Post by Jonathan Gray, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

This year’s Peabody Awards are “new and improved” in many ways. The awards ceremony will be televised, for one (hosted by Fred Armisen, on Pivot); the screening committees were overhauled to draw on the expertise of media and journalism studies scholars nationally; judging made use of an online streaming platform, thereby giving Board members easier access to everything; and announcements have been spread out over two weeks (to give various winners their due, rather than have them hidden behind the more prominent Entertainment awardees). Less monumentally, it’s my first year on the Board. In this post, I thought I’d reflect a little on the process, especially on what it’s like to be on a Board charged with determining value, for a media and cultural studies scholar when we’re often uncomfortable with declaring value, saying this is “better” than that, or establishing hierarchies of worth.

First, though, it’s worth noting two of the ways in which the Peabodys are different from many other media awards. There are no categories with single winners for each. Ostensibly, everything competes against everything. We seek “excellence on its own terms,” and thus being on the Board means constantly shifting one’s frame of value. Paired with this, to receive an award, an item must ultimately receive a unanimous vote from the Board of seventeen members. This means that all decisions are made following a highly deliberative process, and if even just one member doesn’t vote for something, it won’t win. Rather than simply vote on what one thinks is excellent, therefore, one must communicate that excellence, and convince one’s colleagues on the Board that it is worthy of an award.

It’s this deliberative process with which I fell in love. It’s an impressive Board, marked currently by fellow academics Henry Jenkins, Barbie Zelizer, and the Director Jeffrey Jones, but also by television critics, the curator for the British Film Institute, and past or present journalists, producers, creators, and media execs. Everyone’s used to being listened to in their job, yet we’re all thrown into a room and made to talk it out. Simply dictating that this or that has value is meaningless, as one must instead think carefully about what sort of value something has, and to whom, and then communicate that thoughtfully. Each of us came into the process with our own passions, but one can never assume that those passions are shared by others. This could be a recipe for bland, middle-of-the-road fare, if everyone simply yielded on the most unobjectionable texts. Instead, though, the deliberative process was exhilarating, as everyone seemed to accept that the awards are more meaningful if we try to understand others’ passions and criteria for excellence, and if we found ways to precariously balance them out with each other.

Exciting for me, therefore, were the moments when I found new appreciation for something that on first viewing or listening meant little to me. At times, I’d enter a discussion skeptically, yet either be schooled on why something mattered to people other than me, or – even cooler when it happened – be led into liking it myself. Similarly, it was energizing to sit down and think through some of my passions, and work out how best to communicate their value to others: when we can’t simply pound a fist on the table and insist that something is good dammit, it challenges us to really explore what it is that we love so much about it, why it has value, and why we want others to experience it as do we. The process “stretched” me, both in terms of getting what other people like and why, and getting better what I like and why.

It’s this process that also makes the Peabody Awards quite unique, and that lead to their value to those who win. Walter Cronkite famously quipped that one counts one’s Emmys, but cherishes one’s Peabodys. Indeed, this would be a retort to those who question the point of the whole endeavor. Awards like this can matter, we’re aware: many veteran Board members told me of one-on-one conversations with documentarians, writers, or newscasters at previous awards dinners who’d spoken of how much an award like this means to them. The new mantra is that we award “Stories that Matter” (while being openly reflexive in asking who they matter to, how, and why), and I like the idea of celebrating those who have contributed meaningfully to the public sphere. Just as it’s always a pleasure for me to sit down and write a reference letter for a truly spectacular student or colleague applying for a job, award, or grant, since I want to stop and pay respect to their awesomeness, so too is it refreshing that we find ways to say not just, “your show was engaging, interesting, and/or amusing,” but “your show matters and makes a difference.”

I’m very proud of this year’s slate of winners. It includes things I adored and/or admired before the judging process, such as Inside Amy Schumer, Fargo, Serial, Doc McStuffins, Cosmos, Jane the Virgin, and Last Week Tonight. I gained new obsessions and passions along the way, to State of the Re:Union, The Honorable Woman, Adventure Time, The Americans, Black Mirror, Richard Engel’s reporting, Vice Media’s access and new approach to news, all things Grace Lee Boggs, and many other documentaries, news reports, radio shows, podcasts, websites, and entertainment shows that didn’t get awards but that won me over all the same. And I had confirmed for me why it can be valuable, and transformative, to have discussions and debates about what is worthy of commendation, what is special, what is unique. Media and cultural studies is right to be concerned about singular, monologic declarations of value, but there’s something to be learned from the Peabodys’ mode of deciding upon value dialogically.

However, this analysis privileges a sense of gaming value predicated on structured gameplay experiences, and Disney Infinity is also built around an open-ended world of creativity. Its Toy Box mode may be derivative of other titles, but it gives gamers the keys to the Magic Kingdom and allows them to explore their own Disney-branded worlds using the range of characters available for the game. While the play sets offer rigid franchise experiences where only figures from that particular franchise are able to participate, the Toy Box mode offers the absolute freedom to create your own Disney mash-ups.

It represents an expansion of the Disney license, away from purely promoting a single franchise toward reframing sandbox game creation within the context of the Disney universe (the title of a smaller “mash-up” title released in 2011). Many of the “toys” available to gamers are characters or locations from films like Aladdin or Disney-owned properties like The Muppets, and playing each play set unlocks items from those games that can then be repurposed and mashed up in the creation of new user-generated levels. The Toy Box system is robust: while some levels can be basic sandboxes for exploration, a series of “Creativi-Toys” give gamers the chance to build intelligent levels with internal logic and goals. It is here where Disney shifts their attention away from promotional value and toward building a platform that can continue to offer gamers value as long as new levels are being created and then shared with the community (either by users or by Disney themselves).

Although this potential value is a substantial part of Disney Infinity’s promise to gamers, it is built on value propositions uncommon within console gaming. The Toy Box mode comes with only a limited range of items, with users having to unlock other items through either collecting capsules scattered throughout each of the game’s five play sets or using “Infinity Spins”—earned by leveling up characters and completing Toy Box activities—to unlock items in the “Infinity Vault.” These items, which are picked at random when Infinity Spins are used, include the fundamental building blocks of more substantial levels, like race track pieces and side-scrolling cameras. If you want to build more complicated levels, you need to play the game long enough to earn the spins necessary to ensure you can collect these items at random.

It is here where Disney Infinity, despite being a console-based product and despite costing at least $74.99, evokes the free-to-play logics of social and mobile gaming. Its Toy Box mode is trapped behind a “playwall,” in which the full potential of the mode—if not its basic functionality—requires gamers to invest considerable time and energy in the rest of the game. While this does not necessarily require additional financial investment beyond the Starter Pack, it does encourage it: the fastest way to earn Infinity Spins is to buy additional characters to level up, as well as additional play sets to expand the Toy Box offerings available. The play sets themselves encourage this with an in-game Infinity Vault, which is only unlocked once you’ve collected every character tied to that play set and contains key Toy Box building blocks.

Disney’s “Sidekicks” figure pack—that they classify Mrs. Incredible as a “sidekick” is worth a larger discussion at a later date.

Although the game is playable out of the box, additional financial investment is ultimately required to access the full Disney Infinity experience. The choice to limit the play sets to characters from that franchise means that gamers who want to play co-operatively within each of the play sets must invest in at least three additional figures, which Disney has facilitated through discounted—but still $30—three-packs featuring characters from the three Starter Pack play sets. The ability to access multiplayer is the most substantial value tied to the purchase of additional figures. All characters are more or less evenly balanced, with no substantial gameplay differences when switching from character to character; beyond the value of collecting and playing as a favorite character, their value is instead tied to unlocking content the game has purposefully blocked off in order to incentivize further investment in the platform. The game’s Hall of Heroes tracks your progress in the game, but it also reminds you of all of the figures and power discs you haven’t collected yet.

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Like free-to-play titles, Disney Infinity is always quick to remind you of what you’re missing without making further investment. Character-specific vaults are scattered throughout each play set, locked until you purchase the character in question, and the game’s introduction makes sure to introduce you to various upcoming figures—and play sets—that won’t even be available to purchase until later this fall. However, unlike free-to-play titles, Disney Infinity isn’t actually free-to-play: although their PC and iPad apps allows you to build and share Toy Box creations for free, actually playing the game requires a $75 investment. It’s a high price, which raises the question of why the designers chose to place key Toy Box content behind its “playwall”: while the game has built-in incentives to encourage further purchases, getting gamers to commit to the platform based on potential value locked at launch is more challenging.

Disney Infinity represents a clear shift in Disney’s approach to licensing their valuable intellectual property, but it comes with as many limitations as possibilities. While Disney is promising an epic scale, and has still yet to fully tap into the incredibly valuable “golden age” animated properties of the 1990s, their efforts with Disney Infinity prioritize the business of licensed gaming without necessarily being able to offer gamers the scale they’ve promised without substantial investment.

However, in prominent popular discourse surrounding the series’ return, journalists have privileged the value of the programs to producers rather than their value to audiences. While talk of profit margins is all well and good, the two soaps’ move online involves asking audiences to accept new definitions of a soap opera’s value—once “free” over broadcast—within the television marketplace. Although the product itself—its characters, its narratives, its evolution—will determine its ultimate value to fans, Prospect Park’s release strategy intersects in complicated ways with discourses of televisual value within an evolving space of digital distribution, which is being adapted in order to fit the specificity of an atypical televisual form.

When broadcast networks started selling their shows through the iTunes Store, it was a pivotal moment for the digitization of media content and the growing impact of convergence on industry business models. However, it also rearticulated our conception of televisual value by placing a distinct price on an episode of television as a discrete twenty- or forty-minute entity.

This articulation was part of the larger digital distribution revolution: while iTunes and its competitors Amazon Instant Video and YouTube continue to sell individual episodes, streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime have reframed televisual value through access to expanded libraries of content, largely leaving the iTunes model as an industrial afterthought (albeit one which is still useful for cord-cutters).

Prospect Park’s distribution strategy for All My Children and One Life To Live is an unorthodox merger of these two business models. Their primary partnership with Hulu—under their “Hulu Exclusives” acquisition strategy—is itself a combination of two different streaming logics: the online Hulu service features recent episodes of the series for free, ad-supported web browser streaming, while the multi-platform Hulu Plus service—$7.99 a month—will have the entire library of each series along with HD ad-supported streaming to tablets, game consoles, Roku players, etc. In order to articulate these options, particularly to viewers—imagined as older viewers in popular discourse—unfamiliar with online streaming, Hulu drafted One Life to Live stars for a video explanation:

In the process, Prospect Park and Hulu have dissected the experience of watching soap operas on television into two discrete values. The first is being able to “revive their daily drama habit”—to use Hulu’s marketing rhetoric—for free, with the caveat that their viewing must remain daily (as only the most recent episodes will be available). However, the second is the ability to “relax on your sofa and watch on your TV,” which Hulu has commodified by limiting device-based streaming to its subscription service. The distinction allows viewers to determine which parts of their soap viewing experience were most valuable to them, and specifically asks if watching on a television—or on a tablet—is worth $7.99 a month.

And yet Prospect Park’s arrangement with iTunes is even more interesting, given that no currently running soap operas are distributed through the service (whereas Days of our Lives and General Hospital also stream on Hulu). They are offering what they call a “Multi-Pass,” which is comparable to a “Season Pass” for primetime series with one caveat: instead of an entire season, it instead gives viewers twenty episodes—or four weeks—of a series for $9.99; viewers can also choose to purchase individual episodes for $0.99.

Whereas the Hulu arrangement asks viewers to place a value on their soap viewing habits, the iTunes arrangement explicitly asks viewers how much they are willing to pay for an episode of a soap opera. Prospect Park’s choice of $0.99 is half of what iTunes charges for primetime television episodes in standard definition (Hulu Plus remains the exclusive home of high-definition episodes), a decision that reflects the large volume of content viewers are expected to pay for—hence the Multi-Pass discount of $0.50 an episode—but also reinforces existing hierarchies of value between daytime and primetime programming.

However, the two soaps also fit somewhat awkwardly into the logics of streaming, given that one of the key values of streaming services—an extended library of previous episodes—is thus far unavailable to the two programs. Although one could expect that many fans of the two shows would invest in the ability to access decades of soap opera content through a streaming service like Hulu, the ability to revisit previous episodes has less perceptible value when there are thus far no previous episodes to revisit (as ABC’s stake in the new ventures—as license holders—is not strong enough for them to actively support Prospect Park with such library content beyond 8-10 minute recaps for potential new viewers).

Although it’s unclear what kind of data Prospect Park will be releasing—it will, as always, depend on whether releasing the data has value to them—any determinations about the “value” of the two relaunching soap operas have to be withheld until we understand how audiences respond to these initial articulations. While online distribution is often framed as offering audiences new ways to experience television, the habit-based nature of soap viewing has led Prospect Park and Hulu to devise and promote specific distribution strategies which emulate more traditional viewing patterns, at a price.

As a result, the stakes of this project are neither as simple as Prospect Park’s financial investment in All My Children and One Life To Live nor as broad as the very future of digital distribution. Rather, the specificity of this experiment will determine what value soap audiences have within future conceptions of digital distribution, their acceptance or rejection of industrial definitions of value shaping how and where they will be programmed to in the future.