Streaming across industries: Streaming logics and streaming lore across the music, fi lm, television, and book industries

This article explores streaming across the cultural industries, drawing on 39 interviews with CEO/top-level industry executives working in the Norwegian music, film, television, and book industries. We examine two broad questions: What dokey industry players see as the main opportunities and challenges of streaming?To what extent do industry players compare with and learn from other industries when making sense of, and seeking solutions to, the main challenges? Drawing on theories of media industry logics and industry lore, the article identifi es a collective understanding of turmoil and uncertainty. While informants across industries formsimilar notions about the impact of streaming and emphasise the need to learn from other industries, solutions to challenges are typically sought within industryspecific frames. Our findings suggest that even if streaming is a cross-industrial trend, strategies are based on industry-specific logics and notions

Making Sense of Mobile Media. Institutional Working Notions, Strategies and Actions in Convergent Media Markets

This thesis is a study of how established institutions within the media and telecom industries act in times of change, using the first decade of the 2000s as its time frame. As an emerging field that has inspired high expectations but also much uncertainty, mobile media has been a leading subject of scholarly investigation. Located mainly within the management of technological innovation tradition, this thesis discusses how incumbent institutions, with their legacies from the traditional media and telecom industries, make sense of the mobile device as a media platform, as well as how they translate their perceptions into plans and actions. Furthermore, this thesis connects the development of mobile media to other, more far-reaching developments—technological, cultural and economic—within the media and telecom industries. Hence it considers how mobile-media perceptions and facilitations are related to the more general developments of media convergence, changing audience relations and challenging new-media business models. It concentrates on well-established institutions from the Norwegian media and telecom markets—the incumbent telecom operator Telenor, the public service broadcaster NRK, the tabloid newspaper VG, the commercial television channel TV 2 and the commercial radio channel P4 in particular. This thesis relies upon a multifold definition of the term “strategy” and distinguishes further among strategies as plans, patterns and perspectives. Hence, it analyses not only what these institutions say they plan to do (and what they actually do) regarding mobile media but also the foundation of these decisions—that is, industry perceptions and working notions. The latter term is given particular attention in this thesis, because analyses of strategies as plans or patterns can mislead us into believing that the institution’s decision-making processes are linear and rational and driven by well-documented goals and aims. On the other hand, studies that incorporate working notions - where different working notions compete and where the dominant working notion might even change over time - provide a more chaotic but ultimately more dynamic and realistic representation of reality. This thesis aims to substantiate why, and outline how, this is so

Overgang til digital fjernsynsdistribusjon : Argumenter, konflikter og allianser i Norge og Danmark

Tema for oppgaven er digitaliseringen av kringkastingssektoren og de utfordringer og muligheter dette teknologiskiftet skaper for den politiske styringen av mediene. Min teoretiske tilnærming er at det nasjonale handlingsrommet til å fatte politiske beslutninger er definert av noen generelle drivkrefter i samfunnet. Jeg har tatt utgangspunkt i tre slike drivkrefter: Den teknologiske utviklingen, bransje-aktørenes økonomiske interesser, og internasjonale politiske tendenser. I oppgaven analyserer jeg hvordan disse drivkreftene definerer handlingsrommet til å fatte beslutninger om digitalisering av kringkastingssektoren. Dette gjør jeg gjennom et komparativt forsknings-design, der jeg analyserer den politiske debatten og beslutningen om overgang til digital fjernsynsdistribusjon i Norge og Danmark. I tidsrommet våren 1996 til våren 2004 ble flere mulige løsninger for en slik overgang diskutert. Ulike allianser av aktører kom med forslag til løsninger og begrunnet disse med forskjellige argumenter. I løpet av 2002 og 2003 besluttet den norske og den danske regjeringen å bygge ut et digitalt bakkenett for distribusjon av fjernsyn. Reguleringsmodellene for disse utbyggingene var imidlertid svært forskjellige

From problem to solution? Why it is difficult to restrict the remit of public broadcasters

This article discusses the conditions for making policy change, and, more precisely, factors explaining why policy change is often hard to achieve even when key policy actors explicitly throw their weight behind it. It draws on a comparative analysis of two specific review processes in Britain and Norway, addressing the future remits of the public service broadcasters BBC and NRK. In both cases, the processes were initiated by governments explicitly stressing the need for radical change, but ambitions were not met although some changes took place. The article combines theories of advocacy coalitions and multiple streams to discuss how key stakeholders within the two processes operated to promote and inhibit change by defining–and re-defining–problems and solutions

Streaming across industries: Streaming logics and streaming lore across the music, film, television, and book industries

This article explores streaming across the cultural industries, drawing on 39 interviews with CEO/top-level industry executives working in the Norwegian music, film, television, and book industries. We examine two broad questions: What do key industry players see as the main opportunities and challenges of streaming? To what extent do industry players compare with and learn from other industries when making sense of, and seeking solutions to, the main challenges? Drawing on theories of media industry logics and industry lore, the article identifi es a collective understanding of turmoil and uncertainty. While informants across industries form similar notions about the impact of streaming and emphasise the need to learn from other industries, solutions to challenges are typically sought within industryspecific frames. Our findings suggest that even if streaming is a cross-industrial trend, strategies are based on industry-specific logics and notions

Conceptualizing the Experiential Affordances of Watching Online TV

This article investigates the experiential affordances of watching online TV as outcomes of the material underpinnings of online TV and the actions taken by viewers. Potential experiential changes derive from how online TV services can be considered libraries of content affording self-scheduling action possibilities. Such changes need to be situated in the slow-to-change conditions of television viewing. We draw on a qualitative study of how viewers respond to the action possibilities and constraints of online TV services. We argue that potentials for individualized viewing are counterbalanced by television viewing as a social activity. Next, self-scheduling ties in with viewing as a deliberate action, appropriated to create experiences where attentiveness is tailored to what is narratively required. Finally, flow schedules are replaced with programed paths constraining the agency of viewers

‘Remember, it’s Just Television’: Rubicon TV and the Commercialisation of Norwegian Television

This article investigates the historical development of one of the most successful television production companies in Norway, Rubicon TV, focusing on its changing leaders, their mission statements and programme portfolios. Based on primary historical documents, the article shows how the various CEOs of the company have consistently argued that television is not a ‘window to the world’, but a harmless medium for light, engaging entertainment. This understanding was originally a reaction to the perceived elitism and paternalism of public service television, allowing the company leaders moral leeway to produce provocative and innovative programmes that came to change the Norwegian television landscape

Global platforms and asymmetrical power: Industry dynamics and opportunities for policy change

Global platforms have radically changed institutional dynamics within the media industry. In this study, we explore how national media organisations manoeuvre in an increasingly uneven playing field. Combining theoretical perspectives from platform studies and the media policy field approach, we analyse how asymmetrical platform power impacts industry-policy relations in a small-nation context. We find that national players collectively frame the power of global platforms as a potential threat to the media sector and to democracy. In this framing, all the players – regardless of size or market position – define themselves as ‘small’ to signal a common threat and mission across the industry. Being ‘small’ however does not entail the same for all players, which results in different action logics. We also find that industry players use collective framing to protect existing support schemes and to legitimate the call for new ones, while they seek international collaboration to impact regulation of global platforms