to-air broadcast television.

The basis for this distinction between mobile television's technologies and protocols is Lisa Gitelman's (2006) proposal that the term medium be understood as encompassing both technological instruments and the “vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions [. . .] which gather and adhere like a nebulous array around” them (p. 7). As defined by Gitelman, protocol is a flexible category encompassing a medium's uses, business models, the forms its content or messages take, the standards and regulations governing its implementation, and even ideas about its cultural meanings. Though protocols have a tendency to sediment and become inertial beneath the encrustations of common sense that surround them, they remain sensitive and dynamic. Protocols may change in response to technological developments, as when the introduction of a new technology prompts the reappraisal and revision of a medium's extant regulations. But they may likewise be influenced by a much wider range of “changeable social, economic, and material relationships” (p. 8), including the institutional practices of remediation described above. In its efforts to reform its own identity or reputation, a broadcaster, a mobile network operator, or any other institution may remediate the protocols of other media and other institutions. Protocols are in this respect intermedial, and register the shifting dynamics of power and status that play out in the interactions between media institutions.

The mobile television solutions explored by mobile communications companies illustrate the complex and unpredictable ways that media institutions remediate one another's protocols. For as greatly as mobile technologies have changed since US mobile network operators first began carrying television programming over their networks, mobile television's protocols have undergone equally dramatic transformations. The protocols that have so far taken shape around mobile television are schizophrenic and unstable, and remediate practices, forms, regulatory frameworks, and social and financial arrangements associated with broadcast and cable television, mobile telephony, and personal computers and the Internet.

The first services that used mobile networks to deliver television-like video content to US mobile phones debuted in 2003. That year, Sprint and AT&T Wireless began loading a selection of their top-of-the-line phones with software that allowed customers to access a rotating selection of about 100 on-demand video clips, many of which were sourced from broadcast television networks. Provenance notwithstanding, RealOne Mobile's video clips resembled Internet slide shows more than they did television. Due to the limited processing power of handsets and the bandwidth constraints of existing mobile networks, clips ran at between 1 and 4 frames per second (as opposed to television's 30 frames per second). Even then, similar to Internet video sites, RealOne Mobile's streams were prone to frequent buffering, pixilation, and losses of synchronization between their audio and video tracks.

If the poor picture quality of RealOne Mobile's television clips evoked the visual culture of the Internet, so too did many of the other protocols that coalesced around this and other mobile multimedia services in this period. RealOne Mobile was a mobile version of RealNetworks' RealOne GoldPass, a subscription-based multimedia service that delivered a similar selection of short television clips, as well as streaming music, radio stations, and movie trailers, via the Internet to personal computers. As RealOne Mobile was joined in the fledgling mobile television market by Verizon V Cast, ESPN Mobile, Amp'd Mobile, and Cingular Video, many of these services adopted the monthly subscription fees, clip-based content libraries, and on-demand delivery methods of Internet multimedia services. Institutional protocols were passed between Internet and mobile multimedia ventures as well – for instance, mobile television preserved the convention of third-party companies serving as aggregators of other distributors' programming. In the case of RealOne Mobile, RealNetworks acted as an intermediary between two very different types of distribution networks, licensing content from television networks and then subsequently processing and packaging that content for redistribution via mobile phone networks.⁶

The protocols that RealOne Mobile and other fledgling mobile television aggregation services inherited (or appropriated) from their Internet counterparts hybridized with the normative rules and default conditions of the US mobile communications industry. Until recently, the United States' major mobile companies ran their networks as “walled gardens,” placing restrictions upon the hardware and software their subscribers could use and the content they were permitted to access. The cornerstone of the walled garden was the subsidized handset. To entice prospective customers to enter into these “enclosures,” operators offered deep discounts on mobile phones. These discounts came with two major conditions: first, customers were required to commit to a contract of a specified duration (typically 24 months); and, second, network operators modified these subsidized phones so that they worked only on their networks.

Early mobile television services replicated this business model. Network operators made available a selection of subsidized multimedia handsets loaded with software that allowed them to receive television clips and other forms of multimedia content, but only from aggregators with whom operators had standing compacts. These restrictions allowed network operators to manage their subscribers' use of multimedia services, for instance by blocking access to the Internet and its bandwidth-intensive free video sites. They also meant that all transactions between mobile television viewers and aggregators were conducted within networks' walled gardens, putting network operators in positions to negotiate arrangements in which they would be paid by both parties.

What kinds of programming could subscribers watch after signing up for one of these “walled garden” services? Much of the video content available on mobile phones during this period was repurposed from broadcast and cable television. Apart from one service that delivered a selection of 12 streaming television channels with fixed schedules, most mobile multimedia packages were dominated by short television clips presented on an on-demand basis. The most common sources for these clips were heavily segmented television formats, including news, late-night talk shows, sketch comedy series, sports highlights, and entertainment reports (Dawson, 2011). For instance, Verizon V Cast debuted in 2005 with a programming lineup that included brief highlights from The Daily Show, Entertainment Tonight, and ESPN's Sportscenter. Go TV presented abridged versions of weekly episodes of ABC's Desperate Housewives and Alias, while Sprint Vue featured clips culled from a selection of current and classic CBS programs, including CSI and I Love Lucy (Dawson, 2011). Though there was a great deal of talk in this period about creating short-form programming geared specifically to the small screens and limited processing power of mobile handsets, original content – that is, content not recycled from television – was scarce (Dawson, 2007). Rare exceptions included made-for-mobile spinoffs of popular prime-time television series: for example, Verizon licensed a series of minute-long “mobisodes” based on the Fox drama 24 for its V Cast service, while Cingular Video included a premium HBO “channel” featuring an exclusive Entourage miniseries.

Though most of the programming available from these services was sourced directly from broadcast and basic cable television networks, or else based on popular television franchises, the most direct influence on this programming's presentation remained the protocols of early Internet multimedia services. By 2005, however, these protocols were themselves being overhauled, with the subscription-based models pioneered in the late 1990s by aggregators such as RealNetworks giving way to the “Web 2.0” model exemplified by the video-sharing website YouTube. In contrast to aggregators like RealOne GoldPass, which sourced content directly from television networks, record labels, and movie studios, YouTube operated a free video hosting service that initially relied exclusively on site visitors (and creative interpretations of “safe harbor” copyright exemptions) for content. Within a rather short period of time YouTube was joined in the web video marketplace by a number of startups that also combined free hosting services with social networking platforms. Like YouTube, these sites were free, device-and platform-agnostic, and encouraged user participation via uploading, tagging, commenting, embedding, and sharing features.

The explosive growth of YouTube and its competitors inspired an avalanche of press coverage, with some contemporary commentators identifying these sites as a harbinger of an entertainment “snacking” trend that would transform how popular media was made, distributed, and consumed (Miller, 2007). Mobile network operators were eager to capitalize on this trend, and in advertisements and other publicity materials positioned the mobile phone as the ideal “snacking” platform. They also pursued partnerships with video hosting websites: in 2006 Verizon Wireless signed a deal with YouTube granting it exclusive rights to distribute clips from the site via its V Cast multimedia service. But in keeping with the mobile industry's “walled garden” business model, Verizon made only a curated selection of YouTube's clips available to its subscribers. Though Verizon Wireless and other mobile network operators dabbled in the snack marketplace, most stopped well short of allowing their subscribers to venture outside of their “walled gardens” to graze at the Internet's all-you-can-eat video buffet. Ultimately, mobile network operators were reluctant to embrace the changes Internet video's protocols underwent during this period, in part because the “openness” these protocols aspired to was so incongruous with the concept of the “walled garden.”

As YouTube's Web 2.0 model achieved hegemonic status online, mobile network operators found new templates for the protocols of their mobile television services in “old” media. From 2007 onward, mobile network operators began phasing out clip-based mobile television services' on-demand protocols in favor of ones that more closely resembled those of free-to-air broadcast television. On-demand services transmitted separate signals to each individual viewer over mobile networks using a method known as “unicasting.” By contrast, the second wave of mobile television technologies employed a “multicasting” distribution model to simultaneously transmit a selection of between 8 and 14 preprogrammed linear channels that, depending on the network, might include NBC, Fox News, Adult Swim, Nickelodeon, and the Disney Channel. Although these services' daily schedules were adjusted to reflect mobile television's peak viewing times – the morning and afternoon rush hours – the programming lineups they offered were for the most part identical to those airing on broadcast and cable television.

Technical dilemmas posed by clip-based mobile television were a major motivating factor behind the development of multicasting technologies. For although mobile television services' subscriber numbers remained well beneath telecommunications analysts' sunny projections, it soon became apparent that existing mobile networks were not up to the task of delivering television programming to large audiences on a unicast basis. Within two years of the launch of unicast mobile television, analysts were warning that even a modest bump in viewing could overwhelm the nation's mobile networks (Reardon, 2005). The troubles experienced by the South Korean mobile network operator SK Telecom provided a preview of what might be in store if these projections panned out. In 2002 SK Telecom had been amongst the first mobile network operators in the world to offer a mobile television service. But within a year of the service's launch, the stress that it placed on SK Telecom's 3G network had grown so great that the carrier was required to build a special multicasting network just to handle its mobile television traffic. With many analysts and journalists predicting a similar fate for US operators, mobile telecommunications set out in search of alternatives to unicast mobile television.

The bandwidth crunch forecasted by telecommunications analysts never materialized. In fact, in the United States demand for mobile multimedia services lagged far behind analysts' projections, and many services launched between 2003 and 2007 struggled to attract viewers.⁷ Still, the prospect that mobile television would sometime in the future overwhelm operators' 3G networks continued to influence long-term planning in the mobile telecommunications sector. US mobile network operators explored a number of potential multicasting solutions in this period before the nation's two largest networks, Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility, settled on Qualcomm's MediaFLO. They also began acquiring additional spectrum as it became available. Between 2003 and 2008, Qualcomm spent $683 million to acquire UHF spectrum for MediaFLO and other unspecified future mobile services. In 2007, AT&T purchased a nearby band of frequencies for $2.5 billion, prompting rumors that it would launch its own competing mobile multicasting service in the UHF band. The following year, AT&T spent an additional $6.64 billion, and Verizon $9.63 billion, to purchase additional UHF channels that had been cleared by the DTV conversion. Even these acquisitions, however, did not satisfy mobile network operators' hunger for spectrum. Citing forecasts that demand for mobile television and other data-intensive multimedia services would in fact eventually spike, the mobile communications industry lobby, the CTIA, warned policymakers and the general public that the United States was on the cusp of a spectrum “crisis” that would cripple mobile networks and derail the nation's economy. To avert this crisis, the CTIA petitioned the FCC to free up at least 800 MHz of spectrum for use by mobile companies, preferably from the frequencies allocated to television broadcasting.

In making the case for the transfer of additional spectrum from broadcasters to mobile network operators, the CTIA repeatedly returned to arguments about the cultural and economic obsolescence of the local stations that were this spectrum's incumbent occupants. Together with allies that included the consumer electronics industry lobby, the CTIA sponsored a massive public relations campaign in the second half of the 2000s to portray broadcasting as an undesirable use of the nation's radio spectrum. The mobile industry lobby aligned itself with proponents of radical spectrum reform in making the case that broadcasting was a medium without a future, and moreover that it constituted a roadblock on the nation's path to technological and economic progress. By continuing to grant broadcasters free licenses to use that spectrum as they pleased, the United States placed itself at risk of falling behind other countries in terms of its development and adoption of innovative wireless technologies. The CTIA claimed, on behalf of mobile network operators, the local broadcasting stations' traditional mantle as trustees of the public interest, linking the expansion of wireless networks to larger national priorities. According to the CTIA's lobbying campaigns, the reallocation of spectrum from television to wireless telecommunications would help balance the federal budget, reestablish the United States' global leadership in the telecommunications and high-tech sectors, and extend access to broadband Internet to underserved populations and regions.⁸

The tone of the CTIA's campaign for spectrum reform cut a sharp contrast to the advertising campaigns that the organization's members conducted during this period. For at the very same time that the mobile industry lobby portrayed broadcasting as irrelevant and broadcasters as expendable, mobile network operators promoted multicasting as a faithful facsimile of broadcasting. Then again, despite their incongruous tones, mobile network operators' determined efforts to establish multicasting's identity with broadcasting were otherwise consonant with the mobile industry lobby's claims on broadcast television's status and spectrum. Mobile television's promotional materials endorsed broadcasting's protocols, but only within the context of touting the mobile industry's ability to remediate them. In effect, they invited US consumers to imagine a future in which something akin to broadcasting would survive, but broadcasters most certainly would not.

“Real TV, Now on Your Phone”

Exemplary of mobile network operators' efforts to affiliate multicasting with broadcasting is a succinct slogan that appeared in some of the advertisements for Verizon Wireless's V Cast Mobile TV: “Real TV, now on your phone.” The press release that announced V Cast Mobile TV's 2007 launch eliminated any confusion about what Verizon meant by “real TV” at its outset:

The “real TV” conjured up by this string of questions was television that was watched – and shared – with others. It was both the source and the subject of communal experiences and feelings of togetherness that cemented the bonds of the nuclear and the national family. Above all, “real TV” was live television, enjoyed in the moment of its transmission, as opposed to time shifted, downloaded, or watched on DVD. In this respect, it was strikingly dissimilar from the on-demand model of television that drew a large number of converts in this period, especially amongst mobile television's target market of tech-savvy early adopters. At a moment when companies such as TiVo, Apple, and Google were dominating conversations about the future of television with their promises that their products would liberate viewers from the “tyranny” of broadcasting's unforgiving timetables (Boddy, 2004; Carlson, 2006), Verizon presented V Cast as a throwback to television's high network era.⁹

It is significant that each of the examples alluded to by the questions that began Verizon's press release were of live “media events” (Dayan & Katz, 1992), broadcasts that have historically been central to both the ideology and the political economy of free-to-air broadcasting. On numerous occasions throughout the twentieth century US broadcasters defused challenges to the hegemony of the free-to-air network model by recapitulating the argument that broadcast networks' ability to simultaneously address the entirety of the United States' geographically dispersed population was critical to the maintenance of national cohesion (Boddy, 2004, pp. 101–102). Though decades have passed since broadcasters were the only institutions that possessed this capability, the importance of media events to the broadcast industry has grown as the national networks' cumulative share of the television audience has declined. Broadcast coverage of major sporting events, national elections, and annual award shows continues to attract large audiences, generating significant advertising revenues and publicity for broadcasters. Equally importantly, these moments generate goodwill toward broadcasting itself. Live coverage of media events celebrates in explicit and implicit ways the institutions and the protocols of broadcasting. It invites audiences to remember what broadcasting was, and by extension makes the case that broadcasting can continue to play its nation-building and binding role in a digital age.

The publicity materials that introduced mobile multicasting to US consumers in this period in many instances made explicit appeals to consumers' memories of television's “touchstone moments,” as well as to television's former status as the nation's common medium. They did so in tribute to television's history, but also in order to position the mobile phone as a worthy, and in fact superior, successor. Qualcomm, for instance, produced a minute-long commercial that doubled as an advertisement for MediaFLO and a tribute to live television. Appropriately enough, the spot aired during what was at the time the most-watched live broadcast in US history: the 2010 Super Bowl. The commercial began with a sequence of black-and-white snapshots of television's infancy, including an Indian Head test card, a roof-mounted antenna, twisting bobbysoxers, Howdy Doody. It then segued into a rapid-fire montage of some of the most iconic moments in the medium's history. In between brief clips of civil rights marches, the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, Neil Armstrong's moon walk, the toppling of the Berlin Wall, and the wreckage of the World Trade Center, a series of on-screen graphics invited the audience to recall their own experiences of these “touchstone moments.” “Where were you then?” the text asked. “Where will you be?” The montage climaxed with footage of the celebrations that followed the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. Over a shot of a waving US flag appeared the words “Don't miss a moment.” The commercial ended on a clever trick shot: the footage on the screen rapidly pulled backward away from the viewer, revealing that it was in fact a video playing on the screen of a mobile device (SPOTBOWL, 2010).

Much like the “living timeline” described at this chapter's outset, Qualcomm's Super Bowl commercial retraced television's path from the black-and-white sets of its broadcast past to the ultra-portable devices of its digital future. The layout of LG's television museum had both literally and figuratively positioned the mobile handset at the culmination of television's historical trajectory. Qualcomm's rendering of television history went even further toward the conflation of convergence with progress, claiming parallels between the medium's technological evolution and the narrative of social progress the commercial's iconic footage conveyed. These parallels were underscored by the commercial's montage, which began with images of black-and-white television sets, and black-and-white television images of African American civil rights protesters being attacked with fire hoses, and concluded with vibrant high-definition images of the celebration of the election of the nation's first African American president. It was furthermore reinforced by its soundtrack, which featured a remix of The Who's “My Generation” by the hip-hop star will.i.am. Television and the nation were together undergoing a remix of sorts, as embodied by a youthful president, innovative technologies, and a mobile populace. Put another way, both were remediated by the mobile phone.

Conclusion

The US broadcast industry's answer to MediaFLO – and to the spectrum reform campaigns that gained momentum in the 2000s – made its belated debut in January 2010 at the annual convention of the global consumer electronics industry. That year the convention featured a special “Mobile DTV TechZone” where a group of exhibitors demonstrated prototypes of mobile devices capable of receiving signals transmitted using broadcasters' mobile DTV standard, which had been finalized in late 2009. In remarks delivered at mobile DTV's official launch event, NAB chief executive Gordon Smith identified local programming (which remained absent from MediaFLO systems) as mobile DTV's most important and appealing application. Smith assured his audience that broadcasters would capitalize on this innovation to establish themselves as the leaders in the delivery of “local, live broadcast signals” to all varieties of mobile devices. “That's the future,” Smith informed the reception's attendees, “and it includes broadcasters” (Dickson, 2010).

Throughout 2010 broadcasting groups geared up for a mobile multicasting standards war that would pit mobile DTV against MediaFLO. This war, however, was not to be. In December 2010, Qualcomm announced that it was pulling out of the mobile television business. The following March, Qualcomm sold off the MediaFLO system's spectrum to AT&T for $1.925 billion (Hibberd, 2010). Less than four years after its launch, the technology LG had once called “the future of television” had returned to the vapor.

With the demise of LG's industry standard multicasting solution, clashes between the mobile communications and broadcast industries migrated from mobile television to other fronts. By 2010, mobile network operators had begun to shift their priorities from developing new multimedia services capable of driving up their subscribers' data usage to coping with the strain mobile email and web browsing were placing on their networks. Broadcasters, meanwhile, gained new ammunition with which to defend themselves against accusations of irrelevance, as the popular press became increasingly enamored with the practice (or, more accurately, the premise) of “cord-cutting,” or replacing costly cable or satellite television subscriptions with a combination of over-the-air DTV and on-demand Internet video-streaming video services. Though studies suggested that it would be years before cord-cutting had a significant impact on the US television marketplace (Kafka, 2011), the positive media coverage the practice received provided free-to-air broadcasters with a badly needed public relations boost. The NAB capitalized on this growing interest in DTV in public relations and lobbying campaigns that touted the affordability, reliability, and local orientation of broadcast television (Lieberman, 2011).

Clearly, the mobile communications broadcasting industries no longer require competing mobile television vaporware standards to have a reason for a row. In all likelihood, they never did. With the benefit of only a few years of hindsight it is beginning to become apparent that mobile television was for broadcasters and mobile companies a proxy battle in the much larger war over spectrum and policy concessions. To recognize that the real source of conflict between these adversaries laid elsewhere is not to suggest that mobile television was inconsequential to either industry. It is instead a way of emphasizing that recent confrontations over mobile television have taken place within the context of a much longer history of transactions between media and telecommunications companies.

Media studies provides a rich vocabulary for describing these transactions. It is thus possible to speak of the “convergence” of the telecommunications and broadcast industries' infrastructures and business models (Jenkins, 2006); of a legacy of “jurisdictional conflicts” between the two industries that stretches back at least as far as the confrontations between RCA and AT&T over control of commercial radio broadcasting in the 1920s (Altman, 2005); or of the ways in which mobile companies and broadcasters “remediate” aspects of each other's institutional cultures (Bolter & Grusin, 2000). The theoretical models associated with these terms all display strong temporal biases, and address in their own ways the relationships between the old and the new, the residual and the emergent, and the anachronistic and the cutting edge. But as the case of mobile television demonstrates, the relationships between media and media industries may also be understood as matters of proximity and distance. Convergence, conflict, and remediation occur when the protocols that dictate the arrangements of literal and metaphoric spaces are altered in ways that breach recognized boundaries and bring formerly separate institutions into contact with one another. It is within the confines of these close quarters that the futures of our media are determined.

NOTES

1 In a web video produced to promote the event, LG made this argument even more explicitly, declaring the mobile television “the future of TV” (Fathom4, 2007).

2 AT&T Mobility is the post-2007 name of the entity formed through the merger of the Cingular Wireless and AT&T Wireless networks. In this chapter I refer to this company as AT&T Mobility, except in those instances where I refer specifically to one of the two pre-merger companies.

3 The source of this quote is media industry analyst Christopher Kent, quoted in Waldman (2008).

4 Amongst the proponents of radical spectrum reforms were George Keyworth of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, legal scholar and FCC advisor Stuart Benjamin, and Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation.

5 At the conclusion of these investigations, the FCC recommended transferring 500 MHz of spectrum immediately, and an additional 300 MHz in the future, from broadcasting to mobile communications (FCC, 2010, pp. 75–79). To clear broadcasters from this spectrum, the FCC proposed a number of measures, ranging from “repacking” television into a different portion of the radio spectrum, reducing the amount of spectrum assigned to each broadcaster, and giving local broadcast stations the option of forfeiting their channels in exchange for a portion of the proceeds they generated at auction.

6 In addition to RealNetworks, other aggregators that began operating mobile television services in this period included the startups Go TV and MobiTV.

7 In 2007, the year of MediaFLO's launch, the clip-based unicasters Mobile ESPN and Amp'd Mobile both suspended their operations due to inadequate subscriber numbers.

8 See CTIA's Position Papers at its “Advocacy” webpage: http://www.ctia.org/advocacy/position_papers/

9 Though Verizon's conception of “real TV” as a source of communal experiences resonated deeply with the structuring ideologies of the US model of broadcasting, Orgad (2009 p. 202) identifies a similar trope within international mobile television advertisements.

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