On Demand Culture

The movie industry is changing rapidly, due in part to the adoption of digital technologies. Distributors now send films to theaters electronically. Consumers can purchase or rent movies instantly online and then watch them on their high-definition televisions, their laptops, or even their cell phones. Meanwhile, social media technologies allow independent filmmakers to raise money and sell their movies directly to the public. All of these changes contribute to an “on-demand culture,” a shift that is radically altering film culture and contributing to a much more personalized viewing experience. Chuck Tryon offers a compelling introduction to a world in which movies have become digital files. He navigates the complexities of digital delivery to show how new modes of access—online streaming services like YouTube or Netflix, digital downloads at iTunes, the popular Redbox DVD kiosks in grocery stores, and movie theaters offering digital projection of such 3-D movies as Avatar—are redefining how audiences obtain and consume motion picture entertainment. Tryon also tracks the reinvention of independent movies and film festivals by enterprising artists who have built their own fundraising and distribution models online. Unique in its focus on the effects of digital technologies on movie distribution, On-Demand Culture offers a corrective to address the rapid changes in the film industry now that movies are available at the click of a button.

Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era offers a theoretical rumination on the question asked in countless blogs and opinion pieces of the last decade: Why are we so obsessed with true crime? Author Tanya Horeck takes this question further: Why is true crime thought to be such a good vehicle for the new modes of viewer/listener engagement favored by online streaming and consumption in the twenty-first century? Examining a range of audiovisual true crime texts, from podcasts such as Serial and My Favorite Murder to long-form crime documentaries such as The Jinx and Making a Murderer, Horeck considers the extent to which the true crime genre has come to epitomize participatory media culture where the listener/viewer acts as a "desktop detective" or "internet sleuth." While Facebook and Twitter have re-invigorated the notion of the armchair detective, Horeck questions the rhetoric of interactivity surrounding true crime formats and points to the precarity of justice in the social media era. In a cultural moment in which user-generated videos of real-life violence surface with an alarming frequency, Justice on Demand addresses what is at stake in the cultural investment in true crime as packaged mainstream entertainment. Paying close attention to the gendered and racialized dimensions of true crime media, Horeck examines objects that are not commonly considered "true crime," including the subgenre of closed-circuit television (CCTV) elevator assault videos and the popularity of trailers for true crime documentaries on YouTube. By analyzing a range of intriguing case studies, Horeck explores how the audience is affectively imagined, addressed, and commodified by contemporary true crime in an "on demand" mediascape. As a fresh investigation of how contemporary variations of true crime raise significant ethical questions regarding what it means to watch, listen, and "witness" in a digital era of accessibility, immediacy, and instantaneity, Justice on Demand will be of interest to film, media, and digital studies scholars.

World Cinema on Demand brings together diverse contributions by leading film and media scholars to examine world cinema's dialogue with the transformations that took place during 2010-2014, engaging directly with ongoing debates surrounding national cinema, transnational identity, and cultural globalization, as well as ideas about genre, fandom and cinephilia. The contributions look at individual national patterns of online distribution, engaging with archives, SVODS and torrent communities. The essays also investigate the cross-cultural presence of world cinema in non-domestic online markets (such as Europe's, for example). As a result, the volume sheds light on geo-politically specific issues of film circulation, consumption and preservation within a range of culturally diverse filmmaking contexts, including case studies from India, Nigeria, Mexico and China. In this way, the collection maps the impact of different online formats of distribution in the understanding of World Cinema, underlining the links between distribution and media provisions as well as engaging with new forms of intermediation.

This book explores the quirks of digital culture. Through a series of short punchy chapters, it uses these quirks as momentary glimpses into the hidden dynamics of our swirling, highly mediated and often unfathomable cultural experiences.

This book explores the quirks of digital culture. Through a series of short punchy chapters, it uses these quirks as momentary glimpses into the hidden dynamics of our swirling, highly mediated and often unfathomable cultural experiences.

Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of success. But what promises does the notion of innovation entail? What is it about the ideology and practice of business innovation that has made these firms so successful at selling their services to everyone from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies? And most important, what does business innovation actually mean for work and our economy today? In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change. A masterful look at the contradictions of our capitalist age, Creativity on Demand is a model for the anthropological study of our cultures of work.

Since 2010 “curation” has become a marketing buzzword. Wrenched from its traditional home in the world of high art, everything from food to bed linens to dog toys now finds itself subject to this formerly rarified activity. Most of the time the term curation is being inaccurately used to refer to the democratization of choice – an inevitable development and side effect of the economics of long tail distribution. However, as any true curator will tell you – curation is so much more than choosing – it relies upon human intelligence, agency, evaluation and carefully considered criteria – an accurate, if utopian definition of the much-abused and overused term. Television on Demand examines what happens when curation becomes the primary way in which media users or viewers engage with mass media such as journalism, music, cinema, and, most specifically, television. Mass media's economic model is based on mass audiences – not a cornucopia of endless options from which individuals can customize their intake. The rise of a curatorial culture where viewers create their own entertainment packages and select from a buffet of viewing options and venues has caused a seismic shift for the post-network television industry – one whose ultimate effects and outcomes remain unknown. Curatorial culture is a revolutionary new consumption ecology – one that the post-network television producers and distributors have not yet figured out how to monetize, as they remain in what anthropologists call a “liminal” state of a rite of passage – no longer what they used to be, but not yet what they will become. How does an advertiser-supported medium find leave alone quantify viewers who DVR This is Us but fast-forward through the commercials; have a season pass to The Walking Dead via iTunes to watch on their daily commutes; are a season behind on Grey's Anatomy via Amazon Prime but record the current season to watch after they're caught up; binge watched Orange is the New Black the day it dropped on Netflix; are watching new-to-them episodes of Downton Abbey on pbs.org; never miss PewDiePie's latest video on YouTube, graze on Law & Order: SVU on Hulu and/or TNT and religiously watch Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show via digital rabbit ears? While audiences clamor for more story-driven and scripted entertainment, their transformed viewing habits undermine the dominant economic structures that fund quality episodic series. Legacy broadcasters are producing more scripted content than ever before and experimenting with new models of distribution – CBS will premiere its new Star Trek series on broadcast television but require fans to subscribe to its AllAccess app to continue their viewing. NBC's original Will & Grace is experiencing a syndication renaissance as a limited-run season of new episodes are scheduled for fall 2017. At the same time, new producing entities such as Amazon Studios, Netflix and soon Apple TV compete with high-budget “television” programs that stream around traditional distribution models, industrial structures and international licensing agreements. Television on Demand: Curatorial Culture and the Transformation of TV explains and theorizes curatorial culture; examines the response of the “industry,” its regulators, its traditional audience quantifiers, and new digital entrants to the ecosystem of the empowered viewer; and considers the viable future(s) of this crucial culture industry.

Subscription video on demand (SVOD) represents the fastest-growing means to consume films and series. Although market leaders Netflix and Amazon Prime have received much scholarly attention for the way that they use algorithms and big data to connect users to content, there is another significant, relatively unexamined model: curation-style services such as BFI Player, IFC Unlimited, the Criterion Channel or MUBI — the latter, which forms the focus of this book, claims to be the world's most subscribed independent video on demand service. These platforms take advantage of common anxieties about algorithms, cultural surplus and filter bubbles to promote discovery, human-generated recommendations and quality over quantity of content. Deploying an original, holistic methodology that includes analysis of technological affordances, marketing rhetoric, business models, interviews with company executives and a qualiquantitative audience study, this book critically analyses MUBI as a way to understand this particular mode of content aggregation, cultural recommendation, choice architecture and community building. Curation services address a real, but decidedly circumscribed gap in the market. Ultimately, MUBI offers film, media and business scholars an instructive example of the fate of art cinema and media diversity in a digital culture increasingly dominated by a few giant tech companies.