Politico reported yesterday that Alpha House, the Garry Trudeau-created pilot about a group of Congressmen living together in a townhouse in Washington, DC that’s based on a 2007 New York Times story about real-life legislators who are roommates when they’re in the District of Columbia, has become one of the first shows to be picked up by Amazon as part of its attempts to expand into original content development. It doesn’t shock me that Amazon pulled the trigger on Alpha House, which, if nothing else, let the company lock down John Goodman for a show, a move that follows the playbook laid out by Amazon in its splashy signing of Kevin Spacey to star in its remake of the British series House of Cards. But Alpha House was far from the strongest of Amazon’s adult-oriented pilots (it’s also testing shows aimed at children). And even if Amazon isn’t doing a traditional development process like its competitors in broadcast television, it would be wise for the service to consider taking a page from the networks’ playbooks and consider revamping the show a little bit before its full launch. Here are five suggestions for how to make Alpha House shine.

1. Make The House Bipartisan: One of the dullest decisions in the original pilot of Alpha House was to make all members of the house Republicans, and to make them all risible. Goodman’s Gil Joh Biggs, a do-nothing incumbent from a rural district who teaches Louis Laffer (Matt Malloy), an obviously closeted social conservative, to shoot in the basement, and signs them both up for a trip to Afghanistan when they attract Tea Party challengers and need to look tough. Clark Johnson plays Robert Bettencourt, an African-American Congressman who’s mostly in in for the donations from defense contractors—in one scene, he gives Gil John his notes from a filibuster speech so they can both go on the record saying nice things about the same giant corporations. And Mark Consuelos plays andy Guzman, a recently-divorced freshman who’s schtupping the founder of a Super PAC. All in all, it’s nothing we’ve seen before. But if Alpha House can sharpen the characterizations and give us a fresh take on what bipartisanship actually looks like, it could be refreshing and funny.
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It’s television upfronts this week, the time every year when the broadcast networks announce which lucky shows have earned subsequent seasons, which unfortunates are getting cancelled, and most importantly, which of the many new projects in development will be going forward—and then try to convince advertisers that they should be excited to buy ad spots in these new and returning shows, and to be part of a new, rearranged schedule.

The enthusiasm the network executives will display at their presentations to advertisers, and the amusing site of actors like Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman dressing up as their dueling liberal and libertarian characters from Parks and Recreation to do schedule announcements, is deceptive. Many of the shows that are being presented as the next great thing will prove to be creative or commercial failures: NBC, for example, cancelled almost all of the shiny new shows it offered up to advertisers and to viewers with such great hope last fall, and is starting over with shows like a sitcom from Michael J. Fox and a drama starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Dracula. And the fancy presentations and celebratory air at the upfronts disguises that the process by which the networks select which new shows they’re moving forward with is hugely expensive and exhausting. The networks may put as many as 100 shows into development, going through the process of writing the pilots, casting actors for them, pulling together sets and wardrobes for those actors to work with (or investing in special effects), shooting said pilots, testing them extensively in front of audiences, and then making their choices. It costs an awful lot of money, and leaves a lot of people waiting a long time to learn if they’ll have jobs.

Last week, when I spoke with Kevin Spacey, who stars as villainous Democratic Majority Whip Frank Underwood in Netflix’s adaptation of the British series House of Cards, one of the reasons he mentioned for wanting to work with Netflix rather than another outlet was the way Netflix approached the development process.

“What was great that they were the only network that said ‘You don’t have to do a pilot,’” he said. “Because David Fincher and I really didn’t want to do a pilot, because when you do a pilot, you’re kind of obligated to spend 45 minutes establishing all of the characters. And we didn’t want to do that. We just wanted to get on with telling a story, and tell a story over a long period of time. And they said ‘We believe in you, we believe in David, we love this series from Britain. How many do you want to do?’ And we were like, ‘Um, two seasons?’ And they were like ‘Okay!’ It was a risk on their part, but they’ve been great partners.”
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As Netflix has launched its big original series House of Cards and Hemlock Grove over the past few months, their choices of genres and styles has indicated a great deal about what that company thinks is worth emulating on broadcast television. House of Cards is a clear attempt to enter the anti-hero genre that’s done so well for networks like HBO, while Hemlock Grove is a nod to the emergence of horror on television, mostly thanks to FX’s wildly inventive American Horror Story.

But when Amazon put out eight original comedy pilots last week as part of a process by which viewership and viewer reviews will help the company decide which projects to turn into full-fledged shows, their choice of material actually suggested more about the holes that Amazon sees in the television ecosystem and is trying to fill. The eight pilots currently under consideration have a great deal in common, and for good and for ill, they do differ with broadcast television in ways ranging from use of language to genre. Given that Netflix is ramping up its original content offerings more slowly, it may take some time for that company to develop a brand that’s anything like HBO’s or CBS’s. But Amazon’s selections give us a much clearer sense of who Amazon thinks its core consumers are, and what kind of identity Amazon wants its original content to have. Here are four throughlines that were most striking:

1. “Adult” content: All of Amazon’s originals come with warnings about adult language and content. And all of them make use of the leeway apparently granted them by the warning, from the cussing Congressmen who live together in a Capitol Hill townhouse on Garry Trudeau’s Alpha House, to Moby telling an app developer in Silicon Valley start-up comedy Betas “You ever fuck an octopus? I fucked an octopus. It’s why I’m a vegan now,” to Zombieland’s introduction of a character who explains that her name is “Regina. Kind of like vagina, but with an R,” and then counts how many times another character can’t resist joking about it. It’s no question that the show that uses its license to be naughty most judiciously, musical web journalism intern sitcom Browsers, gets the most mileage out of it in a number in which Bebe Neuwirth, playing a riff on Arianna Huffington, explains in song that ” I’m smart but I’m hardly a genius / And I can’t say I’m good with a buck / But throughout my career / I’ve made perfectly clear / I’m someone with whom not to fuck.”

But permission to use the F-word is not the same thing as having genuinely grown-up ideas, or using explicit content to get at the reality of adult experience. And the ability to swear and to be sexual and somewhat gross on television is hardly new. FX has made use of its ability to go there so successfully in shows like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia and The League that it’s spinning off a second network so it has more room to develop and to air original comedies and dramas. Nothing in Amazon’s pilots is nearly as explicit as the sex scene in the first episode of Girls. If Amazon wants to beat its competitors by expanding the realm of what its characters can say and do, it’s not enough to let them cuss. The company’s going to think about what its shows do with the leeway it’s granting them, and what ideas and experiences aren’t making it onto other networks.
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Vulture explains the new plan:

Sharing is caring, and all the caring has resulted in an estimated 10 million people enjoying Netflix free of charge, piggybacking on the accounts of family members, friends, and foes. Now the streaming service has instated a family plan, which for $11.99 a month allows four users to stream at once on four individual devices. The standard $7.99/month account is said to limit streaming to just two devices at once. “Take a moment to imagine a family of four all sitting in different rooms of the house watching different shows on Netflix at the same time. A sad picture, but not necessarily a far-fetched one,” HuffPo writes. “However, what’s more likely is that Netflix is trying to squeeze a few more dollars out of subscribers who all know that they aren’t supposed to be sharing their accounts with so many people.”

The interesting question for me is whether Netflix will start enforcing restrictions on password-sharing at some point, and what those enforcement mechanisms would look like. If you have dramatically different schedules from someone you’re sharing a password with—say, someone overseas, or in a different time zone—upgrading to the family plan doesn’t make much sense because you’re unlikely to both be streaming content at once, and thus unlikely to come into any sort of conflict about who gets to use the password when. So if the prospect of having your streaming shut off when someone else hops on your account isn’t the incentive to force people to pony up for more bandwidth, what would that enforcement look like?

One way to go might be for Netflix to offer an iTunes-like authorization system that gets each username a set number of devices in each category they can register, and then requires them to ante up if they want to get more devices on the account, perhaps in tiers like the ones offered by Verizon’s Share Everything plans. That would preserve the interoperability of the service, which is one of the key factors in its success, while also letting people pay in a realistic way based on their own usage and the usage of people associated with their account.

And it might also prepare users for increases in fees. Netflix got in the streaming video door extremely early, and had a first-mover advantage when it came to negotiating deals for content. That advantage doesn’t exist anymore. The deals Netflix signs going forward will be more expensive if they’re exclusive, or they won’t be exclusive, lowering the value of the content. And if Netflix wants to produce its own original content, it’s going to be quite expensive. While the company has said that originals like Hemlock Grove and House of Cards are quite popular, they aren’t really quantifying what “quite popular means.” In any case, the measure that counts is whether people subscribe to Netflix specifically for that content at numbers and price levels that make the continued production of it sustainable. This business model is far from settled. But how it shakes out will be indicative.

I watched all of Hemlock Grove this weekend and I loved it. It’s not great. Everything Lauren Davis says about it over at io9 is completely true. I still loved it. (And I was right to suspect the cat would not make it into the show named “Fetchit.” Onscreen it was “Casper.”) And part of the reason why is that Hemlock Grove seems uniquely designed for a second-screen experience—and to give those of us deeply steeped in vampire lore and assorted pop culture nerddom a particular thrill.

Hemlock Grove, it seems to me, assumes that one of the joys its viewers will take is in catching all the references. It’s not just that there’s a wolfman and a vampire and a Frankenstein’s monster and a mad scientist and all the other horror tropes. It’s that the wolfman is named Peter, as in Peter & the Wolf, the vampire, whose mom is secretly from Romania, is name Roman, the Frankenstein’s monster is named Shelley, as in Mary Shelley, and the mad scientist is Dr. Price, an obvious nod to Vincent Price. And, sure, sometimes the names are a little too spot on–the fortune teller’s name is Destiny, the werewolf hunter is Dr. Chasseur (French for “hunter”), the first victim’s name is Victim 1… no, just kidding about that one. But the point is that this is a show that assumes you will enjoy it more the more you know what tropes it’s playing with and what sources it’s drawing from, so it tries to leave you plenty of bread crumbs.

This brings me to one of the most quietly extraordinary moments in the show. Here’s what you need to know to appreciate it. One of the recurring images in the show is that of the dragon. People are constantly mentioning dragons. Peter and Roman have themselves a little fake Order of the Dragon. Dr. Chasseur belongs to the real Order of the Dragon. Roman’s mother tells him that he is a dragon. Okay, then, so we join Dr. Norman Godfrey, who has just learned that Lod, LLC wants to buy his share in the family biotech business. And he’s researching the company on the internet. He clicks on the Wikipedia entry for the city of Lod and scrolls down only as far as the section titled “The Arab Period.” If there’s anything relevant to the viewer on that page, it’s not really easy to tell on the TV screen.
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I was lucky enough to spend some time at Swarthmore College last week thanks to a kind invitation from the Swarthmore Feminists to talk about sexuality and television, but the real treat for me was a chance to sit and chat with the students there about what television they watch, and how they watch it. Keeping in mind, of course, that this is hardly a representative sample size, that college students aren’t at the height of their purchasing power, and that it isn’t always easy to set up cable subscriptions on campus, it was still a revealing conversation, and one that did more to convince me than cord-cutting numbers have thus far that television could face a comparatively sudden realignment of its business model as a generation of television watchers comes of age, and turns out not to watch television live, in the timeslot, or through the conventional means of accessing television programming at all. I was struck by three key takeaways in particular:

1. If They Own Television Sets, It’s Mostly For Gaming: I didn’t really develop the habits of a television viewer until I’d graduated from college and had access to cable for the first time, but even then, I owned a television, and my sense was that most rooms had one, if only to watch DVDs. DVD drives didn’t come standard on laptops at the time I purchased my first one, tablets were a theoretical product, and streaming video wasn’t a commercial-ready product that could support long clips and heavy usage. Now, with all of those things standard, televisions are less a primary means of watching video content than large objects that take up space in a single or a common room. If you’re serious about video games, they might be a necessity. But all the Swarthmore students I talked to were building their habits as television viewers through their interactions with Netflix and Hulu, rather than with channel surfing. And that means a very different, and much more highly curated user experience. Television watching is a habit as much as it is an optimal consumer experience, and if it’s not developed early, there’s no reason to believe it will remain primary.

2. They Don’t Feel Any Real Hesitation About Pirating Content On Either Moral Or Quality Grounds: Only one of the students I talked to said she avoided watching content that had been illicitly downloaded on moral grounds, and she admitted that her refusal to watch movies or television that hadn’t been paid for or borrowed in some licit way marked her as something of a square. The consensus seemed to be that television networks and studios don’t really need the students’ money, that someone else is putting up the money to support the continued production of content. I obviously think that’s a fairly shortsighted perspective, but it’s illustrative of how deeply it’s taken hold as a convenient excuse for not purchasing content.

3. They Don’t Care When They See Whole Seasons, Much Less Individual Episodes: This was probably the consensus opinion that hit me hardest: the students were very comfortable with watching not just episodes of television but whole seasons of television long after they’d aired. Neither the prospect of so-called spoilers, nor the desire to engage in a cultural conversation tied temporally to air dates seemed to matter very much. And that seems like it should scare television producers more than anything else. If there’s no such thing as must-see-TV, whether it’s the old expectation that viewers wouldn’t see every episode of their favorite shows, or the modern one where it’s expected that we’ll tune in to every episode of long-arc narratives, then it’s hard to see what the television business model is at all.

Last week, I wrote that HBO’s idea—I would not yet describe it as a plan—to let consumers buy HBO Go subscriptions from their internet service providers seemed like the most likely way to solve the problem of letting people buy stand-alone HBO Go without subscribing to HBO through a cable package: it would freak out cable companies and lead to retaliation against HBO before the streaming market was rigorous enough to support it. I was writing mostly from a consumer perspective then, but fortunately, friend of the blog Gabriel Rossman is here to write about what this adaptative mindset means for the way we conceive of our ability to freely access content that streams over the internet. He argues that it’s a short-term victory for access to certain content that’s a long-term defeat:

Suppose that your ISP isn’t happy with HBO’s offer to let it keep half the money from IP only HBO Go (which it would price at or above the price it charges tv customers) because it really wants to keep pushing you towards that “triple play” package its telemarketers keep harassing you with? Well, that ISP can just refuse to sell HBO GO to its broadband-only customers. And unlike Netflix, the ISP would actually be able to veto your purchase. It’s structurally very similar to car dealerships, where local brokers are terrified of (and can use their clout to prevent) translocal competition. This one is actually kind of scary. Imagine if you could only subscribe to the New York Times through your condo’s HOA, which would otherwise deny building access to the paperboy?

There are some ways in which this would still create problems for the cable operators, mostly in that it would undermine the two-part tariff aspect of their business model, but I think this is effectively obviated by the local veto aspect of the proposal. Moreover, cable operators are increasingly showing signs that they see the bundling aspect of their business model unraveling (mostly because carriage fees are out of control) and are willing to settle for a role of brokerage, without bundling. (Note that data caps, which don’t apply to content bought from your ISP, help enforce this brokerage role since they effectively let your ISP tax content bought on the open market).

This, of course, is all dependent on a world where high-speed internet access is something we purchase individually. If municipal wireless networks or municipal broadband ever really take off, or we move to the idea that high-speed internet access is a right rather than a commodity, then the broker role of internet service providers would be disrupted. But as long as we’re each paying to get online in the first place, even if we’re paying less money than we used to and for a higher-quality product, we’re in a position where we’ve accepted ISPs as toll-takers. That they’re going to make like Delaware and get every penny out of us for as long as they can shouldn’t come as any particular surprise.

Per Business Insider, the streaming music service Spotify has apparently decided that the road to profitability, or greater profitability, lies in jumping on developing original video content and hoping it will attract subscribers in the same way that Netflix and Amazon Prime are attempting to do:

Spotify has become a very popular service with consumers, but its business remains challenged. The reason: extremely thin margins. Spotify does not own the music its customers listen to. Music labels do, and Spotify has to pay the labels every time a customer listens to one of their songs. As Spotify gets more popular, the labels charge more and more.

The original plan for Spotify was that it would grow so popular with music listeners that Spotify would be able to dictate negotiations with the labels. This hasn’t happened. This is in part because there are several Spotify competitors all bidding for the same rights to the same music. Even though it has become a significant source of revenue for the labels, Spotify still depends on the labels more than they depend on it.

My initial reaction is that this is an odd move. The more logical move for Spotify would be to start signing bands, producing their records, and holding on to both profits from those album sales and the profits from streaming, which Spotify could demand exclusively from the artists whose albums they put out. That would involve much lower start-up costs than television, which is enormously expensive if you want it to attract buzzy talent and look good—I’m sure Battleground, Hulu’s nifty little political show, has done an okay business for the service, but it hasn’t made nearly the cultural splash as House of Cards did for Netflix. Second, sticking to music would keep Spotify in the same core business—they’ve got data that will let them push music they own into listeners ears via recommendation algorithms, and listeners who already come to them for a high-quality music product. Spending money to let new audiences know they’re in the television business, and to convince them that Spotify TV shows are worth watching, would mean a significant advertising outlay. And Spotify would presumably have to make technological improvements to make sure it can handle the much higher bandwidth of video.

I’m not saying Spotify is wrong to try to go into the television business. But original television is hard to do well, and it’s not going to be a solution for every media company. Netflix and Amazon are still a long way from proving they can consistently make genuine hits, much less that original content is going to be their core business.

Around this time last year, I wrote a long piece explaining why you can’t purchase a stand-alone subscription to HBO Go. The service, intended as an enhancement of the HBO experience for existing subscribers, was an attempt to enhance the cable model, not to subvert it. HBO’s entire business model is distribution through cable companies, who are in competition with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Throwing in with the competition could lead to retaliation. And it’s not clear that there are enough people who would prefer an HBO Go subscription to cable to make it worth blowing up that business model.

But HBO has always been interested in expanding its potential reach. And HBO CEO Richard Plepler is starting to talk about ways HBO could get out of the conundrum of its business model—and one solution he’s proposing could be directly enabled by the consolidation of internet and cable companies into single businesses:

“Right now we have the right model,” Plepler told Reuters on Wednesday evening at the Season 3 premiere of HBO’s hit TV show “Game of Thrones.” “Maybe HBO GO, with our broadband partners, could evolve.”

HBO launched HBO GO in 2010 to let subscribers view its shows over the Internet on devices such as Apple Inc’s iPads. The service has about 6.5 million registered users, compared with about 29 million for HBO’s main service.

However, HBO GO is only accessible for viewers who pay for cable TV service, plus an extra fee for HBO. This means monthly bills of $100 or more typically. HBO GO is available to subscribers of several pay TV companies that provide Internet service such as Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Verizon FiOS

Plepler said late Wednesday that HBO GO could be packaged with a monthly Internet service, in partnership with broadband providers, reducing the cost.

Or, in other words, HBO would still be tied to large cable and broadband providers—it wouldn’t just let you sign up for HBO Go without verifying your subscription to a cable or internet service in the same way you sign up for streaming Netflix. But HBO would be tied to consolidated companies with the diminished expectations that it’s better to get customers to sign up for one service if the choice is between that and not having them sign up for cable and high speed internet with you at all.

I still think that the cable package will continue to have value for a lot of consumers. If a la carte cable pricing tied to internet subscription takes off, per-channel pricing is still going to be quite expensive, and many consumers will end up paying similar amounts to what they spend now for five or ten channels. But for both die-hard cord cutters, and for media companies, this is probably a reasonable detente.

As television networks have struggled with their ratings this winter, online content distributors have heated up. House of Cards has succeeded in making Netflix look buzzy, at least for a cycle—even if the show isn’t a candidate for the pantheon, it was a demonstration that a distributor could put up the money to make something that looked attractive on a big screen or a computer monitor, and to attract strong acting talent to a project. Amazon is investing in a range of shows it’ll test for audiences before greenlighting a few of the products for longer seasons. YouTube, which has been investing in content channels, had one of its mini-networks, WIGS, enter into a partnership with Fox. And now the network’s discovered an even more intriguing content partner, Reddit, which has just launched its first series:

Reddit general manager Erik Martin tells The Hollywood Reporter that the series, which is funded by YouTube, marks an experiment to encourage the site’s users to create web video rather than a larger foray by the company to get into original web programming. “For us, it’s more about encouraging the Reddit community and bigger community of producers, filmmakers and animators out there to create content, video, web series, shows … based on Reddit content,” Martin says. The “Explain Like I’m Five” subreddit, which the company says gets an estimated 4 million page-views monthly, was chosen because its discussion concept seemed fit for a video series.

What makes Reddit fascinating as a potential developer and tester of content is very different from other outlets who are getting into this business. Amazon and Netflix are both content distributors with an advantage over television networks, which have to set one schedule for all viewers. Amazon and Netflix viewers can program their own sequences of content, and Amazon and Netflix use sophisticated content ratings algorithms to help those viewers find content they might like based on what they’ve consumed before.

Reddit lacks that algorithm, but it has communities that are extremely good at tearing apart content and analyzing ideas. Most of the time, they do that for content that members bring in from the outside, though things like Ask Me Anything sessions are organically generated for Reddit in particular. Those communities could be repurposed as test audiences on a large scale—and a test audience that’s attracted to that content in particular, rather than picked by networks to see how content will appeal to a large range of viewers. It’s an enormously valuable resource, a chance to float a series, get both broad reactions and particular notes (if you’re willing to pick through the comments), and then go back and revise content either to continue distributing on Reddit and YouTube platforms, or to sell up the ladder to Netflix or Amazon. Netflix and Amazon are alternative distribution channels. Something like Reddit could give them a truly alternative development system.