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7/31/2019 "Defining Mobile Television: The Social Construction and Deconstruction of New and Old Media" (Excerpt)

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Popular Communication, 10: 253268, 2012

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1540-5702 print / 1540-5710 online

DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2012.715329

Defining Mobile Television: The Social Constructionand Deconstruction of New and Old Media

Max Dawson

Northwestern University

This article explores the circumstances surrounding the launch of mobile television services in theUnited States during the early 2000s. It draws on Rick Altmans method of crisis historiography to

contextualize the fragmentation of mobile televisions technologies and the confusion that this frag-

mentation has bred amongst consumers, industry professionals, analysts, and academics. To examine

mobile televisions identity crisis, I trace how this identity crisis has impacted and has been

impacted by changing conceptions of the identities of the two media that mobile television endeav-

ors to merge: the cellular phone and television. Based on this case study, I argue that the identity

crises that accompany the arrivals of new media technologies do not take place in isolation, but rather

have consequences that influence our attitudes toward and engagements with other, more established

media.

During the first decade of the 2000s, companies from a variety of industries made significant

investments in the development and commercialization of technologies capable of wirelessly

transmitting television programs to cellular phones and other portable devices. 1 Following the

establishment of mobile television services in Europe and Asia, these technologies arrived in

the United States in 2003. That fall, the wireless carrier Sprint struck deals with two content

aggregators to provide mobile television services over its network. Over the next five years,

Sprints competitors added similar services of their own, setting off a race among carriers, cel-

lular chip manufacturers, consumer electronics companies, broadcasters, and technology start-up

companies to establish an American market for mobile television.

While many wireless industry analysts agreed that mobile television possessed significant

commercial potential, consensus regarding its technical standards remained elusive. The devel-opment of mobile television technologies in the United States simultaneously followed a number

of diverging paths as various companies angled to establish their own products as industry-wide

1The processes that establish the dominant terminology used to describe and define new technologies constitute a

primary focus of this article. Accordingly, in the pages that follow I use the term cellular phone in place of mobile

phone. Whereas in most countries mobile phone is standard, in the United States cellular phone is more common.

By using this term, it is my intention to signal that the insights offered by this article are limited in their scope to the

specific contexts surrounding mobile televisions development and commercialization in the United States.

Correspondence should be addressed to Max Dawson, Assistant Professor, Department of Radio, TV, & Film,

Northwestern University, 1920 Campus Drive, Annie May Swift Hall Room 213, Evanston, IL 60208, USA. E-mail:

[email protected]


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254 DAWSON

standards. The result was a perplexing array of incompatible systems, the majority of which

came with their own proprietary hardware and infrastructure, fee structures, and programming.

The sundry systems supported by the carrier Verizon Wireless between 2005 and 2011 illus-trate the fragmentation of mobile television (as well as that of the mobile television market).

Television clips first became available to Verizon subscribers on an on-demand basis via the

multimedia service V Cast in 2005. Two years later Verizon added a new service called V Cast

Mobile TV, which included 16 channels of broadcast-style programming. Verizon subscribers

could also opt to pay for a comparable package of channels supplied by the Silicon Valley startup

MobiTV. Alternatively, they could use a Slingbox device connected to their home cable boxes

or digital video recorders (DVRs) to send programming to their phones over Verizons network.

Subscribers with phones capable of connecting to the web could access YouTube.coms library

of television clips. With the opening of Apples iTunes App Store to Verizon customers in 2011,

iPhone owners could download apps that enabled them to watch the television programmingavailable via the streaming services Netflix and Hulu.

Other major carriers, including Sprint and Cingular Wireless (which in 2007 became AT&T

Mobility), introduced similarly lengthy lists of mobile television options during these years. The

relatively rapid emergence of these incompatible yet in many instances overlapping services

fostered considerable confusion among content creators, retailers, journalists, and consumers

over what exactly the term mobile television referenced. Industry associations, regulatory

bodies, and consulting firms attempted to clarify mobile televisions identity via white papers

and press releases that laid out its technical properties and explained its uses. These efforts,

however, often operated at cross purposes with one another, and more often than not the def-

initions they proposed transparently prioritized the interests of the corporations that funded

them. Further complicating matters, at the same time as these new technologies were arrivingin the marketplace, the term mobile television was also being used to describe video distri-

bution and reception technologies that had nothing to do with cellular phones. A 2005 article

in Broadcasting & Cable declared that any way a consumer uses TV on a portable device

could technically be called mobile TV. That ranges from programming burned onto a DVD

to satellite TV beamed to an auto to a video cellphone or Wi-Fi services that help consumers

stream videos (Mandese, 2005, p. 14). In an environment in which DVDs, Wi-Fi, and in-

car satellite receivers all could beand in fact werelabeled mobile television, services

that delivered television to cellular phones competed not only with one another but also with

consumer electronics manufacturers, computer companies, video websites, cable and satellite

operators, and internet streaming services over slivers of a market that had yet to prove its own

existence.

This article employs Rick Altmans (2005) method of crisis historiography to contextualize

mobile televisions technological and semiotic fragmentation in the United States during the

first decade of the 2000s. In the process, it explores the nature of the relationship between the

two devices that mobile television seeks to merge: the cellular phone and the television set.

Altman likens the period surrounding a new media technologys advent to a crisis of identity in

which its technical properties, functions, and name are fluid and contested. During these identity

crises, the various parties that stand to be impacted by the new technology square off against one

another in jurisdictional conflicts over the authority to define its functions and meanings. As a

result, new media technologies frequently possess multiple identities, each of which might reflect

the interests of a different group of stakeholders. Crisis historiography attends to the contentious


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DEFINING MOBILE TELEVISION 255

and contingent processes by which these identities are consolidated into a singular, seemingly

self-evident definition.

The definitions that these processes fabricate may possess a sheen of natural stability, butthey are in fact mutable social constructs, the products of tenuous and more or less temporary

compromises between a technologys various stakeholders. Crisis historiography assumes [. . .]

that the definition of a representational technology is both historically and socially contingent,

Altman writes (2005, p. 16, emphasis in original). The task of the historian is to reconstruct the

specific historical and social contexts in which individuals and groups proposed, contested, and

negotiated over rival definitions of its identity. In this respect, crisis historiography is equally

concerned with the history of technologies and the history of ideas. Citing the example of motion

pictures, Altman writes: If early users of motion pictures considered them as just thatpictures

that move, then in order to explain the early history of moving pictures we must know how

contemporaries understood the terms moving and pictures (2005, p. 16, emphasis in original).To access turn-of-the-century understandings of these terms, it is necessary to temporarily bracket

off our knowledge of the outcome of jurisdictional conflicts over the definition of motion pictures,

as well as our own present-day understandings of what motion pictures are. To do so, ideas that

from the vantage of the present might appear anachronistic or misguided must be placed on equal

footing with ideas that now appear logical and right (Cowan, 1989, p. 279).

This article heeds Altmans instructions, using an examination of contemporary understand-

ings of the terms cellular phone and television to recover and recontextualize the multiple

identities of mobile television. Mobile televisions launch in the United States occurred at a

moment when the cellular phone and television both were undergoing identity crises of their own.

Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s the cellular phone metamorphosed from a portable

voice communication device (that is, a mobile telephone) to what USA Today described as adigital Swiss Army [knife], used for talk, music, photography, Web surfing and personal orga-

nization (Digital tech delights, 2007). Televisions identity likewise fragmented in this period

as new technologies of distribution and reception dispersed its content and functions across var-

ious sites and screens. Televisions identity crisis was in fact an existential crisis: in addition to

contemplating the perennial question of what is the future of television? some commentators

asked whether or not television had a future at all in a world in which computers, game consoles,

iPods, and cellular phones all could receive and display television programming.

By exploring the interactions between the unstable identities of television, the cellular phone,

and mobile television, this article traces the progressive entanglement of their proliferating func-

tions and meanings. My case study underscores that the identity crises experienced by new media

do not take place in isolation, but rather respond to, exacerbate, or even catalyze crises in the

identities of other media. While this is particularly the case with respect to cellular phones,

which capitalize on the affordances of digital hardware and networks to merge the functions

of multiple media technologies, my contention is that this argument is equally applicable to

nondigital media as well. The identity of every medium is defined within the frames of reference

provided by dominant understandings of the identities of its technological antecedents, contem-

poraries, and offspring. Accordingly, the consequences of any one mediums identity crisis will

ripple outward, affecting our understandings of all of the various media to which its identity is

indexed.

In outlining the crisis historiography methodology, Altman stresses the importance of paying

ample attention to the technological dead ends and technical failures that are often marginalized


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256 DAWSON

or excluded by teleological histories of technological progress (2005, p. 17).2 An engagement

with these failures (a designation that warrants quotations, as failure itself is a contingent social

category) yields greater insight into the social contexts from which new technologies emerge,and specifically into the agendas of those stakeholders who were unsuccessful in their bids to

define their properties and meanings (Lipartito, 2003). Mobile television has certainly experi-

enced its fair share of dead ends and failures in the United States. All told, more than a dozen

companies introduced mobile television services in the United States between 2003 and 2011,

and many more announced their intentions to do the same. Despite attracting volumes of pos-

itive press and the support and patronage of many of the worlds most influential wireless and

entertainment companies, however, from early on the new American mobile television ventures

encountered great difficulties in signing up subscribers. Of the nearly 270 million Americans

who owned mobile phones in 2008, only 2% were mobile television subscribers (Kharif, 2008).

So disappointing was mobile televisions performance in the United States that by as early as2007 consensus was beginning to build behind the notion that mobile television was overhyped,

a disappointment, or even a failure (Andrews, 2008; Santo, 2010; Tan, 2007).

Any designation of mobile television as a failure requires qualification, especially in light

of mobile televisions performance in overseas markets. Mobile television services similar to the

ones that have floundered in the United States have elsewhere proven very successful. In South

Korea, for instance, mobile television services have garnered sizeable audiences. In Japan, Brazil,

Peru, Argentina, Russia, Nigeria, Thailand, Egypt, and China viewership of mobile television

is growing as well, leaving North America (along with some portions of Western Europe) as

one of few remaining territories where mobile television adoption has fallen short of projections

(OBrien, 2010). However, this article neither seeks nor offers explanations for mobile televi-

sions market travails in the United States. Instead, it shifts attention away from mobile televisionproviders business woes and to the historically and socially contingent contexts within which

so many observers have designated mobile television a failure. It likewise offers a framework

for understanding how our attitudes toward this so-called failed technology influence, and are

influenced by, our interactions with other media technologies. For while mobile television has

certainly failed to make a meaningful impact in the American marketplace for wireless multi-

media services, this has not stopped it from playing a meaningful role in the identity crises of

television and the cellular phone.

REDEFINING THE CELLULAR PHONE

2In doing so, he echoes earlier calls by sociologists and historians who have proposed a social constructivist

approach to the study of technology (e.g., Cowan, 1989; Pinch & Bijker, 1989).

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