Chapter 14

Writing for Mobile Media

The mobile device originated as a cellular phone made to connect to a new cellular wireless network and through it to the existing copper wire voice network. As all the world knows, this portable device has evolved into a multimedia, multifunction digital platform now converging with the portable computer and television. Companies are innovating and jockeying to find the business model to exploit the preferences of the public that uses cell phones and mobile media. By the time a fourth edition of this book might go to press, many uncertainties of the present moment will have become clear. But we can’t wait, because the rate of change in Internet and mobile media broadband is accelerating as we write.

The metamorphosis of the cell phone into a multimedia mobile platform raises interesting questions about the video content that is delivered to subscribers. Are traditional linear media simply being redistributed over a new channel? Redistributing existing TV series on a mobile platform does not change the narrative style or the scriptwriting because clearly the product was already preconceived for broadcast television. Or does the design of this new mobile platform and the sociology of its users point to new formats unique to the medium? If the latter, then writers need to think about how they are going to tell stories that exploit mobile formats. We can extrapolate from early and current experiments in content for mobile media to plot the curve into the near term future. So we need to turn to examples of unique content and investigate how they modify visual narrative for mobile platforms. Are mobile platforms just another channel for delivery of existing content or a new medium with unique content that demands a new kind of writing? The nascent signs of content unique to mobile platforms suggest there is a new kind of content and therefore a new kind of writing and producing specific to mobile platforms. If the use of mobile media platforms is going to drive the demand for new and original content, content providers will turn to writers for their proven narrative skills. However, writers will have to think differently.

Antecedents

With the birth of television and its flowering post World War II, the need for content was ferocious. The lineup had to be filled. Content providers, who were the networks, basically taped the content of radio shows that were familiar—soaps, quiz shows, comedians, and variety shows. Then as the potential of the television medium became better understood, producers invented content unique to television from series to miniseries, talk shows, and most recently reality television. Going from an audio medium to a video medium is a radical shift, whereas going from one visual medium to another form of visual medium with a change in screen size and mode of access is less so. We can draw a parallel to the difference between movies and television. The size of the television screen, the viewing context in the living room, and the multiplicity of channels offered a different form of visual entertainment than movies. Initially, they were deadly rivals. Film studios forbade their contract stars to appear on television and would not allow movies to be shown on television. Movies set themselves apart by turning to color cinematography and new widescreen formats that prevail to this day and even 3-D formats (now reemerging), while television was stuck with a black-and-white image, a small screen, and the academy ratio of the 4:3 screen format. Even though television screens grew in size, and the quality of the video and audio improved and eventually became digital high definition, there was, and still is, a difference between television and movies.

Movies narrate more by means of action and setting, whereas television series resort to more dialogue often in series sets that become familiar spaces to the audience—the bar in Cheers, the living room in Married with Children, Gerry’s apartment in Seinfeld, the couch in Friends, the office set in The Office, or the emergency room in ER. There is a different kind of writing and thinking that lies behind each medium. Even though films can be shown on television, seeing them on the small screen interrupted by commercials is not the same experience. By the same token, you could argue that seeing episodes of television series through mobile broadband or on a cell phone by subscription to a service provided by the carrier is not the equivalent of viewing content written and produced expressly for mobile platforms. The length, the pace, the screen size, the viewing context—all of these elements, once again, impact on the meta-writing and the kind of storytelling that engages a new sensibility in the audience. The fact is that it has already begun. A new word has been added to the lexicon. The Internet viewing experience spawned the word webisode to mean a segment tailor made for streaming on the web. Now we have the new term—mobisode™.¹ It is a short serial form of narrative uniquely adapted to the cell phone or mobile platform. So there is no question that new media formats have begun to emerge. The question is, what makes them different and how might they develop? Another interesting parallel that comes to mind is the change in content and readership styles that emerged with the flourishing of newspapers when compared to books. Books involve long sessions of reading that must be repeated over days and sometimes weeks to absorb the content. Newspapers, evolving from broadsheets and newsletters, accommodate short sessions of reading and are made up of multiple parallel segments of unconnected content. Newspapers are portable and fill in time while riding on a bus, train, or a plane. Likewise, cell phones are portable and serve both functional and spontaneous entertainment needs in unpredictable intervals between activities. The advent of the comic strip in the late nineteenth century as a new form of quick self-contained or serial narrative made sense in the context of the daily, expendable nature of newspaper content and the conditions under which newspapers were read. Comic strips are still going strong well more than 100 years later. Another change has occurred with the evolution of interactive editions of newspapers that are published on websites. Context and use alter the way content works. Prose narrative has become multi- media and in many ways reconceived to exploit the hyperlinks across the World Wide Web and the interactive potential of the computer through which it is delivered.

Mobile phone content could be seen as video strips, a video form of comic strip that is short, entertaining, and apt for the viewing device. For newspapers, successful comic strips built audiences, readership, and cult followings. The video strip, or mobisode™, or other kinds of content for mobile devices such as games keep the user on the channel and paying for data or time, and this type of content also sells other features. It might be like an electronic version of newspapers, attracting readers with the “funnies” who then go on to read other parts of the newspaper and see the ads.

Traditional prose storytelling has consisted of the short story and the novel. In the nineteenth century, authors like Dickens in Britain and Melville in America serialized novels in magazines. In recent years, something called flash fiction has emerged. It tells a story in 500 words or less. Younger generations have less time and less inclination to read. These short narratives for magazines and websites alter the dynamics of storytelling. Many have heard of the haiku, a Japanese 17-syllable poem that captures a fleeting but essential sentiment or perception. We see 15- and 20-second television advertising spots that are highly compressed forms of visual statement. This has evolved as a narrative form that has taught audiences to read visual messages in condensed, rapid, staccato narratives that depend on stripping editing down to the absolute bare minimum for visual comprehension. This often involves shots cut to fractions of a second, a matter of frames, accelerating the pace of visual narrative. Audiences, habituated since childhood from thousands of hours of watching television, have altered their response time, sense of visual literacy, and expectations. Watch a few older movies from the black-and-white era, and you will see the change in pace!

Technical Antecedents

My first cell phone was a monster with a separate battery pack you had to carry around that weighed a ton. It was simply a portable phone that connected to the wireless network of one of the carriers. What began as a portable, wireless apparatus designed initially to connect to a voice network has evolved over a dozen years into a multifunction device that uses the available networks in multiple ways. The cellular phone has metamorphosed into the iPhone, the Palm Pre, the Blackberry, and other phones with operating systems that enable burgeoning numbers of downloadable apps. The speed and complexity of this evolution flabbergasts even those business professionals who expect technological development at a rapid pace. The iPhone has probably driven this evolution because it has changed expectations of the design and functionality of a pocket-size mobile platform. This has made it the leader in sales volume and compelled other manufacturers to innovate in their design and functionality. The question now is whether the Apple propriety operating system, exclusive to its own device, will prevail over that of other cell phones whose functionality is enabled by transferable operating systems like Android and Palm Pre that will open up the apps that developers can write. It will be difficult to catch up with the iPhone apps lead. Perhaps it will be a rerun of the Apple versus PC marketing contest in which Apple led with its innovation of the graphical user interface but lost market share because the IBM PC was licensed to other enterprises to manufacture clones, which in turn brought the price down and increased the population of PC owners. When Microsoft Windows incorporated the graphical user interface in the operating system for cheaper PCs, that move eventually attracted developers to invest more time, energy, and money in more applications for PCs, which then became cheaper due to increased sales volume.

Although voice communications are still fundamental, text messaging or texting as it is now called, has taken on a huge importance as has the transmission of visual media, whether stills or video. Some portable digital phones already come with an FM radio chipset, which may well become standard now that the new Google phone Nexus One announced for 2010 will incorporate an FM chip- set.² Increasing numbers of models can connect to the Internet to read and send email and browse websites. Keyboards, physical or virtual, have become more important features of cell phones. Yawn! I know all this, you say. What is fairly new at this writing is the prospect of mobile TV.

Let’s begin with standards. There are basically five ways to access video on a mobile platform. The carrier provides a service like Verizon’s VCast, to which you subscribe for its content, somewhat like you might subscribe to a premium cable channel. Several independent content producers are positioned to service the carriers. Only subscribers to the carrier’s network can access this content where the carrier’s signal is available. Each carrier has its own video entertainment stream.

Any device that can access the web through any carrier’s network and has a browser can open the video stream of a broadcaster’s website or YouTube or Hulu. However, a lot of video requires a Flash player and for this and other technical reasons will not play on every cell phone. The strength of the signal and traffic on carriers’ circuits will also affect this viewing experience. There is also a question of cost to the user paying for the data stream over significant stretches of time. We’ll call this the second way.

The third way is not yet fully operational. It is digital television broadcast from an antenna to any device that has the receiver for the broadcast signal built into its chipset and is within range of the transmitter. This method exists and works in a number of mobile devices for FM radio. Because all broadcast stations are local, mobile TV will be determined by your physical location. When you buy a television set, you don’t buy a TV set that will work in Seattle as opposed to one that will work in New York; you expect it to work anywhere in the country. If you move from Seattle to New York or vice versa, you know the television set you take with you will work in the new location. Likewise, the mobile platform that has the digital TV receiver built in will work wherever you are in range of a transmitter. It will be like carrying a television set around with you except that this one fits into your pocket or perhaps on your wrist. Who has not wondered when the wristwatch video featured in the Dick Tracy comic strips of our youth will become a reality?

Open Mobile Video Coalition³ (OMVC) is a group of some 800 stations that have been trying to establish a mobile digital television (DTV) standard enabling the “DTV Triple Play”—a multiplex of high-definition, standard-definition, and mobile DTV program streams. Until the standard was fixed, manufacturers of mobile devices could not know what chip set to put in the phone to receive the signal. The challenges are technical, legal, and content driven. Meanwhile, 11 companies have also filed patent disclosure statements with the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). It raises a question about the cost for open access.⁴ The ATSC, the U.S. digital TV standards body, ratified the ATSC-Mobile/Handheld (ATSC-M/H)⁵ while this manuscript was in copyedit stage. This will pave the way for consumer mobile platforms such as cell phones, netbooks, and DVD players incorporating the receiver chip set to show up on retail shelves in 2010. Some 70 stations have already committed to begin mobile DTV broadcasts in 2009.⁶ The DTV signal comprises not only the television content but parallel packets of information that allow device executable functions that can map location and possibly open up a wholly new form of advertising similar to Internet contextual banners and messages.

There is really a fourth way hidden in the first. Qualcomm’s MediaFLO division is building its own nationwide network using the old bandwidth of UHF channel 55, which it bought at auction, to broadcast its own DTV signal. This means that phones must have the Qualcomm receiver chip built in to the device to receive its network signal, and that requires a relationship with a carrier and its locked phones. Both AT&T and Verizon have a relationship with this company to bring video content to their subscribers.⁷ Qualcomm is making a huge bet that this network based on its chip set will be superior to broadcast and superior to streaming websites through a phone’s Internet connection. The carrier benefits by not having the video stream occupy huge chunks of its bandwidth. However, MediaFLO doesn’t have the local content. There is a loose parallel between this and satellite radio, which is a uniform national signal but does not have any of the local content that terrestrial radio stations have and that television stations do in each market. This changes the way advertising can work and changes the business model. Producers like GoTV Networks provide original content and programming to carriers that want to add value to the range of content accessible on their network. Their servers are accessed through the carrier network and programming is managed at their end. They can manage and program the content in real-time response to user demand.

The fifth way involves the manufacturers of mobile devices like Ericcson, Nokia, and Motorola building into their product a capability to receive a dedicated video stream. Even though the device must use a carrier’s network to do so, the access to the content now becomes device specific. Motorola has contracted with Blockbuster to stream movies to new feature-rich cell phones. The difference between this and the fourth way described earlier rests on exclusivity tied to the hardware. The fourth way is more like a cable channel that may or may not be in the bundle your cable provider offers, or at least be part of a premium package that increases your subscription cost. Christy Wyatt, vice president of software platforms at Motorola, said, “Mobile video entertainment is exploding, as consumers are demanding the widest selection of content: the movies they love in their living room and on their PC, now also available on their mobile phone, while on the go.”⁸ Ericsson has a contract with Sprint to manage its network. Its new CEO Hans Vestberg sees mobile broadband becoming predominant in the future as the number of mobile broadband subscribers grows (an 84 percent increase in 2008) with unpredictable implications for the shape of mobile media and what business model will work.⁹

This initiative by mobile device manufacturers to make money from content, not just from making the mobile platforms, begs a question. Which service, which channel, or which form of access to entertainment content will the public prefer? The business model for radio and television, and cable for that matter, is well understood. Not so for mobile media! Revenue can accrue to the provider either by subscription, somewhat like cable, or by selling ads around content or in preroll while providing the content free. The business model is in interactive relationship to the behavior of its users and subscribers. What do they want? What are they willing to pay for? And how do they use their mobile devices? Is the revenue in the network provider’s data stream or in the content provider, and what is their relationship?

Video and Cell Phone Use

The question of what will shape cell phone content and hence the question of how content and the writing for that content may differ from traditional media rests on understanding some technological issues and sociological issues of user behavior. To plot the curve into the future, we need to understand the demographic of users and more particularly how this demographic uses these ever-more- versatile mobile platforms. The Boston Globe reported that landline phones are being replaced by cell phones: “18 percent in cell-only households compares with 16 percent in the second half of 2007, and just 7 percent in the first half of 2005. Leading the way are households made up of unrelated adults, such as roommates or unmarried couples. Sixty-three percent of such households only have cellphones. About one-third of renters and about the same number of people under age 30 live in homes with only cells. About a quarter of low-income people also have [sic] only wireless phones, nearly double the proportion of higher-earning people.”¹⁰

Clearly, a change in viewing habits and behavior derives from new options furnished by the mobile platform. Data gathered by media tracking organizations suggests certain changes. The Wall Street Journal¹¹ reported some key facts gathered by Nielson that even though traditional linear television is still the most popular means for viewing video content, habits are in transition.

The number of users and the time spent watching each of the media screens rose. The number of viewers watching video on mobile devices increased the most. In the fourth quarter of 2008, some 11 million people viewed content on mobile media. Larger numbers viewed DVR programming and Internet video viewing increased.

The Nielson data show that the average length of viewing on a mobile phone is longer than for watching on the Internet. In the first three months of 2009, according to Nielson, about 13 million people watched video on their cell phones, about 6 percent of all mobile subscribers—a 50 percent increase over the year before.¹² This is confirmed by Transpera, the largest mobile video ad-network in the United States, which anticipates increased ad revenue with increasing audience numbers.¹³ Forbes, com reports that the U.S. mobile TV broadcasting market, subscription based and advertising funded, was estimated at $200 million in 2008. It is expected to jump 50 percent in 2009. Advertising across all mobile platforms, including mobile display and short messaging, grew 35 percent to $648 million in 2008.¹⁴ All these data are telling us that there is a growing audience of mobile phone users and a growing revenue stream even if the exact business model is yet to be defined. A parallel trend in the period 2008/2009 has been the decline in television viewing and advertising revenue and the gain in web-based audiences and revenue.

At the National Association of Broadcasters convention on April 22,2009, at the Mobile Entertainment Summit on a panel organized to discuss “Mobile, TV and Online: Successful Cross-Platform Strategies,” Glenn Reitmeier, vice president of technology standards policy and strategy at NBC Universal and chair of the Advanced Television Systems Committee overseeing the mobile DTV standard, said that broadcasters have every reason to work with mobile operators because wireless is critical to the industry’s future. The industry is trying to figure out what the mobile TV business really is. The video entertainment market has become fractured and thus affected advertising revenues. Most commentators in the industry seem to agree the future is going to be determined by an audience that will want to watch anything they choose on a platform of their choice and at a time of their choosing. The ability to deliver on-demand content to mobile viewers has to be incorporated into broadcasting.¹⁵ Panelists posed the question we want to ask, namely, what is going to be the “nature of that content (long form versus short form)” and how is it going to be “delivered (streaming versus downloading).” Carriers and broadcasters are trying to figure out how to get as much content to users on screens of varying sizes. Payment models could include free over-the-air, subscription-based, and pay-as-you-go services. Reitmeier thought it unwise to project a business model onto a device and to expect several business models to evolve.¹⁶

The business model will succeed or fail with the assent of the mobile user public. QuickPlay Media, a Toronto-based provider of mobile TV and video services, surveyed 1000 mobile users between the ages of 18 and 25 and found that the primary reason the respondents have shunned mobile TV is the perceived cost; 51 percent said they would be willing to accept advertising if they got to watch for free.

The survey also revealed that “a quarter of mobile TV users say they watch between daily activities, 16 percent while in transit (on a bus, for instance) and 11 percent while waiting in line.”¹⁷

The mobile phone is portable, personal, and aggregates numerous functions such as voice communications, text messaging, calendars, alarms, still and video image capture, music, and (for cell phones with an operating system) hundreds of potential killer apps that facilitate life in a multitasking world such as conference calling and geopositioning. It could be that the immediate accessibility of the mobile phone will make it the viewing platform of choice. iPhones lead the way for devices that can download and store content, which means that the cell phone, if we should still call it that, can increasingly function as an offline viewer and as portable storage for media that can then be played back through laptops, desktops, and even television with USB inputs. So cellular phones now become satellites of our mothership platforms that duplicate functionality and furnish greater speed, power, and more apps. Will the cell phone be a storage device to carry content to plug into a larger screen for viewing, or will it be the viewing device itself? Although I crave the cinematic experience of the projected image, a whole new generation that cannot live without mobile phones doesn’t really care that much. Convenience, accessibility, and personalized viewing drive the next generation. We hear the term “snackable” media as denoting dispensable, instantly gratifying media content that is not just scaled down but maybe different in style and flavor. Technical quality and the size of the image may be less important than the program content and the fact that it is controllable and on demand. Most mobile phone users whip out the phone when they have downtime or nothing special to do, or even while they are otherwise occupied (for instance, in my classes). If the average viewing time is about minutes (see Nielson data above), it might be a clue as to the kind of content that will succeed on mobile platforms.

Historically, the idea of unique content for mobile platforms is relatively old. In fact, it predates the previous edition of this book, which gives pause for thought. Media technology often develops under the radar, and innovation is of necessity not mainstream but the province of early adopters. Fox Mobile Entertainment, a new division of News Corp., was commissioned to produce a new media serial for cell phone distribution by Verizon, which shared it subsequently with European Vodaphone, the world’s largest cellular phone carrier, to develop content for the 3G launch of Vodaphone’s services.¹⁸ The producer working for Twentieth Television and running the Foxlab at the time, Daniel Tibbets, was instrumental in putting together the first “mobisode™,” a term that Fox then registered as a trademark.¹⁹ Several such series were made before the Fox unit was closed down. The idea was probably ahead of its time and the technology in 2004/2005. Since then, bandwidth has increased, phone screens have become larger and switchable between portrait and landscape format according to the function desired with touch screen controls. Above all, battery life and efficiency have improved so that watching TV or video on a mobile phone is manageable. Fourth~generation(4G) networks already launched by Verizon, with other carriers close behind, offer speeds 5 to 10 times faster than 3G.²⁰ A competing network technology called WiMax promises similar speeds that, whatever the technology, could challenge DSL and cable broadband, while alternate parallel networks like Qualcomm’s Media Flo provide a mobile TV service of licensed, content from broadcast and cable channels. On March 1, 2007, Verizon launched VCAST TV incorporating the MediaFLO-spedfic technology, which, as noted earlier, is a separate signal that does not take up bandwidth on the voice and data networks. AT&T Mobility launched its MediaFLO service on May 4, 2008. Video and TV content on cell phones is here to stay and will grow its audience and hence its advertising and revenue.

Since this is a book about writing rather than technology or marketing, our interest must be in the content and in the writing behind that content. More particularly, our interest must be in innovative writing specific to mobile platforms. Redistributing existing TV series on a mobile platform does not change the narrative style and scriptwriting, because clearly the product was already preconceived for broadcast television. So we need to turn to the unique content and investigate how it modifies visual narrative for mobile platforms. If the use of mobile media platforms is going to drive the demand for new and original content, content providers will turn to writers for their proven narrative skills. However, writers will have to think differently.

Webisodes

Before mobisodes™, there were webisodes. Whereas “mobisode™” is trade marked, “webisode” is in the public domain and has been included as a new word in the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. As the name implies, webisodes were a new form of video content consisting of short serial episodes found on websites of successful television shows such as Battlestar Galactica. They are often preceded by pre-roll ads. In some ways, they could be seen as satellites to the network series or trailers to promote the full-length series on cable or network television. The website for The Office offers webisodes and full-length episodes. However, certain webisodes exist in their own right, not as offshoots of conventional series. They take existing characters and add story not found in the broadcast version but scaled down in length and free of the three-act structure of the main series. Webisodes are not like outtakes that adorn DVDs where you get to see what the director and editor painstakingly removed from the final version. They are more like footnotes or excursions into tangential story matter that would interrupt the flow of a conventional television episode. There is another form of webisode to complicate matters, which is freestanding serial narrative that exists only on a website.

The Spot or thespot.com pioneered serialized fiction on a website, which ran from 1995 to 1997, and also pioneered a business model that included paid advertising banners and product placement in the interactive journals that characters wrote to engage the audience and get them to participate in the story by posting advice to characters on bulletin boards and emailing ideas. The “Spot” was a beach house in Santa Monica, California, that rented out rooms to cool 20-somethings. It flourished, attracted investment and then failed as a commercial venture. It was briefly revived by two of its producers in 2004 with an exclusive wireless connection to Sprint, but it has not survived.²¹ Thus, we find the first instance of a webisode migrating to mobile media.

Something to Be Desired, about a group of young people working as deejays in a Pittsburgh radio station, originated in 2003 as a dedicated entertainment website rather than a satellite of a network series. It is still going and represents a form of pure web-based serial narrative with episodes of 5 to 6 minutes duration. It shoots in real locations and has an ensemble cast. Its audience demographic must be roughly equivalent to the demographic of its characters. The website has interactive features that allow voting and rating of episodes and audience comments as well as a forum (www.some-thingtobedesired.com).

The Strand (www.strandvenice.com/), set in Venice, California, is another web original brought to life in 2005 by one of the creators of The Blair Witch Project (1999), whose success was very much due to the brilliant and pioneering viral marketing through its website. This webisode mingles actors and real characters and exploits an improvisational style. The audience cannot interact directly with the storyline but can explore background blogs and anecdotal details of production.²²

Bigger players are getting involved in the format with bigger budgets. Michael Eisner has produced Prom Queen with 90-second minisodes and a production cost of $3000 per segment.²³ It achieved an audience of 15 million, which led to a sequel, Prom Queen: Summer Heat. Let us note that the production costs are fractions of the cost of broadcast television. This is going to have implications for the kind of writing you can do. In chapter 1, we pointed out the production consequences that can arise from a few words on the script page. The concept has to be clean and simple and must allow some kind of narrative shorthand. Webisodes are often launched on social networks like MySpace and YouTube. Mainstream Hollywood producers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick’s Quarterlife premiered on MySpace. It was then picked up by NBC.²⁴ The consensus seems to be that this is a new media frontier, and nobody is certain how to monetize the webisode. The audience demographic is adolescents to young adults who have adopted social networks, send video over cell phones, and snack on media tidbits grabbed on the fly. It is viral and unpredictable. The webisode offers an alternative experience to traditional television. It innovates on-demand viewing, interactivity, and personal viewing—on a laptop or computer monitor rather than a living room TV. It is not interrupted by ads like traditional television. It is free of constraints imposed on broadcasters licensed by the Federal Communications Commission to use public airwaves. The innovative style, format, and content are noticeably different than network TV driven by ratings and hunger for advertising dollars tied to the size of audiences, which ultimately limits the kind of writing and subject matter that the viewer will see. The webisode invites unconventional writing and storylines that push the envelope of the medium. It is still going and will now be accessible to mobile platforms that can access the web. It is also migrating to mobile media and becoming part of the media mix available through cell phone carriers and mobile broadband.

The Mobisode™

What’s different? The abbreviated length and style of the webisode is transposed to a new network. The name “webisode” has embedded in it the association with the web, whereas the “mobisode™”suggests the new network and is a trademarked piece of terminology. In both, the writer is faced with extreme compression of storytelling techniques. However, the modisode™compresses narrative into a shorter and more elliptical style. Dialogue takes screen time. Visual narration becomes key. Think back to the dialogue balloons of comic strips and their relation to picture. There is a movement toward downsizing and compression. As life speeds up, there is less time to watch and to read. The comic strip really invented the EXTREME CLOSE UP and established key frame narration as a way to tell a story. In mobile media minisodes (to coin another phrase), it is almost as if the key frame of a storyboard becomes the program. The storyboard is, after all, a kind of comic strip of a full-motion linear narrative. Whereas the writing formats for games and interactive media are almost impossible to tie down, the script format for mobile media follows the linear media script for film and television. Do they differ in the meta-writing or conception that responds to the new qualities of this new medium? That is the question. To answer it, let us turn to a pioneering mobisode™.

Daniel Tibbets produced Love and Hateand Sunset Hotel, which were the original mobisodes™ for Fox Mobile entertainment. Love and Hateand, later, the existing series 24 were re-edited for mobile streaming, but Sunset Hotelwas scripted specifically as mobile content by Jana Veverka. Daniel Tibbets was quite clear at the time that cell phones invited a new kind of narrative content. Since then he has continued to develop unique mobile content as Executive Vice President and Studio Chief of GoTVNetworks.²⁵ Likewise, Jana Veverka was keenly aware that they were engaged in a new form of short narrative episode that had to tell a serial story in short episodes of 1 to 2 minutes for cell phone viewers.²⁶

Sunset Hotel consists of a storyline centered in a Los Angeles hotel. This recalls the California settings of The Strandand Something to Be Desired.The characters are straight out of film noir and crime/suspense genres with good guys and bad guys and an alienated demi-monde femme fatale. Genre provides an immediate frame of reference and a way for audiences to recognize characters and situations. It is probably fair to say that this mobile series does not resonate with any profound philosophy or solve any existential problems. The bad guy is Peter, the womanizing, manipulative manager/owner and pimp. We discover this world through Jack, the new bartender. Bianca is a sexy call girl who has a working relationship with Peter and a suite at the hotel. There is a maid, Robin, who makes up the rooms and her friend, Charlie, whose picture-taking cell phone is a key prop and plot device that exposes the culprit of the murder of a client staying in the hotel. Jack is attracted to Bianca, who falls in love with him. Jack’s sister, Emily, comes to visit him, and Peter uses her as a courier. The dialogue is mostly stylish and smart with comeback repartees and put-downs. While Peter is a classic domineering villain, Bianca is an unconventional free spirit who challenges Jack. Jack cannot deal with Bianca’s chosen profession as call girl until his baby sister gives him a lesson on love. In the end, Charlie saves Bianca from being set up by Peter. Emily’s relative purity and innocence are preserved, and Jack nearly misses out on Bianca because of his conventional scruples about returning love from a call girl. This is probably the most interesting part. What is characteristic of the writing and the storyline is its cart style and unresolved story issues. The premise is the story in the sense that we do not need complete third act resolution. Jack gets a one-way telephone message in the last episode of Bianca’s address. The use of cell phone ring tones makes the content use the medium it’s on to good effect. The mobisodes™ are like snapshots of a fictional world that seems familiar because of film noir and other suspense films.

Let’s take the episode in which Emily comments on Jack’s relationship with Bianca before she goes home:

In effect a scene becomes an episode. So the scene is like the key frame of a comic strip or a storyboard. If it is going to work in 1-minute mobisodes™, playing of genre helps, but conventional television writing has to be stripped down to essentials. Now the plot question has to resolve.

At this point we have to resolve whether Jack will have the courage of his love and whether Bianca will break her business arrangement with Peter.

Each episode is set up with a tag line, a boiled-down quintessence of the mobisode™, which is itself almost like a trailer for a bigger story. The storyline is like a series of pods or seeds that grow in the audience’s imagination. In Sunset Hotel, each episode is stitched together with a voice-over narrative somewhat like the nondialogue narrative of comic strips. The voice-over, which is not in the original script, provides a string to thread through the beads of the episodes. In the final cut, the voice-over of Jack reveals some interior dialogue. Sunset Hotel as shot and edited is perhaps shorter than the script. The shooting style evolves from television shooting, which relies on close ups and two-shots, but with an even tighter, more elliptical style.²⁷ The scenes are shot like key frames of a storyboard and tell the story through staccato scenes with minimal dialogue and a voice-over link. Body language in close-up becomes more critical in mobisodes™. Cutting style changes—jump cuts compress action. We have learned to read short cuts from the narrative compression of so many TV ads, which also influences the narrative style, shooting, and editing techniques.

One way to understand this new format is to realize that even though television episodes and even movies can be downloaded to cell phones or viewed on cell phones, the kind of content developed specifically for the cell phone format would never really work on television because our viewing expectations differ in the living room. GoTV Networks has developed other content, which you can sample on its website.²⁸ Segments are 2.5 to 4 minutes in length. Some of the content involves branded entertainment centered around strong product integration for corporate sponsors such as Tide for the hilarious mobile sitcom Crescent Heights. It is really the old soap opera model from radio.

It is interesting that this idea has been expanded in recent TV spots created from Desperate Housewives for Sprint, in which the carrier’s Palm Pre figures in the interaction of the characters and then becomes incorporated in the on air script later so that there is seamless connection between the advertisement and the content.²⁹ Product integration is the new commercialism of the mobile media age. It began in feature film production as a way of selling opportunities for companies to expose their products when necessary props had to be in shot. The art director or Property master could arbitrarily or accidentally choose one brand over another of a car, a soft drink, or other commonly used product. Or producers could mine the script for props that could be sold as product placement opportunities and defray the cost of production.

The next step that has emerged in the context of the unstructured, undefined, and shifting business models of the mobile media worlds is branded entertainment. This involves more than product placement. Branded entertainment allows advertisers to have products written into the storyline and even fabricate story moments that walk a fine line between a detour to feature a product and a product that happens to be a logical part of the story. This blending requires skillful writing and is going to be part of the webisode writer’s almanac. The advertiser then underwrites the production cost, somewhat similar to the old soap opera model and sponsored TV show. A defining characteristic of minisodes is their length and hence their production cost. A 1-minute minisode is not that much longer than a TV commercial spot. Moreover, the spots are an intrusion that the audience can reject or screen out either by means of technology or by simply leaving the screen to get a snack or go to the bathroom. Branded content makes the message unavoidable for any audience that is absorbed in the story.

Comedy is comedy in any format because it is funny. The quick comic sketches of Crescent Heights use well-understood comic devices but with a refreshing structural efficiency. The setting is an apartment complex with a typical laundry room that becomes the venue for several episodes and numerous encounters. Because Tide is the series sponsor, laundry themes are frequent. Here is an episode that exploits the comic hero as victim. Our hero has a temp job that terminates in disaster on the first day—in fact, morning, to be more accurate. While in the laundry room, Will tells it as a flashback to his roommate Eddie, from whom he borrowed a white shirt that he has ruined. A dragon office lady tells him that he must have coffee on his boss’s desk by 8:45 or face a ballistic rage and termination.

In minisodes, we skip dialogue and once the comic problem is set up we go straight to the sequence of physical comedy that ends with our hero knocking himself out in the kitchenette while trying to make the coffee. We see him on a stretcher, and then we understand why he is talking to his roommate with a bandage round his head. In mobile serials, we have to strip the action to its essence and allow the audience to fill in. It is not that this doesn’t happen in regular television or even movies; in mobile media, it drives the mobisode™. In a feature film, we see someone hail a taxi in the street. Maybe we let the character get in the cab. We cut to the character at his destination. We don’t want to watch a cab ride. It is a form of elision that shortens the action and relies on the audience’s powers of deduction to fill in what happened that is not shown on screen. Audiences like contributing their imaginations to interpret the story. In minisodes, the action is constantly stripped down to its bare minimum, in this case a slapstick disaster. The character Will goes to the coffee machine. He sees no filters. So he looks at the empty paper towel dispenser in frustration then seizes on toilet paper to make a coffee filter. He searches the cabinets for coffee. He finds a packet of coffee. In tearing it open, he spills the contents on the floor. Cut to Will scooping coffee off the floor and sticking it in the machine. Enter the dragon to drop the line: “I hope you didn’t add water. It’s connected.” She exits.

We then get the physical comedy, which is much more compressed and faster than the script might suggest (see the website).

Will turns to the machine, slips on the coffee grounds on the floor, then bangs his head and knocks himself out. Cut to exiting the building on a rolling gurney with all his office knick-knacks around him. A single scene implies the outcome of the previous scene and implies the missing scene of the emergency room. Time is also a character. Will is racing against the clock—a classic comic device. (See the website.)

Being Bailey is a teen drama for a key demographic distributed on AT&T, Sprint, and alltel that works like a kind of video diary of Bailey and her two best friends who are starting high school.³⁰ Information net- casting or mobile information content and even documentary are part of the mix. Imaginings, sponsored by Lexus through Saatchi and Saatchi, exploits the high-definition slo-mo action shot at 1000 frames per second. It is a gallery of the poetry of motion to be found in the movement of athletes and animals. It reminds one of the early silent movie days of the mutoscope and the kinetoscope, which offered short clips without storylines to be viewed for sensation. You watch the clips of Imaginings for pure visual sensation and, in this age, for its hi-tech multicam montage of extreme observation. This kind of content and the rest of the documentary coverage of music, news, and other events do not need narrative scripting.

The Writers Guild of America has recognized these new formats and that creative script writing is involved: “New Media includes all writing for the Internet and mobile devices as well as any new devices using these technologies as they evolve, or any other platform thought of as ‘new media’ by the industry as of the start of the 2008 MBA, which was February 13, 2008.”³¹ A scale of minimum fees has been negotiated that binds the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which refers to programs up to 2 minutes in length as sort of standard units, clearly recognizing the kind of minisode for mobile platforms that we have discussed in this chapter.³²

Writing Dos and Don’ts

How must writing change for the new market of mobile media scripts? Clearly, characters have to become easily recognizable. Genre will probably help, but that can mean capturing comic strip conventions of compressed narrative that leave intervening frames and action to the imagination. Shorter length means shorter dialogue because speech takes screen time. In this respect, movie dialogue might be the model. When dialogue plays, it must be hip, short, and to the point. Action trumps dialogue. Stories built around a product are going to sell to sponsors. The style must be contemporary and reach a primarily younger demographic below the age of 30. Single location settings will match the limited production budgets.

Conclusion

Enough evidence exists to warrant the prediction that new streams of video content can be delivered to mobile devices in a number of ways. Although a dominant technology of transmission and reception has not emerged, the arrow points to growth and development of smart phones and mobile operating systems that allow more sophisticated entertainment options. As more eyeballs turn to mobile devices, carriers, broadcasters, and content providers search for the business model that will monetize the potential. Many consider this to be a new media marketplace, even a new media industry even though it is in part an offshoot of existing media. You could argue that the portable wireless platform and its adoption as a personal mobile entertainment device is a kind of genetic mutation of media into a new species. There are signs that although recognizable brand entertainment of movies and TV shows are the bait to attract early adopters, a mass audience will follow.

We can identify a number of innovative forms of program content that are specific to the medium and beg the question of how you invent narrative and write scripts specifically for mobile media production. Although a limited amount of original work is produced for mobile and Internet formats, talent agencies and producers are waking up to the potential of this content and the discovery of new voices.³³ Once again, where there is demand for content, there has to be demand for writers who know how to create content and tell stories. We may well find new formats and new narrative styles evolving to meet the unique viewing habits of a generation brought up on a new kind web and mobile media. Historical parallels and antecedents support the likelihood of content evolving to exploit and fulfill the new potential of a mobile viewing experience with miniformats.

Exercises