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.

If you get your internet through Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision or Time Warner, and you’re still downloading music, television, or movies without paying them, you may start feeling something in addition to your guilt. In collaboration with the Center for Copyright Information, a group that includes both those internet service providers, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, Independent Film and Television Alliance, and the American Association of Independent Music, the companies will let you know they’re watching what you’re up to:

As part of what’s known as the “six strikes” system, the ISPs will deliver to consumers a graduated series of six messages that starts with a warning and ends with some sort of action…While the first two alerts serve as warnings or reminders, the second two require consumers to confirm receipt of the message. The final two, called mitigation alerts, could result in some sort of action, like slower Internet connection or suspending service. The CAS doesn’t specify what consequences ISPs should impose on consumers and leaves it up to each ISP.

The Stop Online Piracy Act may have died last year, but it seems inevitable that internet service providers, as well as search firms like Google, would get into the business of trying to crack down on illicit downloads. Media consolidation means that cable and internet companies like Comcast have as part of their business model creating and distributing original content. An organization like Google seems to be gradually discovering that there’s more money to be had in distributing, if not yet creating, original content instead of merely showing other people where they can find other distributors. In other words, the interests of the people who make content and the interests of the people who help people get to that content are converging.

Whether this is a preferable turn of events for SOPA opponents is up to them. I certainly hope it becomes clearer which providers are levying which consequences as the system goes into place. And from both a business and consumer behavior perspective, it would be great for notices to include information about where consumers could get the same content licitly, though that would pose a formidable technical challenge, and it might feel too invasive to consumers for ISPs to be monitoring their activity at that granular a level. There may always be some consumers who have no interest in paying for certain content, or supporting it by sitting through ads, an attitude I think shows very little awareness of what it takes for that content to keep getting produced, and ISP warnings probably won’t do much to deter those folks. But helping consumers who do understand that nothing comes for free find ways to give their money or their eyeballs to the people who produce and distribute that content—or to let them know when they’ll be able to do so if something isn’t available legally yet—could help change practices. Then, government could be in the position of advocating for well-intentioned consumers, while still letting internet and content companies develop their business models in an organic way.

Netflix’s attempts to develop original content has frequently been puzzling to me, given its focus on resurrecting dead masterpieces like Arrested Development, remaking masterpieces that don’t necessarily translate to new settings like House of Cards, keeping alive shows that no one really believed needed to be kept alive like Terra Nova. But its latest move, to outbid other competitors for Disney’s back and future catalogue, actually makes perfect sense to me:

The agreement is the first time one of Hollywood’s big studios has chosen Web streaming over pay television. Netflix has made similar “output” deals with smaller movie suppliers like DreamWorks Animation and the Weinstein Company. But all of the majors — Disney, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, Sony and 20th Century Fox — have stayed with Starz, HBO or Showtime until now.

Library titles like “Dumbo,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Pocahontas” will become available on Netflix immediately, Disney said. Netflix will begin streaming new release Disney films starting in late 2016, when the current accord with Starz expires. The deal announced on Tuesday includes direct-to-DVD movies…With the Disney deal, Netflix will be able to offer customers exclusive access to a pipeline of films that are reliably some of the year’s biggest box-office successes. Netflix has also made it a priority to strengthen its children’s and family offerings.

What’s smart about this is that it’s Netflix identifying an actual niche in the market. Hulu’s done this already in a lot of ways, doubling down on content that will appeal to serious television and film fans, whether it’s streaming foreign and foreign-language content like Hatufim, historical shows like Ironside, or even films from the Criterion collection. It’s true that Hulu is building its audience with a lot of tiny Legos, but the bricks in that wall don’t cost them a lot either, and it means they can easily adjust should one of those investments fail to pay off.

Investing in children’s and family programming is an unsexy way to build a firewall, but it’s an important one. Parents who want access to content for their children, but are worried about their youngesters wandering elsewhere in the cable lineup, or who don’t want to shell out cable prices when they only want some of the content, are a perfect audience for Netflix. And they’re a much clearer audience than whoever Netflix thought it was aiming Lillyhammer at. I don’t think it’s dumb for Netflix to experiment with original content. But until it figures out an actual successful strategy there, it makes much more sense to me for the company to spend $300 million a year on Disney content than for it to spend $100 million on 26 episodes of House of Cards

I missed this in the midst of election anxiety on Tuesday, but the Supreme Court just refused to take a case charging that cable bundling is in violation of federal anti-trust laws. As Deadline reports:

The U.S. Supreme Court today refused to hear the appeal of a class action lawsuit filed by cable and satellite subscribers who argued that channel bundling violated antitrust laws. The subs had asked the court to require programmers and distributors to offer single channels for purchase, rather than sell them only in prepackaged tiers. In March, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit filed against NBCUniversal, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and others, saying the plaintiffs had not stated a plausible claim.

In a sense, this is a reaffirmation of something we’ve discussed here quite a bit: bundling and the cable business model as currently constituted are inseparable, and many, many millions of people are willing to accept the model as is, even if they don’t love it. Getting around this without killing enormous amounts of programming (something, again, as I’ve said before, that I would be okay with!) is going to take an enormous amount of innovation, and a lot of time, and in the end, individual channels in the bundle will probably cost more than we sense they ought to. In a way, I wonder if the first goal for the cord-cutting or a la carte movements ought to be targeting the provision of internet, cable, and phone services by the same company. Those kinds of bundles are convenient from a customer service perspective. But in terms of preserving the free flow of content, unrestricted by companies who have an interest in slowing down web-based alternatives to cable, that’s a bad incentive structure for the companies themselves, and poses risks for consumers who want real content choices in the future.

As Deadline notes, there’s a huge untapped potential to get more viewers watching streaming programming:

The research firm says that in September, 3.1M unique users streamed TV Everywhere programming at AT&T, Cox, Comcast (Xfinity), Verizon, Cablevision (Optimum), Time Warner Cable, and Dish Network. That comes to just 5.1% of the roughly 60M customers who could have accessed TV Everywhere videos at those companies. The data suggest “relatively weak TV Everywhere awareness among cable, DBS and telco video subs, most likely due to the lack of any serious marketing campaigns to promote the product,” analyst Tony Lenoir says. It also means the services have a long way to go to catch up to other streaming video providers. For example, Hulu had 21.3M unique users in September, while Netflix had 16.2M.

I actually think this could be a critical way to get customers to be quite loyal to cable. The streaming landscape is a deeply confusing place right now: on Hulu alone, NBC puts up everything the day after it airs, Fox delays episodes unless you’re a Hulu plus subscriber, and CBS holds everything on its own site, which has an unbelievably terrible proprietary streaming player. Then, there’s HBO GO, which is a stand-alone service to HBO subscribers, but that is slightly unreliable. And Showtime is working with cable providers to have Showtime Anytime service work through their streaming players. Netflix gets new seasons of things at uneven rates. That’s confusing even for an obsessive consumer like me. If RCN developed a streaming service that made all content available on a consistent basis, with extremely high-quality visuals and fast-loading streaming, that alone would make me affirmatively loyal to the company for the first time in my career as an adult cable consumer. And I bet it would be a real value ad for people who don’t spend ten hours a day watching television and movies.

Over at The Mary Sue, Susana Polo makes an absolutely critical point for the debate about whether the cable model is about to collapse and people about to start cutting the cord en masse:

That the world is ready for streaming, a la carte television to become the default way that folks get their cable subscriptions delivered to them. This week the FCC released their eigth Broadband Progress Report, on the state of broadband internet service in the U.S., and they’ve collected some pretty interesting info. While broadband internet is available in 96% of American households, only 60% of Americans actually subscribe to the service. And of those 60%, only a minority of them actually get download speeds as high as 4 megabits per second, the minimum required speed for actual broadband as defined by the FCC. Most households are getting along with 768 kilobits a second. It’s hard to say whether this is because of subscriber preference, or because, well, many cable companies don’t exactly work very hard to guarantee that the speed they advertise is the speed you get. As Livescience points out, the bare minimum download speed for Netflix videos is 500 kbps, and that’s for particularly poor quality video.

Getting folks to give up cable in favor of streaming video services isn’t a matter of changing a single consumer preference. If cord-cutting is going to be a genuine movement, people are going to have to grow less attached to sports packages and more attached to faster internet, and to start demanding the availability of the latter. That’s a more complex cocktail of cultural changes than simply declaring that the cable companies are out of control.

The kind folks at Bloggingheads were good enough to ask me to do a regular show over there, which means you’ll be getting a lot more culture alongside your politics. I’m lucky enough to have as my first guest the AV Club’s television editor and one of my absolute favorite writers on any facet of culture, Todd VanDerWerff:

There’s a lot in this conversation, including a discussion that I think is really important: which networks and services see themselves as in competition with each other. If HBO, Netflix and FX see themselves in competition with each other, it’ll have a dramatic impact on which movies and premium programming are available elsewhere. Networks like Showtime are in an interesting position here—if they’re not in direct competition with Netflix, there may be fewer pressures on them to invest in streaming products like Showtime Anytime, which it’s preparing to roll out more widely to customers of more cable providers, but it needs to not make the strategic mistake of restricting access to its content to the viewers who might need to sample it to get hooked and subscribe. This is really about the integration of two existing industries—movies and television. And the space for a more truly disruptive product, like Hulu, is wide open.

In any case, I hope you’ll swing by. And if you have requests for folks I should have on the show, holler. I’m excited to spend a lot more time talking to my critic friends, and not only at great length on Twitter.

Google’s announcement last week that its search algorithm will begin downgrading the search rankings of sites that have been hit with numerous claims that they’re violating copyright that have determined to be valid has been treated in some quarters as if it’s a worrisome surrender of a commitment to a free and open internet. But its decision to play ball with copyright holders doesn’t actually strike me as particularly surprising. And if its policy works as designed, it could provide incentives that would be a useful alternative to legislation.

It’s not particularly surprising to me that Google would come around to factoring valid takedown notices into its search results given the extent to which Google wants to be a content company just as much as a search company. On YouTube, Google’s response time to takedown notices is astonishingly fast—it’s not as if Google is new to responding to copyright violation complaints in a forum where it’s in the company’s interest to make content providers feel comfortable hosting their material there. Google Play may not be a seriously-established competitor to iTunes or Netflix yet, but the division is signing and promoting new content deals on a regular basis. And long-term, that’s probably a focus that makes sense. I have to think that Google can make more money from long-form video advertising on licit content in front of YouTube videos and from its share of download sales than it can from passive display advertising on illicit torrent streams. Google will always have interests in internet freedom, because access is a big part of how it makes money. But the company has long had some interests aligned with Hollywood’s, and is moving increasingly in that direction.

Then, there’s the question of incentives. One of the biggest arguments by cyberlockers and other sites that end up with users who distribute some illicit content is that it’s not fair to characterize them as primarily piracy sites. Google’s new policy gives them an incentive to prove their intentions by getting serious about removing illicit content, banning users who are repeated infringers, and making running a clean locker a competitive advantage. Now there’s no question that there are risks of false positives, and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are right to keep an eye out for abuse of takedown notice abuse. It will be interesting to see if Google balances this algorithm change by bumping down the priority rating of copyright holders who file bogus or harassing takedown notices repeatedly—good incentives should work in both directions. But a focus on incentives, and on driving users to licit, quality streams of content, is where this debate should be.

When Husbands, the online sitcom about a professional baseball player and a TV star who get married in a drunken weekend in Vegas and decide to stay together in support of marriage equality and because they think they might actually be in love, premiered last year, I wrote that “setting yourself up as a model minority may be an important way to argue for legal rights, real equality means the right to make mistakes and bad decisions—and to work your way out of them.” While that’s true of the show’s main characters Brady (Sean Hemeon) and Cheeks (Brad Bell, also the Husbands co-creator, writer, and executive producer with TV veteran Jane Espenson), when it comes to experimenting to discover the future, it’s also true of Husbands itself, one of the pioneering high-quality ongoing shows to live online rather than on a broadcast network.

What’s exciting about about Husbands, though, is how quickly the show has grown in scope and emotional ambition from its first season to its second, which premieres on August 15. A year’s acquaintance has richened the on-screen chemistry and affection between Hemeon and Bell, and Husbands has grown in confidence both in terms of the ideas it’s exploring and the team behind the show’s sense of the skills they’re developing by working on it. And the show is becoming an important example of how television distributed online fits into a larger pop-culture ecosystem, not simply as an alternative means of distribution for content networks are too timid to make, but as a rich idea lab that could breed a new generation of pop culture tropes and show-runners.

For a sense of that, I have an exclusive first look at the behind-the-scenes material the Husbands crew shot to accompany the second season, which goes inside the table reads and Bell and Espenson’s writing sessions, and also provides some perspective on how large the team involved in the show is:

And it is large: the $60,001 the Husbands team raised through their Kickstarter campaign helped pay the more than 40 people who worked on the second season of the show, let the production move from its cramped initial setting to a rented house that gives the scenes and actors room to breathe, and helped upgrade the cameras from commercial hand-held DSLRs to Steadicam rigs with Scarlet cameras that improved the quality of the images. “It looks like big TV,” Espenson joked when I visited the set in May. “It’s the new big TV,” Bell said, and it’s true. Husbands is an illustration of the narrowing gap between online sitcoms and their broadcast siblings.

The set and the crew aren’t the only way Husbands is bigger in its second season. The show has a large roster of major guest stars, most notably Joss Whedon as Brady’s clueless agent Wes. He’s the kind of man who declares “You know I’d gay-march on hepatatis-infected glass to change things,” even as he tries to get Brady to tone down Cheeks, explaining that “acceptable gays are overweight, over forty, overly professional with their lovers in public,” the show’s painfully accurate swipe at chemistry-free couples like Cam and Mitch on Modern Family. And in a sequence that will make fanboy hearts everywhere go pitter-patter even as it makes a point, Dichen Lachman and Tricia Helfer appear in a brutal parody of straight-guy fantasy about pillow-fighting college girls experimenting with lesbianism.
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