*It’s been such a fun time reading everyone’s posts and taking this class. What a great series of interconnected readings and wonderful discussions! I will truly miss all of you :)
The readings this week, especially the Lisa Parks reading, feel like they are in conversation with a lot of what we talked about in this class. As my favorite reading this week, I think Parks’s 2004 article is still extremely relevant today. I really enjoyed her theorization of the “microcasting” of television at the convergence of traditional TV and the internet. Her emphasis on how the internet creates space for women’s programs and extremely niche audience are prevalent in the mediascape today. One of the things that I really liked is how Parks thinks of this new age of television/internet convergence using evolution as an analogy where she writes: “If we were to add yet another chapter to account for the contemporary moment, it might be called something like ‘Mutants’” (133). A chapter titled “Mutants” might seem jarring at first, but with some interesting examples, this term not only fairly accurately describes the US television/internet media climate, but also some global phenomenons happening elsewhere.
So in this last post of the semester, I would like to talk a little bit about some interesting phenomenons happening in Chinese television (and Post-Television) while also recommending a recent series I liked. Word of Honor, a 2021 Chinese Wuxia series focusing on two male protagonists and their intertwined fates, just hit 50 million views on YouTube today. Produced by Chinese streaming platform YouKu, Word of Honor is adapted from a “Danmei” (耽美)—or “Boy’s Love” in Japanese terms—book published a couple of years ago. YouKu, as one of the premium streaming companies in China, did not have great confidence in the show succeeding. However, the show not only gained sweeping good reviews but also a much wider audience overseas than the producers originally thought it would gain. Amazon Prime also just bought the right of the show in March and it is not streaming on Prime in the US and in Canada. The success of the show is mostly due to its new takes on Wuxia stories, good screenwriting, and a solid fan base of the book. I personally really enjoyed the story and would highly recommend the show to anyone who is interested, but the success of the show is not what I want to focus on today. What interests me is the model of distribution and the availability of additional content on YouKu about Word of Honor. YouKu’s distribution model is similar to streaming platforms like Netflix, but it is also highly different because it is not subscription-based but VIP-based. By purchasing VIP status on YouKu for a certain period of time, the viewers gain access to the newest episodes before non-VIP viewers. For example, the last three episodes of Word of Honor are still only available to VIP viewers, which means if one wants to see the finale of the show they will have to pay for VIP status. This model of distribution is very common on Chinese streaming platforms where VIP users usually get to be ahead of the schedule than non-VIP users. This is, of course, a highly effective way to gain subscribers and audience, but I sometimes do doubt the ethics behind it.
What Word of Honor and YouKu’s producing team did on top of this VIP model is that they released “for purchase” (付费) additional content and behind the scene videos on a daily basis after the season finale. These short videos, usually five to ten minutes long, are compilations of funny moments on set and scenes that were cut out from the original show due to either censorship or plot reasons. The platform charges one RMB per video and the fans happily pay the money. What’s interesting to me and relates to Parks’s discussion of a TV “mutant”, is the fact that none of the Chinese streaming platforms have done the same thing before Word of Honor. The behind-the-scenes is usually released while the show is streaming and they are usually released to the audience for free. What YouKu is doing essentially extends the topicality of the show for another month after the show has ended, and they gained additional profit from content that was considered free and unprofitable. Of course, there are many people who re-upload and re-circulate these “for purchase” content on different social media and platforms, but YouKu has opened pandora’s box where they redefined the saying “everything is content”. I cannot predict if this model will be used in other series or not because Word of Honor’s popularity is unprecedented in recent years. However, this tendency from the producers and streaming companies to try to profit from everything is exactly what a convergence of television and the internet could bring. Granted the Chinese television industry has a completely different history than its US counterpart; it is still very interesting to see the quickened convergence of Chinese internet series and how they change the media climate on a daily basis. This discussion also somewhat relates to my final project which also looks at the post-TV idol competitions in China where media practices simply become “mutants” and evolve into something different every day. I really don’t know how to end this post after all this rambling, but I wonder what Raymond Williams might say about the flow of television if he experiences what we consider television today.
The link to the show on Amazon can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/EP-4/dp/B08ZDV1FFM/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=word+of+honor&qid=1619170753&sr=8-1
Supplemental Response #...4?
ReplyDeleteAnn, I think your insights are spot on, especially in regards to the idea of internet convergence as allowing a space for other audiences to promote and view content of non-traditional casts, stories, etc.
I think back to Ghost Ghirls, a web series that was self funded for a few episodes until Jack Black actually decided to help fund. It was a non-traditional style, that got to focus on two unknown female leads who also wrote and produced the show. It was only possible because of this combined convergence of media and internet allowing things to bypass studios gate keepers. Cool stuff.