This post continues the ongoing “From Nottingham and Beyond” series, with contributions from faculty and alumni of the University of Nottingham’s Department of Culture, Film and Media. This week’s contributor is Paul Grainge, Professor of Film and Television Studies in our department.

BBC iPlayer as a “pink portal” (2010)

Ever since the BBC launched its on-demand service, BBC iPlayer, on Christmas Day in 2007, short-form trailers have appeared across the BBC’s broadcast channels to promote the availability of iPlayer as a new way of accessing and engaging with BBC content. The distinctive iPlayer logo, pretty in pink, routinely appears in TV end credits as a reminder of program availability through catch-up and as a call to action. The “play” symbol invites audiences not only to watch shows they may have missed but also to download content, interact with educational guides, share recommendations and personalize their viewing through sign-in (the last of these reflecting the BBC’s desire, expressed by Director-General Tony Hall in 2015, to “reinvent public service broadcasting through data”).

As well as using end credits, the promotion of BBC iPlayer in the UK market has also taken place in between programs, a range of teasers (10 seconds), trailers (30-40 seconds) and full-blown brand stories (up to a minute long) appearing as interstitials in the BBC’s linear schedule. These always make me watch. Not simply because I’m a sucker for a well-crafted promo, but also because they reveal something of the way that the BBC has produced, and continues to develop, vernaculars around on-demand television.

BBC iPlayer logo

This has become tied to questions of how the BBC communicates its role in a fast-changing media environment. Unquestionably, the BBC has been successful in creating brand awareness for iPlayer. This was evidenced by a YouGov poll in 2013 that named “BBC iPlayer” the UK’s number-one brand in terms of consumer perception, ahead of Samsung (2nd), John Lewis (3rd), BBC.co.uk (6th), YouTube (7th) and Marks & Spencer (8th). And yet, despite the ubiquity of the brand, it remains the case that iPlayer accounts for just 2-3% of all BBC audience viewing. For those responsible for iPlayer strategy at the BBC, this signals a head-scratching gap between brand awareness and actual use among mainstream audiences. While rebutting claims in 2015 that iPlayer’s audience had dipped for the first time, the Head of BBC iPlayer, Dan Taylor-Watt, nevertheless remarked in a May blog post that “the challenge for us is to get everyone using iPlayer—whether that’s to make the journey to work better, the holiday in the middle of no-where [sic] in the rain more enjoyable or just easily catch-up on what you’ve missed from the comfort of your sofa.”

It is the nature of the “challenge” that Taylor-Watt describes that interests me—specifically, how promotion has been used to get audiences to think of iPlayer as part of their daily habit. Since 2011, marketing campaigns for iPlayer have been informed by a “three beyond” strategy: “beyond PC, beyond catch-up, beyond the early-adopter.” This has been expressed in different ways, but is marked by a move away from techno-representations of iPlayer as a “portal”—viewers gazing at phosphoric BBC content in mystical electro-space—and towards representations that depict the use and function of iPlayer in the spaces and routines of everyday British life.

In the move from portals to port-a-loos (the tempting alternative title for this blog), a 2012 trailer called “Beyond the Computer” would depict the iPlayer logo descending onto screen devices being used in a range of spaces across the UK, from buses, beach huts, canal boats and office blocks to windmills, flats and the aforementioned portable toilet. Promoting the extension of iPlayer onto multiscreen devices, this trailer emphasized platform mobility in contemplative representations of “digital Britain.”

More recently, however, iPlayer campaigns have taken a different tack, and have focused more deliberately on what BBC managers that Catherine Johnson and I have interviewed call the “need-states” of on-demand television. This involves communicating the relevance, rather than simply the availability, of iPlayer to audiences. A 2014 campaign called “Always There When You Need It” demonstrates this attempt to show how iPlayer can serve the “entertainment needs” of prospective users. Targeted at the audience persona of “mainstream mums”—women in their thirties and forties with children, seen by the BBC as a group that under-uses iPlayer—the promo imagined “moments and opportunities” where iPlayer could fill gaps and fit into the time-pressed lives of people negotiating hectic, harassed and occasionally hungover moments of the day.

At some level, “always there when you need it” chimes with Max Dawson’s analysis of DVR advertising in the U.S. By the terms of his argument, digital television technologies became linked in the 2000s to discourses of attention management. Dawson connects this to wider neoliberal ideologies and the reflexive project of learning how to allocate attention profitably. Alert to quotidian moments, “Always There When You Need It” depicts scenes where iPlayer solves problems of time and attention in social, familial and workday life—from viewing “opportunities” on a delayed train to calming over-energetic children.

And yet, there is something in these promos that extends beyond a concern with the profitable allocation of attention. In cultural terms, they also contribute to the way the BBC has sought to promote its identity and value as a (digital) public-service broadcaster. In a period when the BBC is having to justify its purpose and unique funding arrangement ahead of charter review in 2016—and in the face of attacks by a Conservative government intent on reducing the corporation’s size—it is perhaps no surprise that the BBC has developed vernaculars that imagine, and assert, the BBC as something that wraps around British life.  While the purpose of “always there when you need it” was to highlight iPlayer’s capacity to meet entertainment needs, this trailer and subsequent promotions (such as this year’s “if you love something let it show” campaign, which invites audiences to share recommendations through iPlayer) have as much to say about the BBC’s own political “need-states” as they do the conditions and situations where audiences might turn to iPlayer as a service.

‘If You Love Something Let It Show” campaign (2015)

The Lone Ranger play set, one of the two sold separately from the Starter Pack, functions more or less like any other licensed game tied to a film’s release. The play set was supposed to introduce the film’s world and its characters to audiences ahead of the film’s release, but instead—because of the delay, which was allegedly to appease retailers who wanted a release closer to the holiday season—arrives as a monument to a box office failure. While the play set was in development too long in advance to scrap entirely, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are absent from some of the promotional images surrounding the game’s release, and it is the only play set for which only two figures were produced (with fellow standalone play set, Cars, earning two extra figures beyond those included with the play set).

While not absent from all promotions for the film, this common piece of promotional material—found, among other places, on the official Infinity website—omits The Lone Ranger and Tonto.

Like any case of licensed content tied to a failed franchise, the Lone Ranger play set has a degree of novelty attached to it—after seeing I had purchased the play set, a colleague commented that it would either be worth a lot or nothing at all in thirty years. However, if the film had been successful, the play set would have offered a valuable case study for the future of Disney Infinity as a promotional platform. Would filmgoers have bought into the Infinity platform solely to access licensed content tied to a box office success, spending—at MSRP—$110 for the privilege? Would Disney Infinity gamers hungry for more content have picked up the play set and—provided the game was released during its planned June window—potentially gained greater interest in the film?

These questions are integral to the future productivity of Disney Infinity to Disney. Moving their licensed content onto the Infinity platform to help build interest in its release is certainly one of Disney’s goals, although one that is more likely to work with pre-existing franchises like Cars than with something entirely new. Disney’s selection of play sets to include with the Starter Pack—The Incredibles, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Monsters University—demonstrate a preference for franchises that appeal to both adults and kids, heavily relying on Pixar’s track record and largely obscuring Disney Animation Studios’ own animated output (although Wreck-it-Ralph figures are coming, and myriad Disney projects are represented in items available in the game’s Toy Box mode). These Starter Pack franchises are being used as gateways, which can then build an install base large enough that when Disney releases Frozen in November it will have figures available on store shelves ready to meet the demands of kids who’ve seen the movie.

However, Disney’s plans for Frozen in Infinity capture the difficulty of developing a new franchise through a still nascent platform. Although figures for Anna and Elsa are going to be made available, along with “power discs” offering special tools for the game’s Toy Box mode, there will be no open-world play set tied to the film. Instead, Disney will once again rely on an existing franchise to add value to the platform ahead of the Christmas holidays, with a “Toy Story in Space” play set launching in October alongside a collection of new stand-alone figures. And since players can only use figures from a particular franchise in a play set, the Anna and Elsa figures will only work in the sandbox Toy Box mode, with only a single character-specific mission built for each of the two characters as opposed to an entire “game.”

Although this may simply be a reality of the timing of Frozen’s release relative to the platform’s development, it signals that thinking about Disney Infinity as a replacement for licensed tie-ins—as opposed to the creative revolution they claim—may still be overestimating Disney’s plans. Rather, it may instead offer a way for them to avoid developing a traditional console and/or handheld title for particular films but nonetheless give those films a presence in the space of console and handheld video games. The company may otherwise be content to serve fans in the space of browser and mobile gaming, where development is cheaper and where Disney is having success with developing new franchises like Where’s My Water alongside derivative mobile titles.

This plan would likely serve Disney’s financial and promotional goals for Frozen, but it also means the value the franchise is adding to Infinity is limited. Although the two Frozen figures will—as pictured—be sold bundled with the two power discs (which are in other instances purchased in packages of two for $4.99) to commemorate the film’s opening, that package offers minimal new “content,” primarily offering aesthetic changes in Toy Box mode. With no future play sets planned beyond Toy Story, the Infinity platform functions not just as a new way to released licensed content but also a way for Disney to scale back its licensed game development while nonetheless ensuring presence—if not substantial presence—on consoles in the future. The question becomes whether they’re offering enough value in these standalone licensed products for them to serve as a promotional platform for either Infinity or the films in question, a question I will explore further in the final post of this series, “Behind the P(l)aywall“. See also the first post, “A Low-Risk Revolution.”