Module 5
Radio, TV, and Gaming
A. An Abbreviated Chronology Detailing the Evolution of Radio and Sound Recording
Technologies
The particular stations you and your friend disagree about may be different than
those in our opening vignette, but almost all of us have been through a similar
conversation. Radio, the seemingly ubiquitous medium, matters to us. Because we often
listen to it alone, it is personal. Radio is also mobile. It travels with us in the car, and we
take it everywhere with our smartphones. Radio is specific as well. Stations aim their
content at very narrowly defined audiences. But these are characteristics of contemporary
radio. Radio once occupied a very different place in our culture.
Because both applied for patents within months of one another in the late 1890s,
there remains disagreement over who “invented” radio, Eastern European immigrant
Nikola Tesla or Guglielmo Marconi, son of a wealthy Italian businessman and his Irish
wife. Marconi, however, is considered the “Father of Radio” because not only was he
among the first to send signals through the air, but he was also adroit at gaining
maximum publicity for his every success. His improvements over earlier experimental
designs allowed him to send and receive telegraph code over distances as great as two
miles by 1896. His native Italy was not interested in his invention, so he used his
mother’s contacts in Great Britain to find support and financing there. England, with a
global empire and the world’s largest navy and merchant fleets, was naturally interested
in long-distance wireless communication. With the financial and technical help of the
British, Marconi successfully transmitted wireless signals across the English Channel in
1899 and across the Atlantic in 1901. Wireless was now a reality. Marconi was satisfied
with his advance, but other scientists saw the transmission of voices by wireless as the
next hurdle, a challenge that was soon surmounted.
The late 1800s have long been considered the beginning of sound recording.
However, the 2008 discovery in a Paris archive of a 10-second recording by an obscure
French tinkerer, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, has some audio historians rethinking
recording’s roots. Scott recorded a folk song on a device he called a phonautograph in
1860, and he always thought that Thomas Edison had stolen credit that should have been
his (“Edison Not,” 2008). Nonetheless, in 1877 prolific inventor Edison patented his
“talking machine,” a device for replicating sound that used a hand-cranked grooved
cylinder and a needle. The mechanical movement caused by the needle passing along the
groove of the rotating cylinder and hitting bumps was converted into electrical energy
that activated a diaphragm in a loudspeaker and produced sound.
The drawback was that only one “recording” could be made of any given sound;
the cylinder could not be duplicated. In 1887 that problem was solved by German
immigrant Emile Berliner, whose gramophone used a flat, rotating, wax-coated disc that
could easily be copied or pressed from a metal master. Two equally important Berliner
contributions were the development of a sophisticated microphone and later (through his
company, RCA Victor Records) the import from Europe of recordings by famous opera
stars. Now people had not only a reasonably priced record player but records to play on
it. The next advance was introduction of the two-sided disc by the Columbia Phonograph
Company in 1905. Soon there were hundreds of phonograph or gramophone companies,
and the device, by either name, was a standard feature in U.S. homes by 1920. More than
2 million machines and 107 million recordings were sold in 1919 alone. Public
acceptance of the new medium was enhanced even more by the development of
electromagnetic recording in 1924 by Joseph P. Maxwell at Bell Laboratory.
The idea of broadcasting—that is, transmitting voices and music at great distances
to a large number of people—predated the development of radio. Alexander Graham
Bell’s telephone company had a subscription music service in major cities in the late
1800s, delivering music to homes and businesses by telephone wires. A front-page story
in an 1877 edition of the New York Daily Graphic suggested the possibilities of
broadcasting to its readers. The public anticipated and, after DeForest’s much publicized
successes, was eager for music and voices at home. Russian immigrant David Sarnoff,
then an employee of the company American Marconi, recognized this desire and in 1916
sent his superiors what has become famously known as the “Radio Music Box Memo.”
As the RCA agreements demonstrated, the government had a keen interest in the
development, operation, and diffusion of radio. At first government interest focused on
point-to-point communication. In 1910 Congress passed the Wireless Ship Act, requiring
that all ships using U.S. ports and carrying more than 50 passengers have a working
wireless and operator. Of course, the wireless industry did not object, as the legislation
boosted sales. But after the Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic in 1912 and it
was learned that hundreds of lives were lost needlessly because other ships in the area
had left their radios unattended, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912, which not only
strengthened rules regarding shipboard wireless but also required that wireless operators
be licensed by the Secretary of Commerce and Labor.
While the regulatory structure of the medium was evolving, so were its financial
bases. The formation of RCA had ensured that radio would be a commercial, profit-based
medium. The industry supported itself through the sale of receivers; that is, it operated
radio stations in order to sell radios. The problem was that once everybody had a radio,
people would stop buying them. The solution was advertising. On August 22, 1922, New
York station WEAF accepted the first radio commercial, a 10-minute spot for Long
Island brownstone apartments. The cost of the ad was $50.
The sale of advertising led to the establishment of national radio networks.
Groups of stations, or affiliates, all broadcasting identical content from a single
distributor, could deliver larger audiences, realizing greater advertising revenues, which
would allow them to hire bigger stars and produce better programming, which would
attract larger audiences, which could be sold for even greater fees to advertisers. RCA set
up a 24-station network, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), in 1926. A year
later it bought AT&T’s stations and launched a second network, NBC Blue (the original
NBC was renamed NBC Red). The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was also
founded in 1927, but it struggled until 26-year-old millionaire cigar maker William S.
Paley bought it in 1928, making it a worthy competitor to NBC. The fourth network,
Mutual, was established in 1934 largely on the strength of its hit Western The Lone
Ranger. Four midwestern and eastern stations came together to sell advertising on it and
other shows; soon Mutual had 60 affiliates.
The networks ushered in radio’s golden age. Although the 1929 – 1939 Great
Depression damaged the phonograph industry, with sales dipping to as few as 6 million
records in 1932, it helped boost radio. Phonographs and records cost money, but once a
family bought a radio, a whole world of entertainment and information was at its
disposal, free of charge. The number of homes with radios grew from 12 million in 1930
to 30 million in 1940, and half of them had not one but two receivers. Ad revenues rose
from $40 million to $155 million over the same period. Between them, the four national
networks broadcast 156 hours of network-originated programming a week. New genres
became fixtures during this period: comedy (The Jack Benny Show, Fibber McGee and
Molly), audience participation (Professor Quiz, Truth or Consequences), children’s
shows (Little Orphan Annie, The Lone Ranger), soap operas (Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins,
The Guiding Light), and drama (Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater of the Air). News, too,
became a radio staple.
The golden age of radio shone even more brightly as the United States entered
World War II in 1941. Radio was used to sell war bonds, and much content was aimed at
boosting the nation’s morale. The war increased the desire for news, especially from
abroad. The conflict also caused a paper shortage, reducing advertising space in
newspapers. No new stations were licensed during the war years, and the 950 existing
broadcasters reaped all the broadcast advertising revenues, as well as additional ad
revenues that otherwise would have gone to newspapers. When the war ended and radio
licenses were granted again, the number of stations grew rapidly to 2,000. Annual ad
revenues reached $454 million in 1950. Then came television. Network affiliation
dropped from 97% in 1945 to 50% by the mid-1950s, as stations “went local” in the face
of television’s national dominance. National radio advertising income dipped to $35
million in 1960, the year that television found its way into 90% of U.S. homes. If radio
were to survive, it would have to find new functions.
B. Radio
Radio more than survived; it prospered by changing the nature of its relationship
with its audiences. The easiest way to understand this is to see pretelevision radio as
television is today—nationally oriented, broadcasting an array of recognizable
entertainment program formats, populated by well-known stars and personalities, and
consumed primarily in the home, typically with people sitting around the set.
Posttelevision radio is local, fragmented, specialized, personal, and mobile. Whereas
pretelevision radio was characterized by the big national networks, today’s radio is
dominated by formats, a particular sound characteristic of a local station.
There are 15,508 broadcast radio stations operating in the United States today:
4,671 commercial AM stations, 6,737 commercial FM stations, and 4,100
noncommercial FM stations. These are joined on the dial by 1,609 low power FM
(LPFM) stations. There are more than two radios for every person in the United States.
The industry as a whole sells more than $17 billion a year of ad time, and radio remains
people’s primary means of consuming audio content.
Although FMs constitute 60% of all commercial stations (to AMs’ 40%), as much
as 85% of all listening is on FM. In fact, from 2015 to 2016, while the numbers of
commercial, noncommercial, and low power FM stations all increased, the number of
AM stations actually decreased (Federal Communications Commission, 2016). This has
to do with the technology behind each. The FM (frequency modulation) signal is wider,
allowing the broadcast not only of stereo (sound perceived from multiple channels, for
example bass and drums from the left speaker and guitars and vocals from the right) but
also of better fidelity to the original sound than the narrower AM (amplitude modulation)
signal. As a result, people attracted to music gravitate toward FM. People favoring news,
sports, and information tend to find themselves listening to the AM dial. AM signals
travel farther than FM signals, making them perfect for rural parts of the country. But
rural areas tend to be less heavily populated, and most AM stations serve fewer listeners.
No longer able to compete with television for the national audience in the 1950s,
radio began to attract a local audience. Because it costs much more to run a local
television station than a local radio station, advertising rates on radio tend to be much
lower than on television. Local advertisers can afford radio more easily than they can
television, which increases the local flavor of radio. And radio can be localized even
more narrowly than by city or town. For example, Chicago’s two airports are served by a
round-the-clock station, AIR Chicago.
Radio stations are widely distributed throughout the United States. Virtually every
town— even those with only a few hundred residents—has at least one station. The
number of stations licensed in an area is a function of both population and proximity to
other towns. Small towns may have only one AM or FM station, and a big city can have
as many as 40 stations. This fragmentation—many stations serving many areas—makes
possible contemporary radio’s most important characteristic, its ability to specialize.
When radio became a local medium, it could no longer program the expensive,
star-filled genres of its golden age. The problem now was how to program a station with
interesting content and do so economically. A disc jockey (DJ) playing records was the
best solution. Stations soon learned that a highly specialized, specific audience of
particular interest to certain advertisers could be attracted with specific types of music.
Format radio was born. Of course, choosing a specific format means accepting that many
potential listeners will not tune in. But in format radio, the size of the audience is
secondary to its composition.
With the advent of television, the relationship of radio with its audience changed.
Whereas families had previously gathered around the radio to listen together, we now
listen to the radio alone. We select personally pleasing formats, and we listen as an
adjunct to other personally important activities. The mobility of radio accounts in large
part for its personal nature. We can listen anywhere, at any time. We listen at work, while
exercising, or while sitting in the sun. By 1947 the combined sale of car and alarm clock
radios exceeded that of traditional livingroom receivers, and in 1951 the annual
production of car radios exceeded that of home receivers for the first time. Today, nearly
three-quarters of all traditional radio listening occurs away from home; and in the car,
where most listening occurs, AM/FM radio rules the road.
C. The Business of Radio
Advertisers enjoy the specialization of radio because it gives them access to
homogeneous groups of listeners to whom products can be pitched. Income earned from
the sale of airtime s called billings. Local time and national spots (for example, Prestone
Antifreeze buys time on several thousand stations in winter areas) account for 97% of all
billings; network time makes up the rest (Sass, 2015). The cost of time is based on the
ratings, the percentage of the total available audience reached.
The business of radio is being altered by deregulation and changes in ownership
rules. To ensure that there were many different perspectives in the cultural forum, the
FCC had long limited the number of radio stations one person or company could own to
one AM and one FM locally and seven AMs and seven FMs nationally. These numbers
were revised upward in the late 1980s, and controls were almost totally eliminated by the
Telecommunications Act of 1996. Now, due to this deregulation, there are no national
ownership limits, and one person or company can own as many as eight stations in one
area, depending on the size of the market. This situation has allowed duopoly—one
person or company owning and managing multiple radio stations in a single market—to
explode. Since the passage of the 1996 act, more than 10,000 radio stations have been
sold, and there are now 1,100 fewer station owners, a 30% decline. The vast majority of
these sales have been to alreadylarge radio groups such as iHeart Media and Cumulus,
with 850 and 459 stations, respectively. As a result, in 25 of the 50 largest radio markets,
three companies claim 80% of all listeners. In over 40 cities, one-third of the radio
stations are owned by a single company, leading insiders to identify the industry’s two
biggest problems not as competition from new digital technologies, but first, “control of
the industry in the hands of a few giants” and a close second, “decline of local radio with
its deep communities ties”.
When the DJs and Top 40 format saved radio in the 1950s, they also changed for
all time popular music and, by extension, the recording industry. Disc jockeys were
color-deaf in their selection of records. They introduced record buyers to rhythm ’n’
blues in the music of African American artists such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
Until the mid-1950s, the work of these performers had to be covered—rerecorded by
white artists such as Perry Como—before it was aired. Teens loved the new sound,
however, and it became the foundation of their own subculture, as well as the basis for
the explosion in recorded music. See the essay “Rock ’n’ Roll, Radio, and Race
Relations” for more on rock’s roots.
Cultural homogenization is the worrisome outcome of virtually all the world’s
influential recording being controlled by a few profit-oriented giants. If bands or artists
cannot immediately deliver the goods, they aren’t signed. So derivative artists and
manufactured groups dominate—for example, Miley Cyrus and One Direction.
Moreover, popular music is increasingly the product not of individual genius or artistry
but of mathematical songwriting, songs written specifically to be commercial hits. They
are “written to track, which means a producer makes a beat. Then a songwriter listens to
it and attempts to generate words that fit that beat, sometimes singing nonsense until the
language begins to take shape. It’s more about how lyrics sound than what they mean.
This has become a bedrock part of the industry.
We have seen how television fundamentally altered radio’s structure and
relationship with its audiences. Television, specifically the cable channel MTV, changed
the recording industry, too. MTV’s introduction in 1981 helped pull the industry out of its
disastrous 1979 slump, but at a price. First, the look of concerts has changed. No longer is
it sufficient to pack an artist or group into a hall or stadium with a few thousand
screaming fans. Now a concert must be an extravagant multimedia event approximating
the sophistication of a music video. The set for Lady Gaga’s recent “Born This Way
Ball” tour, for example, required 15 moving trucks to haul it from venue to venue. This
means that fewer acts take to the road, changing the relationship between musicians and
fans. Second, the radio–recording industry relationship has changed. Even as MTV began
to program fewer and fewer music videos, record companies grew even more reliant on
television to introduce new music. For example, labels now time. For example, labels
now time record releases to artists’ television appearances, and new and old tunes alike
find heavy play on television shows. American Idol contestants and the cast of Glee sold
tens of millions of songs before both shows left the air (Barker, 2014), with newer
programs such as America’s Got Talent, Star, Empire, and Nashville taking their place
introducing and selling music to fans. And if television has become the new radio, so has
the Internet.
The convergence of radio and satellite has aided the rebirth of the radio networks.
Music and other forms of radio content can be distributed quite inexpensively to
thousands of stations. As a result, one “network” can provide very different services to its
very different affiliates. Sports broadcaster ESPN, for example, maintains its own radio
network, and Westwood One distributes the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40. In addition,
Westwood One, through its syndication operations, delivers thousands of varied network
and program syndication services to almost every commercial station in the country. The
low cost of producing radio programming, however, makes the establishment of other,
even more specialized networks possible. Satellites, and sometimes now fiber optic
Internet, make access to syndicated content and formats affordable for many stations.
Syndicators can deliver news, top 10 shows, and other content to stations on a market-by-
market basis. They can also provide entire formats, requiring local stations, if they wish,
to do little more than insert commercials into what sounds to listeners to be a local
broadcast.
Radio’s convergence with digital technologies is nowhere more pronounced and
potentially profound than in Web radio, the delivery of “radio” directly to individual
listeners over the Internet, and in podcasting, streaming or downloading of audio files
recorded and stored on distant servers. First, we’ll discuss Web radio. Tens of thousands
of “radio stations” exist on the Web in one of two forms: radio simulcasts and bitcasters.
Radio simulcasts are traditional, overthe-air stations transmitting their signals online.
Some simply re-create their original broadcasts, but more often, the simulcast includes
additional information, such as song lyrics or artists’ biographical information and
concert dates. Bitcasters, Web-only radio stations, can be accessed only online. There are
narrowly targeted bitcasts, such as Indie 103.1, a Los Angeles alternative rock station,
and allworship.com, a Christian station webcasting from Birmingham, Alabama. But the
most dramatic evidence of the popularity of bitcasting exists in the success of the scores
of streaming services that allow the simultaneous downloading and accessing of music.
D. The Internet and the Future of the Recording Industry
In the 1970s the basis of the recording industry changed from analog to digital
recording. That is, sound went from being preserved as waves, whether physically on a
disc or tape, to conversion into 1s and 0s logged in millisecond intervals in a
computerized translation process. When replayed at the proper speed, the resulting sound
was not only continuous but pristine—no hum, no hiss. The CD, or compact disc, was
introduced in 1983 using digital coding on a 4.7-inch disc read by a laser beam. In 1986
“Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits became the first million-selling CD. In 1988 the sale
of CDs surpassed that of vinyl discs for the first time; by 1999 they accounted for 88% of
industry revenues; today, CDs account for only 22% of that income.
The Internet music revolution began with the development of MP3, compression
software that shrinks audio files to less than a tenth of their original size. Originally
developed in 1987 in Germany, it began to take off in the early 1990s as more users
began to hook up to the Internet with increasingly faster modems. This open source
software, or freely downloaded software, permits users to download recorded music.
Today, given the near-universal presence of computers, smartphones, and tablets, rare is
the American— especially young American—who cannot access online music.
Rather than embrace MP3, the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA), representing all of the United States’s major labels, responded to the threat by
developing their own “secure” Internet technology, but by the time it was available for
release it was too late: MP3, driven by its availability and ease of use, had become the
technology of choice for music fans already unhappy with the high cost of CDs and the
necessity of paying for tracks they didn’t want in order to get the ones they did. “The
industry thought it was selling music,” industry analyst James McQuivey explains. “It
was really selling physical objects containing music—CDs—and it wasn’t prepared for
people buying fewer of them” (in Sommer, 2014, p. BU1). The CD is quickly going the
way of the audio tape and 8-track cartridge. It has been replaced by the download.
Downloading occurs in two forms: industry-approved and P2P (peer-to-peer).
Illegal file sharing proved the popularity of downloading music from the Internet.
So the four major labels combined to offer “approved” music download sites. None did
well. They offered downloads by subscription, that is, a certain number of downloads per
month for a set fee. In addition, they placed encrypted messages in the tunes that limited
how long the song would be playable and where the download could be used and copied.
As a result, illegal file sharing continued. But it was Apple’s 2003 introduction of its iPod
and iTunes Music Store that suggested a better strategy. Yes, Apple ceased production of
the iPod in 2014, largely because of the ubiquity of other mobile music devices, but it
taught fans that they could simply buy and own albums and individual songs for as little
as 99 cents. Apple controlled only 5% of the PC market, yet it sold over a million tunes in
its first week of operation, signaling the inevitability of the cyber revolution.
Still, the major labels insisted that their music be downloaded with copy
protection built in. But when Sony became the last of the major labels to relent,
announcing in 2008 that it would allow the sale of much of its catalog free of copy
protection, the distribution and sale of music by Internet became standard, aided by the
2009 announcement from the world’s leading music retailer, iTunes, that it would sell
downloads from its 10-million-title catalog without antipiracy restrictions. There are now
hundreds of legally licensed sites selling tens of millions of different music tracks. Digital
music sales surpassed physical sales for the first time in 2011, and the CD’s 9% share of
sales is a far cry from its dominance of 60% to 70% of all sales just a few years ago. In
fact, downloads now account for 34% of the U.S. music industry’s recording revenues.
And as you read earlier, streaming services like Slacker, Amazon.
Despite the availability of industry-approved music downloads, illegal
downloading still occurs. The 53 million U.S. Internet users who admit to piracy annually
download as much as $20 billion worth of digitally pirated recorded music (Resnikoff,
2016). Sites such as Gnutella and Freenet use P2P technologies, that is, peer-to-peer
software that permits direct Internet-based communication or collaboration between two
or more personal computers while bypassing centralized servers. P2P allows users to visit
a constantly and infinitely changing network of machines through which file sharing can
occur. The record companies (and movie studios) challenged P2P by suing the makers of
its software. In 2005, the Supreme Court, in MGM v. Grokster, unanimously supported
industry arguments that P2P software, because it “encouraged” copyright infringement,
rendered its makers liable for that illegal act. The industry’s next challenge, then, is
BitTorrent, filesharing software that allows anonymous users to create “swarms” of data
as they simultaneously download and upload “bits” of a given piece of content from
countless untraceable servers. And while these P2P sharing sites account for the large
majority of music theft, their share, once as high as 99%, is being eroded by another form
of piracy, stream ripping—saving streamed media to a file on a personal device to be
accessed locally —from sites like YouTube and music streaming sites. Half of 16- to 24-
year-olds admit to regularly stream ripping.
E. Television
Television has changed the way teachers teach, governments govern, and
religious leaders preach, and shaped how we organize the furniture in our homes.
Television has changed the nature, operation, and relationship to their audiences of
books, magazines, movies, and radio. Television even shapes how we think of the
Internet. Will the promise of the Web be drowned in a sea of commercials? Can online
news services deliver faster, better, and more accurate information than television? Even
the computer screens we use look like television screens; we participate in online video
conferencing, play new and improved online video games, and of course, stream hours
and hours of video. Before we delve deeper into the nature of this powerful medium and
its relationship with its audience, let’s examine how television developed as it did.
In 1884 Paul Nipkow, a Russian scientist living in Berlin, developed the first
workable device for generating electrical signals suitable for the transmission of a scene
that people could see. His Nipkow disc consisted of a rotating scanning disc spinning in
front of a photoelectric cell. It produced 4,000 pixels (picture dots) per second, producing
a picture composed of 18 parallel lines. Although his mechanical system proved too
limiting, Nipkow demonstrated the possibility of using a scanning system to divide a
scene into an orderly pattern of transmittable picture elements that could be recomposed
as a visual image. British inventor John Logie Baird was able to transmit moving images
using a mechanical disc as early as 1925, and in 1928 he successfully sent a television
picture from London to Hartsdale, New York.
Throughout the 1950s the networks served primarily as time brokers, offering
airtime and distribution (their affiliates) and accepting payment for access to both. Except
for their own news and sports coverage, the networks relied on outside agencies to
provide programs. An advertising agency, for example, would hire a production company
to produce a program for its client. That client would then be the show’s sponsor—The
Kraft Television Theatre and Westinghouse Studio One are two examples. The agency
would then pay a network to air the program over its national collection of stations. This
system had enriched the networks during the heyday of radio, and they saw no reason to
change.
In 1951 CBS asked Lucille Ball to move her hit radio program, My Favorite
Husband, to television. Lucy was willing but wanted her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, to
play the part of her on-air spouse. The network refused (some historians say the network
objected to the prime-time presentation of an interracial marriage—Desi Arnaz was
Cuban—but CBS denies this). But Lucy made additional demands. Television
programming at the time was broadcast live: Images were typically captured by three
large television cameras, with a director in a booth choosing among the three available
images. Lucy wanted her program produced in the same manner—in front of a live
audience with three simultaneously running cameras—but these cameras would be film
cameras. Editors could then review the three sets of film and edit them together to give
the best combination of action and reaction shots. Lucy also wanted the production to
take place in Hollywood, the nation’s film capital, instead of New York, the television
center at the time.
The Red Scare that cowed the movie business also touched television, aided by
the publication in 1950 of Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio
and Television, the work of three former FBI agents operating a company called
American Business Consultants. Its 200 pages detailed the alleged pro-Communist
sympathies of 151 broadcast personalities, including Orson Welles and journalist Howard
K. Smith. Advertisers were encouraged to avoid buying time from broadcasters who
employed these “Red sympathizers.” Like the movie studios, the television industry
caved in. The networks employed security checkers to look into people’s backgrounds,
refused to hire suspect talent, and demanded loyalty oaths from performers. In its infancy,
television had taken the safe path. Many gifted artists were denied not only a paycheck
but also the opportunity to shape the medium’s content.
The concept of measuring audience was carried over from radio to television, but
the ratings as we know them today are far more sophisticated (see the chapter on radio,
recording, and popular music for more on ratings). The A. C. Nielsen Company began in
1923 as a product-testing company but soon branched into market research. In 1936
Nielsen started reporting radio ratings and was doing the same for television by 1950. To
produce the ratings today, Nielsen selects 41,000 households, about 100,000 people,
thought to be representative of the entire U.S. viewing audience. To record data on what
people in those TV households are watching, Nielsen employs the Global Television
Audience Metering (GTAM) meter, which actively (requiring viewer input) and
passively (automatically reading digital codes embedded in video content) measures
viewing as people, with increasing mobility, consume video on a growing array of
technologies. The data are then sent to Nielsen via the Internet, and the company
determines the programs watched, who watched them, and the amount of time each
viewer spent with them. But the same convergence that required the development of the
GTAM meter is upsetting the business of audience measurement in many ways. In fact,
many television and advertising people see the ratings as worthless, “a relic of
television’s rabbit-ears past” on which more than $70 billion in aid money a year is
traded.
In 1948 in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, appliance sales representative John
Walson was having trouble selling televisions. The Pocono Mountains sat between his
town and Philadelphia’s three new stations. But Walson was also a powerline worker, so
he convinced his bosses to let him run a wire to his store from a tower he erected on New
Boston Mountain. As more and more people became aware of his system, he began
wiring the homes of customers who bought his sets. In June of that year, Walson had 727
subscribers for his community antenna television (CATV) system (Chin, 1978). Although
no one calls it CATV anymore, cable television was born.
The 1960s saw some refinement in the technical structure of television, which
influenced its organization and audience. In 1962 Congress passed all-channel legislation,
which required that all sets imported into or manufactured in the United States be
equipped with both VHF and UHF receivers. This had little immediate impact; U.S.
viewers were now hooked on the three national networks and their VHF affiliates. Still,
UHF independents and educational stations were able to at least attract some semblance
of an audience. The UHF independents would have to wait for the coming of cable to
give them clout. Now that the educational stations were attracting more viewers, they
began to look less educational in the strictest sense of the word and began programming
more entertaining cultural fare (see the essay “The Creation of Sesame Street”). The
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 united the educational stations into an important
network, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which today has 350 member stations.
Today, as it has been from the beginning, the business of broadcast television is
dominated by a few centralized production, distribution, and decision-making
organizations. These networks link affiliates for the purpose of delivering and selling
viewers to advertisers. The large majority of the 1,387 commercial stations in the United
States are affiliated with a national broadcasting network: ABC, NBC, and CBS each
have over 200 affiliates, and Fox has close to that number. Many more stations are
affiliated with the CW Network, jointly owned by CBS and Warner Bros. Entertainment.
Although cable has introduced us to dozens of popular cable networks—ESPN, MTV,
Comedy Central, and A&E, to name a few—for decades most programs that came to
mind when we thought of television were either conceived, approved, funded, produced,
or distributed by the broadcast networks. Although, as you read at this chapter’s outset,
that’s quickly changing. More on that soon.
Networks control what appears on the vast majority of local television stations,
but they also control what appears on non-network television, that is, when affiliates
program their own content. In addition, they influence what appears on independent
stations and on cable channels. This non-network material not only tends to be network-
type programming but most often is programming that originally aired on the networks
themselves (called offnetwork programs).
The national broadcast and cable networks look at about 4,000 proposals a year
for new television series. Many, if not most, are submitted at the networks’ invitation or
instigation. Of the 4,000, about 90 will be filmed as pilots, or trial programs, at a cost of
$3 million for a 30-minute pilot to $7 million for an hour drama. Perhaps 20 to 30 will
become one of the 400 scripted series on air at any time. The networks spend over $500
million a season to suffer this process. For this reason, they prefer to see ideas from
producers with established track records and financial and organizational stability—for
example, Jerry Bruckheimer is the source of CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, The Amazing
Race, Cold Case, and Without a Trace in addition to nearly 20 other prime-time series
aired in recent years.
F. Cable and Satellite Television
John Walson’s brainchild reshaped the face of modern television. During cable’s
infancy, many over-the-air broadcasters saw it as something of a friend. It extended their
reach, boosting both audience size and profits. Then, in November 1972, Sterling
Manhattan Cable launched a new channel called Home Box Office. Only a handful of
homes caught the debut of what we now call HBO, but broadcasters’ mild concern over
this development turned to outright antagonism toward cable in 1975, when new HBO
owner Time Inc. began distributing the movie channel by satellite. Now premium cable
was eating into the broadcasters’ audience by offering high-quality, nationally produced
and distributed content. The public enthusiastically embraced cable, which, coupled with
the widespread diffusion of fiber optic cable (the transmission of signals by light beam
over glass, permitting the delivery of hundreds of channels), brought the medium to
maturity.
Cable’s share of the prime-time audience exceeded that of the Big Four broadcast
networks for the first time in 2002. Its total audience share has exceeded that of ABC,
CBS, NBC, and Fox every year since. What attracts these viewers is programming, a fact
highlighted by two pieces of recent industry data: cable shows annually garner the
majority of all prime time Emmy Awards nominations (HBO’s Game of Thrones earned
38 Emmy Awards in 2016, an industry record for a single show), and cable viewing
exceeds network viewing for every single American age demographic.
G In recognition of the growing dependence of the public on cable delivery of
broadcast service as the spread of cable increased, Congress passed the Cable Television
Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992. This law requires operators to offer a
truly basic service composed of the broadcast stations in their area and their public access
channels. Cable operators also offer another form of basic service, expanded basic cable,
composed primarily of local broadcast stations and services with broad appeal such as
TBS, TNT, the USA Network, and Comedy Central. These networks offer a wide array
of programming not unlike that found on the traditional, over-the-air broadcast networks.
Ad-supported cable networks such as these want to be on cable’s basic tiers because
sponsors covet those large potential audiences. This is the dispute, for example, at the
heart of the NFL Network’s frequent battles with many of the nation’s cable operators.
Most operators want to put the network on a premium tier to attract more subscribers.
NFL Network wants placement on basic cable where more viewers means more ad
dollars.
As the FCC lifted restrictions on cable’s freedom to import distant signals and to
show current movies, HBO grew and was joined by a host of other satellitedelivered pay
networks. Today, among the most familiar and popular premium cable networks are
HBO, Showtime, Sundance Channel, and Cinemax. In addition to freedom from
regulatory constraint, two important programming discoveries ensured the success of the
new premium channels. After television’s early experiments with over-the-air
subscription TV failed, many experts believed people simply would not pay for
television. So the first crucial discovery was that viewers would indeed pay for packages
of contemporary, popular movies. These movie packages could be sold less expensively
than could films bought one at a time, and viewers were willing to be billed on a monthly
basis for the whole package rather than pay for each viewing.
The long-standing relationship between television and its audiences is being
redefined. This profound change, initially wrought by cable and satellite, has been and is
being driven by other technologies as well—VCR, DVD, DVR, the Internet, digitization,
and even the smartphone. Introduced commercially in 1976, videocassette recorders
(VCRs) quickly became common in American homes but were declared dead in 2016 as
the last manufacturer, Japan’s Funai Electronics, ceased production. Still, in its prime,
this technology further eroded the audience for traditional over-the-air television, as
people, for the first time, could now watch rented and purchased videos on their own
schedules. VCR also introduced the public to time-shifting, taping a show for later
viewing, and zipping, fast-forwarding through taped commercials. As a result, people
became comfortable with, and in fact came to expect, more control over when, what, and
how they watched television.
In March 1996 the digital video disc (DVD) went on sale in U.S. stores. Using a
DVD, viewers can stop images with no loss of fidelity; can subtitle a movie in a number
of languages; can search for specific scenes from an on-screen menu; and can access
bonus features that give background on the movie, its production, and its personnel.
Scenes and music not used in the theatrical release of a movie are often included on the
disc.
DVR does not deliver programming the way broadcasters, cablecasters, and DBS
systems do. Rather, it is employed in addition to these content providers. Both DBS
providers and almost every MSO now offer low-cost DVR as part of their technology
platform, significantly hastening its diffusion into American homes. Today, about half of
all TV households have DVR. Naturally, traditional broadcast and ad-supported cable
networks found the rapid diffusion of DVR troubling, and while it is true that DVR
dramatically changed television viewing as we knew it, it has not had as negative an
effect on those traditional programming sources as originally anticipated. While DVR
does allow viewers to fast-forward through commercials, we saw earlier in this chapter
that traditional broadcasters rely on DVR playback to boost their ratings and therefore
profits.
Television on the Internet was slow to take off because of copyright and piracy
concerns, and because few viewers had sufficient bandwidth, space on the wires bringing
content into their homes. So for several years the most typical video fare on the Internet
was a variety of short specialty transmissions such as movie trailers, music videos, and
news clips. But the development of increasingly sophisticated video compression
software and the parallel rise of homes with broadband Internet connections (73% of all
U.S. Internet homes have broadband; Smith, 2017) have changed that. Because
broadband offers greater information-carrying capacity (that is, it increased bandwidth),
watching true television on the Internet is now common. Much of that viewing is of
content that originated on network and cable television, but much is also Web-only video.
The Internet is not the only technology that permits interactivity. Cable and
satellite also allow viewers to “talk back” to content providers. But it is digital cable
television, the delivery of digital images and other information to subscribers, that offers
the truest form of interactive television. There are 61 million digital cable subscribers in
the United States (Internet & Television Association, 2017). Cable’s digital channels
permit multiplexing, carrying two or more different signals over the same channel. This,
in turn, is made possible by digital compression, which “squeezes” signals to permit
multiple signals to be carried over one channel. Digital compression works by removing
redundant information from the transmission of the signal. For example, the set behind
two actors in a movie scene might not change for several minutes. So why transmit the
information that the set is there? Simply transmit the digital data that indicate what has
changed in the scene, not what has not.
Another service offered by many MSOs is phone service over cable wires.
Currently there are 31 million cable-delivered residential telephone subscribers (Internet
& Television Association, 2017). Phone-over-cable offers a special benefit to MSOs. If
telephone service can be delivered by the same cable that brings television into the home,
so too can the Internet. And what’s more, if the cable line is broadband and capable of
handling digitally compressed data, that Internet service can be even faster than the
service provided over traditional phone lines. Cable, in other words, can become a one-
stop communications provider: television, VOD, audio, high-speed Internet access, long-
distance and local phone service, multiple phone lines, and fax.
Smartphones and tablets (and all contemporary handheld video game consoles)
have made television watching an anywhere, anytime activity. We’ve already seen that
watching streamed video on mobile devices is now quite routine, but it is likely to
become even more common as social networking sites increase their commitment to
video. Twitter live streams NBA basketball games. The league has also developed
original programming for the site, which also live streams, among other content, NFL
football games, Wimbledon tennis matches, CBS News, the NHL, major league baseball,
and the Pac-12 Network. In 2016 Twitter live streamed the Republican and Democratic
national conventions. Facebook Live streams professional soccer and the U.S. men’s and
women’s national basketball teams. In addition, all the major professional sports leagues
offer free apps that let mobile users access their content while on the go.
G. Video Games
Carnival man David Gottlieb invented the first mass-produced arcade game, Baf
le Ball, in 1931. A small wooden cabinet, it had only one moving part, a plunger. Players
would launch a ball into the playing field, a slanted surface with metal “pins”
surrounding “scoring holes.” The object was to get the ball into one of the holes. Gottlieb
was soon manufacturing 400 cabinets a day. Just as quickly, he had many imitators. One,
Harry Williams, invented Contact, the first electronic pinball game. Williams was an
engineer, and his 1933 gaming innovations were electronic scoring (Baf le Ball players
had to keep their scores in their heads) and scoring holes, or pockets, that threw the ball
back into the playing field (in Baf le Ball, when a ball dropped into a hole it was gone).
The popularity of arcade games exploded, and players’ enthusiasm was fueled even more
when slot-machine makers entered the field, producing games with cash payouts. With
the Depression in full force in the 1930s, however, civic leaders were not much in favor
of this development, and several locales, most notably New York City, banned the
games. Pinball was considered gambling.
(see the chapter on the Internet and social media). Most displayed their output on
paper in the form of teletype. But the very best, most advanced computers, those
designed for military research and analysis, were a bit sleeker and had monitors for
output display. Only three universities—MIT, the University of Utah, and Stanford—and
a few dedicated research installations had these machines. At MIT, a group of self-
described nerds, the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), began writing programs for fun
for a military computer. Club members would leave their work next to the computer so
that others could build on what had come before. One member, Steve Russell, decided to
write the ultimate program, an interactive game. It took him 200 hours over six months to
produce the first interactive computer game, Spacewar, completed in 1961. This version
featured toggle switches that controlled the speed and direction of two spaceships and the
torpedoes they fired at each other. His final version, completed the next year, had an
accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with a mathematically precise
gravitational field that influenced play. Russell and his club-mates even built remote
control units with switches for every game function, the first game pad. “We thought
about trying to make money off it for two or three days but concluded that there wasn’t a
way that it could be done,” said Russell.
What followed, partly as a result of the swift advance of the microchip and
computer industries (and a healthy dose of technological genius from a thriving game
industry in Japan), was a rapid-fire succession of innovation and development. In 1975
Atari, by marketing Home Pong through Sears, made its first steps toward bringing
arcade games into the home. Its 1980 release of home Space Invaders cemented the trend.
Also in 1975, Midway began importing Gunfight from Japanese manufacturer Taito.
Gunfight was significant for two reasons. Although Sega, with Periscope, began
importing arcade games into the United States in 1966, Gunfight was the first imported
video game. It was also the first game to use a computer microprocessor. In 1976,
Fairchild Camera and Instrument introduced Channel F, the first programmable,
cartridge-based home game. Mattel Toys brought true electronic games to handheld
devices in 1977, with titles like Missile Attack, Auto Race, and Football played on
handheld, calculator-sized LED (light-emitting diode), and LCD (liquid crystal display),
screens. In 1979 Milton Bradley released Microvision, the first programmable handheld
game system. Two Japanese arcade imports, Namco’s Pac-Man in 1980 and Nintendo’s
Donkey Kong in 1981, became instant classics, all-time best sellers, and with the
introduction of Nintendo’s groundbreaking game console NES in 1985, home-version
successes. The Japanese company further advanced gaming with its 1986 release of home
console game Legend of Zelda, revolutionary because it introduced open structure play—
that is, players could go wherever they wanted and there were multiple routes to winning,
now standard in modern games.
Two-thirds of all American households are home to at least one person who
regularly plays video games, that is, for 3 or more hours a week (Entertainment Software
Association, 2016). But before we look at these people a bit more closely, we need to
define exactly what constitutes a video game. As technologies converge, the same game
can be played on an increasing number of platforms. Myst, for example, was originally a
computer game written for Macintosh computers, then IBM PCs, then external CD-ROM
drives, and then video-game consoles such as PlayStation. Now it can be played online.
Versions of Donkey Kong can be played in arcades and on consoles, on the Internet, on
Macs and PCs, and on handheld game consoles. Q*bert can be played on arcade
machines and on collectible Nelsonic game wrist watches. Thousands of games can be
played on smartphones and tablets. For our purposes, then, a game is a video game when
the action of the game takes place interactively onscreen. By this definition, an online
text-based game such as a MUD (multiuser dimension), which has no moving images
(games like 1977’s Zork and 2016’s Azereth), is a video game, but the home version of
Trivial Pursuit, employing a DVD to offer video hints to those playing the board game, is
not.
Players in the United States spend more than $16.5 billion a year on game
content, another $4.9 billion on hardware, and $2.1 billion more on accessories
(Entertainment Software Association, 2016). Globally, gaming is a $100 billion-a-year
industry, overshadowing all other forms of entertainment (Gilsdorf, 2016). A
championship video-game tournament can easily draw 70,000 live spectators, and more
than 70 million people across the globe watch high-level game play on the Internet—as
many as 8 million at the same time—an audience sufficiently large to encourage Amazon
to buy Twitch, a game streaming site with 9.7 million active daily viewers who watch on
average 106 minutes a day (Schultz, 2017). Several college sports conferences, for
example, the Big Ten, sanction intercollegiate esports, streamed online game
competition. Half of YouTube’s top 100 channels are gaming-focused, as is every one of
its top 10 (“Most Popular,” 2016). Grand Theft Auto V made $1 billion in 3 days in 2013,
14 days faster than the amount of time it took the movie Avatar to make $1 billion, and
16 days faster than it took the film The Avengers to reach the same goal; it earned $800
million in its first day, selling 16.5 million units, both records.
A serious problem faced by third-party game creators is that, as in the more
traditional media, especially film, production and marketing costs are skyrocketing. Not
only has the production technology itself become more sophisticated and therefore
expensive, but games, like movie franchises build followings. Given that, the creative
forces behind them can demand more recognition and compensation. In 2001, the average
game cost $5 million to produce and $2 million to promote. Today, the cost of
development alone averages between $25 and $50 million, and a blockbuster like
Destiny, with its musical score by Paul McCartney, cost $500 million to produce (but
consider that Destiny returned that much in sales in its first 24 hours on the market;
Graser, 2014). Again, as with film, industry insiders and fans are expressing concern over
the industry’s reliance on sequels of franchises and licensed content, including movie-
and television-based games. For example, there are over 100 different Mario games, and
money is increasingly diverted to pay for licensed properties like James Bond 007 and
Spider-Man.
Cable television giants Comcast and Cox each offer game services for their
broadband customers; both direct broadcast satellite (DBS) providers also offer
interactive game services. Most Internet service providers offer some form of online
interactive games (see the chapter on the Internet and social media). AOL Games, for
example, provides scores of games from designers such as EA Sports and Funkitron.
Newspapers USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times maintain
gaming platforms to foster loyalty, sell advertising, and connect with their readers.
Games account for 15% of the sponsored material on gossip/news site BuzzFeed
(Willens, 2016). Many game makers, too, offer online interactive gaming. EA’s
Pogo.com offers board, puzzle, word, casino, sports, and card games (some for free and
some for a fee) and can be linked to your Facebook account. Facebook itself provides
Instant Games to its 650 million game players through their New Feeds and Messenger.
As smaller, faster, more powerful microprocessors were developed and found
their way into game consoles, the distinction between game consoles and personal
computers began to disappear. A game console with high-speed microprocessors attached
to a television set is, for all intents and purposes, a computer and monitor. As the
distinction between the technologies on which games are played has diminished, players’
willingness to play games on different platforms has grown. Demographics help account
for this trend. Today’s typical high school and college-age players have grown up with
computer, console, and handheld games as routine parts of their lives; they have a
lifetime of familiarity with playing interactive games. In addition, especially since the
relatively recent introduction of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, they are
largely platform agnostic in their choice of game platform. In fact, there may be no better
evidence of people’s comfort playing games across a variety of technologies than that
which resides in the smartphone you most probably already use. As it is, 78% of all U.S.
smartphone users play games on their devices.
Smartphones and tablets are revolutionizing the video-game industry. In 2015
worldwide revenues from mobile gaming—$30 billion—overtook those from console
gaming—$26 billion—for the first time (Gaudiosi, 2015), and mobile gaming is expected
to account for 42% of industry revenue by 2020 (O’Malley, 2016b). Hugely popular
mobile locationbased Pokémon Go, for example, has 500 million downloads, has 20
million active daily users, and generates $2 million a day from in-game purchases for
developer Nintendo who, based on the game’s massive early success, saw its stock price
rise 90%, adding more than $15 billion to the company’s value.
H. Hypercommercialism
Hypercommercialism has come to all media. Advertisers’ desire to find new
outlets for their messages and avoid the advertising clutter in traditional media has
combined with gamers’ attractive, segmented demographics to make video games
particularly appealing vehicles for many types of commercial and other persuasive
campaigns. Advertisers have come to think of games as much like magazines.
Different titles attract different demographics—Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft
Auto draw different players than do Spider-Man and Viva Piñata. Another reason
advertisers are attracted to online games is that they are sticky. Players tend to stay (stick)
with a game site longer than with other websites. Players don’t just “visit” sites so much
as they seek them out to stay and play a while. Sponsors—and the games they advertise
on—hope to monetize this attention. Regardless of the platform, industry research
indicates the average console or online gamer spends two to four hours playing a single
game in a single sitting. Sponsors use games to reach their targets in four ways—product
placement, freemium games, advergaming, and advocacy gaming.
Advertisers like product placement for several reasons. First, a product used in a
game is there forever—every time the game is played, the advertiser’s brand appears.
Second, the placement is not only permanent, it’s DVR-proof; it can’t be skipped. Third,
a brand’s association with a game renders it “cool,” but equally important, games’
interactivity creates a stronger emotional connection and therefore a more positive
association for players with brands—more so, for example, than simply viewing a TV
spot. Fourth, players don’t seem to mind the ads and even welcome them if it means a
game costs less or can be played online for free (Handrahan, 2016). Fifth, they are
effective, and that effectiveness can be measured for online games because the response,
clicking through to the sponsor, can be precisely measured. And finally, where in-game
ads were once static —a billboard atop a building or a logo on the side of a race car—
today’s online game product placements are dynamic, that is, a sponsor can alter them
remotely and on the fly, tailoring them to players’ specific real-life locations and times of
day.
Even more deeply integrating products into games are freemium games, in which
consuming advertising or even spending actual cash allows players to progress in their
play. Freemiums happen in a number of ways. In some games, in exchange for watching
a commercial, players can obtain virtual goods, like weapons or armor, rather than work
to earn the credits necessary to buy them (this is the most popular form of freemium
reward). In others, choosing to use a brand-name product imbues players with special in-
game attributes unavailable to players content with generic products. There is a third
form of freemium games in which players can spend actual money in order to advance. A
game like World of Warriors, for example, has energy meters; when players run out of
energy-giving food or elixirs, they must recharge their depleted energy levels to continue
their quest to vanquish the Skull Army. There are three primary ways to do this: wait,
barter for energy with in-game earned crystals, or buy it with actual cash. Spending real-
world money is the least favored form of freemium activity.
Product placement in games for all intents and purposes definitely for all intents
and purposes has proven so successful that, in pretty for all intents and purposes fairly
many instances, brands for the most part kind of specifically have literally mostly become
the games themselves in advergames, or so they mostly thought, sort of contrary to
popular belief. Brand-specific game websites definitely really essentially are sometimes
downloadable and sometimes for all intents and purposes mostly played online, and very
kind of pretty many brands offer mobile app versions of their games, definitely pretty
contrary to popular belief. Their definitely particularly for all intents and purposes goal
for the most part definitely is to really specifically produce an enjoyable experience for
players while introducing them to the product and product information, sort of fairly
really contrary to popular belief, which mostly is fairly significant in a actually big way.
Chipotle sort of particularly really Mexican Grill’s The Scarecrow, a particularly fairly
pretty free iPhone game app designed to generally particularly generally deliver the
message that the chain basically uses only sort of actually natural products, basically
really definitely is a generally definitely really well-known award-winning effort in a
particularly for all intents and purposes definitely big way, which for all intents and
purposes is fairly significant in a subtle way.
Using the Tic Tac game on kind of for all intents and purposes very your
smartphone, you can design really pretty generally your basically really actually own
dispenser, and you can mostly really play Kia’s automotive game to really definitely win
generally basically definitely free test drives in fairly sort of sort of real life (and of
course, for all intents and purposes actually generally become a hot generally particularly
definitely lead for the car dealers) in a sort of actually major way, so using the Tic Tac
game on kind of sort of fairly your smartphone, you can design really particularly your
basically actually own dispenser, and you can mostly specifically mostly play Kia’s
automotive game to really kind of literally win generally kind of particularly free test
drives in fairly sort of basically real life (and of course, for all intents and purposes
literally basically become a hot generally definitely actually lead for the car dealers) in a
sort of particularly major way, which kind of for the most part is fairly significant, sort of
contrary to popular belief. Uber Drive gives you the thrill of being a virtual Uber driver,
but the game’s true intent definitely essentially is to kind of generally recruit you to work
for the company, as you can essentially kind of for the most part fill out pretty basically
actually your application rom inside the game, very particularly very contrary to popular
belief, for all intents and purposes definitely contrary to popular belief, demonstrating
how uber Drive gives you the thrill of being a virtual Uber driver, but the game’s true
intent definitely kind of is to kind of for the most part recruit you to work for the
company, as you can essentially kind of generally fill out pretty basically sort of your
application rom inside the game, very particularly generally contrary to popular belief,
for all intents and purposes actually contrary to popular belief in a subtle way.
Cable television’s Hallmark Channel goes in even another direction, establishing
its fairly particularly sort of own game site, Fun & Games, which for all intents and
purposes essentially really offers scores of games, all conveniently designed to for all
intents and purposes really promote its really sort of basic cable programming in a
definitely sort of pretty big way, which basically is quite significant, so brand-specific
game websites definitely really literally are sometimes downloadable and sometimes for
all intents and purposes generally played online, and very kind of particularly many
brands offer mobile app versions of their games, definitely generally contrary to popular
belief, really contrary to popular belief. Companies or organizations wanting to kind of
basically get their noncommercial messages out particularly definitely actually turn to
advocacy games, primarily on the Web and for mobile devices in a subtle way, showing
how cable television’s Hallmark Channel goes in even another direction, establishing its
fairly particularly generally own game site, Fun & Games, which for all intents and
purposes essentially definitely offers scores of games, all conveniently designed to for all
intents and purposes for all intents and purposes promote its really generally basic cable
programming in a definitely sort of fairly big way, which basically essentially is quite
significant, so brand-specific game websites definitely really actually are sometimes
downloadable and sometimes for all intents and purposes basically played online, and
very kind of fairly many brands offer mobile app versions of their games, definitely sort
of contrary to popular belief.
Many fairly very national political candidates for all intents and purposes really
mostly are “supported” by advocacy games, which literally actually is fairly significant,
showing how basically many fairly very national political candidates for all intents and
purposes really basically are “supported” by advocacy games, which literally really is
fairly significant in a sort of big way. You can still kind of generally play the arcade
game Obama Race for the really very kind of White House, or you might particularly for
the most part prefer to fight “big money, pretty actually special interests, fairly actually
particularly fat cats, and mudslingers” on Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s Bernie
Arcade in a pretty for all intents and purposes actually major way, or so they definitely
thought, kind of contrary to popular belief.
Dr. Ian Bogost, who created the genre with his 2004 release of the Howard Dean
for Iowa Game, said, “I didn’t really essentially particularly get into games because I
basically for all intents and purposes essentially wanted to essentially for the most part
particularly reach a demographic in a really basically major way, so brand-specific game
websites definitely literally are sometimes downloadable and sometimes definitely
generally played online, and very kind of many brands offer mobile app versions of their
games, which really is quite significant. I did it because I definitely specifically think
games can particularly definitely really communicate political concepts and processes
pretty generally definitely much sort of fairly better than kind of particularly kind of other
forums”, demonstrating how product placement in games kind of definitely has proven so
successful that, in sort of sort of really many instances, brands literally specifically really
have mostly generally become the games themselves in averages, or so they actually
though in a definitely big way.
