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Failure to communicate: Promoting mobile television in the United States

Max Dawson
Department of Radio, TV, & Film
Northwestern University
1920 Campus Drive
Annie May Swift Hall Room 213
Evanston, IL 60208
max@northwestern.edu
Fax: 847-467-2389
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Failure to communicate: Promoting mobile television in the United States

Abstract: Services that transmit television programming and other video content

to mobile phones over wireless networks have struggled to gain a foothold in the

United States despite having achieved widespread popularity overseas. Between

2006 and 2010 a number of high-profile U.S. mobile television ventures

suspended their services due to low subscriber numbers, compelling

telecommunications analysts to label U.S. mobile television as a “failure.” This

essay explores mobile television’s launch and subsequent designation as a

failure in the U.S. market, focusing on the promotional texts that introduced this

new medium to U.S. consumers. In the process, it raises broader historiographic

questions about the study of failed media technologies.

Keywords: mobile television, new media, advertising, technology, failure,

gender, history

Media historians have gained valuable insights into the processes by which new

media technologies are launched and adopted by examining the promotional

materials that announce their introductions. Studies of advertisements, press


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releases, brochures, and point-of-purchase sales materials underscore that these

and various other kinds of ephemeral promotional materials do much more than

simply proclaim the desirability of the devices they promote. Even more

significantly, the images and narratives they contain can influence subsequent

negotiations between producers, consumers, and various intermediaries over

such matters as the content, uses, regulation, and cultural meanings of new

media technologies. Under most circumstances these negotiations commence

well before the majority of their participants have had opportunities to experience

the technologies they concern in person. In fact, in many instances positions

within these negotiations are based primarily, if not exclusively, upon encounters

with representations of these technologies that circulate in advertisements and

other promotional materials.

Of course, not every new media technology that is launched to great

fanfare is adopted by consumers. Time and time again devices that were

subjects of extensive promotional campaigns have failed to make substantial or

lasting impacts in the marketplace. These “failed” media technologies are

deserving of the attention of media historians, as the stories of their unsuccessful

launches complicate the narratives of progress that so often dominate popular

discussions of media change. But piecing together these stories presents its own

set of challenges. Companies that bankroll the commercialization of widely-

adopted media technologies to meticulously document (and enthusiastically

mythologize) their triumphs in press releases, annual reports, corporate histories,


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and websites. By contrast, the backers of commercially unsuccessful media

technologies are rarely eager to publicize their missteps. Accounts of failures are

frequently absent from (or downplayed within) “official” histories, and for many of

the same reasons may be underrepresented within public archives as well. As a

consequence, primary and secondary documents pertaining to the invention,

development, and/or commercialization of failed media technologies are also

frequently in short supply.

In the absence of these forms of documentation, promotional texts may

provide historians with our primary sources of access to information about those

media technologies that have been designated as failures. Certainly there is no

shortage of these ephemeral texts for historians to draw on: advertisements and

other promotional materials in many instances survive long after the products

depicted within them are withdrawn from the market and consigned to history’s

landfill. But what kinds of historical insights are to be gained by examining the

promotion of failed media technologies? For instance, can studying the

advertisements that launched a new media technology that was later designated

a failure lead us to a better understanding of why it was designated as such?

What can advertisements and other promotional materials tell us about the

consumers who rejected or ignored this technology? What can they tell us about

the culture into which this technology was launched?

To address these questions, this essay explores the promotion of a new

media technology that in recent years has struggled to gain a foothold in the
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United States: mobile television. Since 2003 global media and

telecommunications companies and a host of small startups have launched a

number of services that transmit television and other forms of video programming

to mobile phone handsets and other portable devices via wireless networks.1 In

the U.S. the launches of these mobile television services was accompanied by

extensive PR blitzes. By 2006, mobile television was generating an extraordinary

amount of buzz in the mainstream media and the specialized trade presses of

various media and telecommunications industry sectors. After mobile television

services took center stage at that year’s CTIA (Cellular Telephone Industries

Association) trade show, telecommunications analysts predicted that television

and video services would “galvanize” a global mobile entertainment market that

by 2011 would be generating upwards of $77 billion in revenues (Cheng, 2006;

Fierce Mobile Content, 2006). “Mobile television burst onto the radar screens of

carriers, content providers and a few marketers in 2005,” the website Cellular-

News reported in March of 2006. “A year later, it’s clear that something major is

going to happen with mobile TV, and sooner rather than later” (Cellular-News,

2006).

Despite attracting volumes of positive press and the backing of some of

the biggest names in the media and telecommunications sectors, from early on

the new U.S. mobile television ventures experienced great difficulties in signing

up subscribers.2 Before long, low subscriber numbers plunged U.S. mobile

television ventures into crises from which many would not recover. The first
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major casualty was Mobile ESPN, a full-service wireless company that enjoyed

the patronage of Walt Disney Co.’s lucrative cable sports network. Mobile ESPN

announced its 2006 launch with a $30 million advertising campaign, including a

special-effects laden commercial that aired during the most-watched U.S.

television broadcast of the year, the Super Bowl (System Mobile, 2007). Seven

months later ESPN pulled the plug on its mobile service, having attracted only

30,000 subscribers (Lowry, 2006).3 Next to fall was Amp’d Mobile, a youth-

oriented mobile multimedia service backed by MTV Networks, Universal Music

Group, and hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. Amp’d Mobile’s

June 2007 bankruptcy filing came less than two years after the service’s

inception, during which the company had accumulated more than $100 million in

debt (Marshall, 2007; Riley, 2007). More recently, Qualcomm announced that it

was ceasing direct-to-consumer sales of its FLO TV mobile television service,

which the company had developed at a cost of more than $800 million (Murph,

2010). Qualcomm’s announcement came as little surprise to industry analysts: in

three years of operations Qualcomm managed to sign up only 200,000

subscribers, far fewer than was necessary for the FLO TV service to achieve

profitability (Walsh, 2010).

Chastened by these turns of events, telecommunications industry analysts

reversed their projections of mobile television’s prospects in the U.S. As early as

2007 consensus was building behind the notion that mobile television was

“overhyped,” a “disappointment,” or even a “failure” (Tan, 2007; Santo, 2010;


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Andrews, 2008). As one analyst summed up the situation, mobile television’s

“press releases outnumber [its] viewers” (Higginbotham, 2008). Certainly, there

was ample cause for this dramatic reversal. Still, the designation of U.S. mobile

television as a “failure” requires qualification, especially in light of mobile

television’s performance in overseas markets. Mobile television services similar

to the ones that have floundered in the U.S. have elsewhere proven

phenomenally successful. In South Korea, for instance, mobile television

services have garnered sizeable audiences. In Japan, Brazil, Peru, Argentina,

Russia, Nigeria, Thailand, Egypt, and China viewership of mobile television is

growing as well, leaving the U.S. (along with Europe) as one of few remaining

regions where mobile television adoption has failed to meet its backers’

projections (O’Brien, 2010).

That mobile television services similar to the ones that have struggled to

gain traction in the U.S. should succeed at attracting audiences overseas hardly

comes as a surprise given U.S. consumers’ tendency to lag behind their

counterparts in most other nations when it comes to the adoption of mobile data

services (Kedrowsky, 2006). But rather than contradict the chorus of voices that

has called mobile television a failure, mobile television’s uneven global diffusion

underscores that designations of media technologies as failures (and successes,

for that matter) are always context-bound. As Frank Lipartito (2003) argues in his

study of AT&T’s attempts to launch its Picturephone video telephony service in

the 1970s, there are no set criteria that, when met, justify the designation of a
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technology as a success or failure. Instead, he writes, “what constitutes success

or failure is more a matter of social values and expectations than performance or

function” (54). A media technology such as mobile television may fail because it

does not “work” correctly – in other words, because it does not adequately

perform the job(s) it has been designed to do. It also may fail because it is

prohibitively expensive, or because it lacks ample and appropriate content. Far

more frequently, however, media technologies fail because they prove

incompatible with consumers’ values and/or expectations. These values and

expectations are formed in relation to “contingent social conditions” – for

example, the economic climates or cultural traditions that exist within specific

national markets, or the patterns of communication, thought, or social

organization associated with other, older media technologies (52). Accordingly, a

technology deemed a success in one market may simultaneously be written off

as a failure in another, as both designations are social constructs embedded

within specific cultural, historical, and technological contexts.

The telecommunications industry analysts who have designated U.S.

mobile television a failure have for the most part based their conclusions on

numerical indexes – for instance, on subscriber numbers, handset sales figures,

or quarterly revenue reports. These numbers support analysts’ contentions that

the U.S. mobile television industry has experienced extraordinary turbulence in

its relatively brief existence, but offer little insight into why. In this essay, I

approach the sense of disappointment surrounding U.S. mobile television from a


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different perspective, focusing, on the one hand, on representations of this new

medium in promotional materials and, on the other hand, on the contexts in

which these representations circulated and were consumed. I do so not to

dispute analysts’ designations of mobile television as a failure, but rather in the

interest of resituating the abstract financial data on which these designations are

based within cultural, historical, and technological contexts. Informed by

Lipartito’s definition of failure as “a matter of social values and expectations”

(2003, p. 54), in the following sections I turn my attention to the venue where

consumers’ values and expectations were either met or disappointed by mobile

television: that is, the promotional materials that were many consumers’ primary

(if not sole) source of information about and access to this new medium in this

period.

The emphasis I place on these texts and the representations they contain

reflects my contention that the launch of a new media technology is akin to an act

of communication between its producers and/or promoters and its prospective

users. Simply put, producers and/or promoters attempt to create and convey

representations of a new media technology that will captivate consumers and, if

all goes according to plan, compel them to adopt it. Within the context of these

acts of communication advertisements and other promotional materials convey

messages between senders and recipients, but also groom and organize the

meanings of the representations these messages contain. Representations of a

new media technology such as mobile television may have many relevant points
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of reference, including established promotional tropes, longstanding cultural

fantasies, historical memories, or established media technologies. Ultimately, it

falls to promotional materials (and the larger campaigns to which they belong) to

tease these disparate points of reference into coherence, and to make the

representations they contain resonate with consumers’ values and expectations.

The case of the U.S. launch of mobile television services is indicative of

what may occur when these acts of communication are somewhat less than

successful. For while the meanings advertisements and other promotional

materials attached to mobile television technologies in the U.S. in the mid-2000s

were consistent and unambiguous, they were nonetheless consistently and

unambiguously alienating. Mobile television’s promotional materials were narrow

in their address, and even narrower in their conception of this new medium’s

uses. The tropes they referenced excluded large portions of the audience from

taking part in the fantasies they depicted, and wrapped the emergent medium of

mobile television within residual ideologies associated with mobile television’s

technological antecedents. Exploring these promotional materials helps us to

better understand the conditions surrounding mobile television’s launch,

marketplace tribulations, and subsequent designation as a failed media

technology in the U.S. Beyond that, an engagement with these materials also

helps us to understand failure in a more general sense as a matter of

communication – that is, as a failure on the part of a new medium’s backers to

create and convey meanings that resonate with consumers’ values and
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expectations.

“Change out of that skirt”: Masculinity, mobility, and television

Mobile ESPN announced its launch in February 2006 with a minute-long

commercial that aired during television coverage of Super Bowl XL. Four years

later, mobile television made its return to the big game, this time under slightly

less auspicious circumstances. In 2010 Qualcomm spent a rumored $10 million

to produce and air three commercials for its FLO TV system during CBS’s

coverage of Super Bowl XLIV. Mobile ESPN’s Super Bowl debut had come at the

height of the U.S. telecommunications industry’s mobile television fever, at a time

when billion-dollar revenues seemed well within reach (Kharif, 2004). By

February 2010, however, attitudes within the telecommunications and media

sectors towards mobile television had cooled considerably. Analysts in both

sectors questioned whether mobile television in fact had a future in the U.S.,

holding up ESPN’s failed mobile television venture as a cautionary tale. In this

climate, Qualcomm’s multi-million dollar Super Bowl commercials came across

as somewhat of a “Hail Mary” play – that is, a pass thrown out of desperation as

the clock ticks down on the final seconds of an American football game (Duryee,

2010).

Like most Hail Mary passes, Qualcomm’s commercials failed to connect

with their intended recipients. Within nine months, Qualcomm would announce
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that it was discontinuing FLO TV sales (Tartakoff and Kramer, 2010). But if

unsuccessful at drumming up interest in mobile television, Qualcomm’s Super

Bowl commercials did manage to succeed at crystallizing themes that have

surfaced repeatedly in mobile television’s promotional materials. In the period

between 2003, when the first U.S. mobile television services launched, and 2010,

when Qualcomm’s trio of commercials aired, mobile television’s backers

developed and refined a repertoire of stock narratives for representing the

medium, its uses, and its users in promotional contexts. A significant number of

these stock narratives placed mobile television at the center of gendered conflicts

over space, leisure, and consumption. One Qualcomm commercial, for instance,

staged these conflicts within a shopping mall. In this spot, entitled “Injury Report,”

National Football League television commentator Jim Nance provides a “play-by-

play” account of a poorly timed trip to a department store. The commercial begins

with Nance delivering an “injury report” on Jason Glasby, a twentysomething

young man who has accompanied his girlfriend to the mall. “As you can see,”

Nance explains in his classic announcer’s baritone, “his girlfriend has removed

his spine, rendering him incapable of watching the game.” Following Nance’s

introduction Jason is subjected to a series of emasculating retail experiences.

First, he is made to hold his girlfriend’s shopping bags as she rifles through racks

of undergarments. Next, she drags him away from the electronics department,

where he has managed to steal a glance at a football game, and to the

housewares department where she has him sniff an assortment of scented


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candles. As if these indignities are not bad enough, throughout the commercial a

red brassiere remains draped over Jason’s right shoulder. Comments Nance:

“Boy, that’s hard to watch.” FIGURES 1 and 2

As is to be expected, “Injury Report” offers as a solution to Jason Glasby’s

dilemma a FLO TV personal television receiver that, as Nance explains, will allow

him to watch the game anywhere, including in what is perhaps the most

feminized of all retail spaces, the department store. But in this scenario mobile

television offers far more than just the convenience of watching television on the

go. It simultaneously promises Jason a means of recuperating his damaged

manhood: in the commercial’s closing seconds, Nance implores Jason to get a

FLO TV subscription and “Change out of that skirt.” In fact, “Injury Report” is

concerned almost exclusively with Jason’s remasculation. Like many other

mobile television advertisements from this period, it races over a cursory

description of FLO TV’s technical features, and makes no mention of the types of

content available to the service’s subscribers, focusing instead on the decidedly

masculine pleasures mobile television delivers to its audiences.

Though noteworthy for its unabashed misogyny, “Injury Report” was far

from the only mobile television advertisement to place the new medium at the

crux of conflicts between men and women over spectatorship and consumption.

More often than not, these conflicts centered on the ability to watch live televised

coverage of sporting events. For instance, a 2007 Nokia print advertisement

shows a couple enjoying what appears to be a romantic dinner above the slogan
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“A connection can happen anywhere.” The woman in the advertisement has

reached across the table to hold hands, but her date’s attention is focused on the

ballgame playing on a small screen he has hidden just beneath the table’s

surface. A television commercial for Slingbox depicts a similar scenario. In this

advertisement, a man on a dinner date pretends he is receiving an important call

from work so that he can steal away to watch the final inning of a baseball game

on his mobile phone. In each of these advertisements, watching mobile television

is portrayed as akin to an act of defiance whereby men mount passive-

aggressive resistance to women’s encroachments upon their leisure time. As is

the case in “Injury Report,” mobile television factors in Nokia’s and Slingbox’s

advertisements as a weapon within gendered conflicts over space and time.

In depicting these conflicts, mobile television’s promotional materials drew

on and extended a set of discursive conventions for representing television

viewing and viewers outside the home that have their origins in television’s own

postwar period of novelty. During this period, as Cecilia Tichi (1991) notes, the

“physical inertia” of the male television viewer emerged as a major source of

anxiety in the U.S. (89). According to Tichi, postwar leisure reformers, social

theorists, and pundits came to regard the sedentarism of the nation’s male

television viewers as an affront to (masculinist) leisure ideologies that equated

physical activity with economic productivity, good citizenship, and moral hygiene.

In books, magazine articles, and lectures television’s critics linked the diminishing

fitness of male viewers’ bodies to the overall fitness of the body politic, making
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sedentarism a matter of national concern. Television’s critics accused the

medium of immobilizing and emasculating the nation’s male population (Tichi

1991, p. 90), and of transforming “‘real men’ into passive homebodies” content to

watch the world go by on their television screens (Spigel 1992, 61).

Over the course of subsequent decades television manufacturers

addressed the anxieties surrounding the medium’s sedentary male viewers in a

wide variety of promotional materials, and in particular in advertisements for

portable television receivers. Advertisements for the transistorized receivers

introduced in the 1960s tackled these concerns by emphasizing television’s

portability, and portrayed viewers watching television out of doors, where they

combined the virtual experiences of mobility that television afforded its audiences

with the excitement and adventure of travel and tourism. Inverting Raymond

Williams’ term “mobile privatization,” Lynn Spigel (2001) coins the term

“privatized mobility” to describe the fantasies of mediated mobility that became

prominent in the advertisements of this period (71).4 In many of these

advertisements, portable televisions liberated male viewers from their domestic

incarceration at the hands of television, literally freeing them from the confines of

the feminine sphere of the home. Portable receivers became symbols of “potent

masculinity” in the promotional materials of this period, as is demonstrated by

one 1960 RCA advertisement that depicted a procession of well-dressed men

carrying television sets with them as they engaged in a range of appropriately

masculine work and leisure activities (Spigel, 2001, pp. 80-1).


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Television technologies have come a long way since the 1960s, when

transistors were the state of the art and a 19” receiver still qualified as “portable.”

Nevertheless, the promotional discourses used to sell portable television

technologies have in many ways remained consistent over this span. Much as

television receiver manufacturers did in the 1960s, the mobile television services

that inaugurated their operations in the mid-2000s promised male consumers a

means of watching television outside their homes, but also of recuperating

compromised bodies and masculinities. In “Injury Report,” the abject figure of the

lazy homebody that haunted 1960s advertisements for portable television

receivers gives way to that of Jason Glasby sheepishly trudging through a

department store on Super Bowl Sunday. In advertisements such as this one,

mobile television allowed Glasby and other similarly “spineless” men to “take off

their skirts” and assert their masculinity via conspicuous (and conspicuously

defiant) public displays of spectatorship. In this particular case, mobile television

enables Jason Glasby to reinstate what the commercial portrays as the rightful

balance of power between himself and his domineering girlfriend. Equally

importantly, it allows him to appropriate a feminine public retail space for

masculine spectatorial pleasures. “Injury Report,” like many of its

contemporaries, is a miniature revenge narrative, in which mobile television

allows an aggrieved middle class white man to assert gender- and class-based

prerogatives.

Though eager to hype the unique and unprecedented capabilities of their


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technologies and services, in advertisements such as “Injury Report” mobile

television’s backers fell back on well-tread discursive conventions to define the

meanings of the new medium of mobile television primarily in relation to spatial

problematics inherited from the promotion of earlier television technologies.

Mobile television may have been a new medium, but within the context of these

promotional materials it was saddled with the ideological baggage of decades

worth of advertisements for media technologies. Granted, these spatial

problematics underwent processes of updating and recontextualization as they

were restaged within mobile television’s promotional materials. Thus, for

instance, in “Injury Report” Jason Glasby’s problem is not that television has

rendered him immobile, but that his mobility is involuntary, and controlled by his

girlfriend. Mobility here comes at a cost, that being that the mobile man is

prevented from indulging in the spectatorial pleasures he enjoys while at home.

The mobile television receiver stands in this and many other contemporaneous

advertisements as an instrument of voluntary mobility, but also as a symbol of

the possibility of recreating the most desirable aspects of the domestic television

experience in non-domestic locations – namely, the feelings of control,

omniscience, and connectivity that the television viewer experiences at home in

front of his set. In these updated fantasies of privatized mobility, the bus, the

train, the city street, and the shopping mall became extensions of the living room

entertainment center, presumably the place where the Jason Glasbys of the

world felt most powerful and at ease.


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Mobile television’s promotional texts modified decades-old fantasies of

privatized mobility, in part to reflect the technological capabilities of handheld

devices that made possible instantaneous, on-demand access to the full range of

media platforms that comprised the home entertainment center of the mid-2000s.

For the most part, however, these updates were superficial. Despite displaying a

pronounced preoccupation with technological progress, the fantasies of

privatized mobility narrated by mobile television’s promotional materials were

politically retrograde, at least in comparison with their antecedents. 1960s

advertisements for portable television receivers had frequently appropriated the

rhetoric and iconography of the women’s liberation movement to sell

transistorized sets, with many featuring images of “modern” women using

portable televisions within the context of active consumer lifestyles that took them

outside of their homes and allowed them to step outside of conventional gender

roles (Spigel, 2001, pp. 76-80). These appropriations might have been

opportunistic and exploitative, yet they nonetheless recognized and valued the

mobilities of women in ways that later advertisements for mobile television

services seldom did. Mobile television’s promotional materials portrayed mobility

(and mobile spectatorship) as the exclusive prerogative of men, and of white

twentysomething middle class men in particular. In these scenarios, voluntary

mobility was often conceptualized as a zero sum game; hence in “Injury Report”

Jason’s crisis of mobility (and masculinity) arises as a result of the unchecked

mobility of his acquisitive girlfriend. “Injury Report”’s misogynistic depiction of the


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mobile consumer lifestyle of Jason’s girlfriend is telling. Even more telling is the

fact that this commercial is one of the few mobile television advertisements that

depicted a woman engaged in voluntary and pleasurable forms of mobility and

consumption. Far more frequently, as I discuss below, women were absent from

mobile television’s promotional materials, or else appeared only as functionally

inert elements of urban landscapes that existed chiefly for the consumption of

men who had “changed out of their skirts.”

The folly of struggling mobile television companies ignoring over half of

their potential market should be self-evident. Women in the U.S. are avid mobile

phone users, and comprise an important growth market for smartphones and

mobile data services (Nielsen Wire, 2009). Mobile television companies

essentially left this potentially lucrative market on the table in their single-minded

pursuit of America’s Jason Glasbys. Well before Qualcomm’s Super Bowl

commercials aired analysts had already begun to express their concerns about

the long-term viability of this strategy of segmenting mobile television’s audience

by gender. For instance, in 2005 the branding consultancy Third Way criticized

Amp’d Mobile for a commercial targeted at young male early-adopters that

featured a prostitute banging on the chest of a dead John (Mallo 2005). Given

the difficulties that Amp’d Mobile, Qualcomm, Mobile ESPN, and many of their

competitors experienced in attracting subscribers in this period, it seems wholly

reasonable to question the logic behind these companies’ misogynistic

promotional campaigns. Granted, young men are the population that is most
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frequently targeted by the promoters of new media technologies. In this respect,

U.S. mobile television services’ promotional materials have as much to say about

a consumer economy that invests disproportionately in the cultivation of young

men’s discretionary spending habits as they do about the fledgling mobile

television sector. Even so, mobile television services went to extraordinary

lengths to hone in on this population in their promotional campaigns, with the

consequence that in many instances their promotional texts seemed as if they

had been expressly designed to exclude and even offend anyone who did not fall

within this narrow demographic profile.

The Power to entertain yourself: Mobile television, privatization, and

possessive spectatorship

“Injury Report” concludes before Jason Glasby has had a chance to demonstrate

mobile television’s uses and features for the audience. Far more frequently,

mobile television advertisements from this period picked up where “Injury Report”

left off, depicting mobile male viewers’ victories in zero-sum contests over control

of public spaces of leisure and consumption. Many of these advertisements

featured their own versions of Qualcomm’s Jason Glasby character using mobile

television devices to claim public spaces for their own spectatorial pleasures. The

mobile viewers who populated these advertisements were carefree consumers of

texts, spaces, and people, all of which blended together on the liquid crystal

displays of their mobile devices. They were modern-day avatars of what Eric
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Gordon (2010) terms “possessive spectatorship,” or the “cultural impulse to

collect, control, and assemble the experience of the city” through the use of

media technologies (20). Mobile television’s promotional materials narrated this

impulse to “possess” the city in more or less literal ways, inviting consumers to

imagine using mobile television to transform their surroundings into privatized

spaces of spectatorship, but also to imagine consuming these surroundings and

their inhabitants as they might viral videos or streaming television feeds. As

noted above, these invitations were not extended to all consumers. Rather,

possessive spectatorship was monopolized in mobile television’s promotional

materials by a succession of Jason Glasby types, young white males who

satisfied their impulses to collect, control, and assemble their experiences of

urban environments at the expense of their inhabitants.

Perhaps the most literal illustration of mobile television’s reworking of this

impulse of possessive spectatorship is a 2006 commercial for Nokia’s N-Series

mobile television-equipped handset. The commercial, which circulated on the

web, employs tromp l’œil special effects to convey the manner in which the

multimedia cell phone reduces the urban landscape to a much more intimate and

manageable scale. It begins with a quick montage of shots of a city at dusk,

establishing its verticality and vastness, before transitioning to a sequence of

shots of a smartly dressed young man traversing its streets. The man spots a

phone booth, which he lifts off the ground and places in his bag. His motions are

accompanied by a sudden shift in scale that reduces the phone booth to the size
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of a dollhouse miniature. The man continues to accumulate pieces of his

surroundings in this fashion, collecting items that represent the multiple functions

of his Nokia mobile phone, including a billboard (photography) and the neon sign

of a jazz club (music). Finally, he comes across a billboard-sized television

screen, which he plucks from the top of the building on which it has been

mounted. In the palm of his hand, the screen appears no larger than a mobile

phone. As the scaffolding that had formerly held the screen in place buckles and

explodes, the camera swivels 360 degrees. Once this revolution has concluded,

it is revealed that the giant-screen television has morphed into a Nokia phone.

With each of its tromp l’œil sequences Nokia’s advertisement restages the

city’s transformation from an intimidating to an intimate environment via shifts of

scale that miniaturize it and enable its possession. Miniaturization, in the words

of Margaret Morse, is “a process of interiorization, enclosure, and perfection” that

reduces the incomprehensibly vast to a more intimate and manageable scale.

Morse identifies this process as being at play in television, automobile culture,

shopping malls, and consumer capitalism itself, each of which “expands the

personal … [transforming] action into exchange, nature into marketplace, history

into collection and property” (1990, p. 201). Miniaturization is thus a form of

privatization, not unlike that carried out by the individual who uses a Walkman,

iPod, or handheld gaming device to carve out and inhabit “‘media saturated’

spaces of intimacy” within shared public spaces (Bull, 2004, 278). In these

scenarios, portable media devices supply their users with means of creating
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private audiovisual bubbles around themselves, and therefore of insulating and

absenting themselves from their immediate surroundings. By contrast, in Nokia’s

advertisement the mobile phone transforms the city itself into one of these

“‘media saturated’ spaces of intimacy.” The private audiovisual bubble and the

city become one and the same, rendering the urban environment a space where

and that the mobile viewer subject may safely, comfortably, and pleasurably

consume.

The privatized urban environments depicted within mobile television

advertisements were frequently populated with individuals who appeared to exist

solely for the entertainment of the mobile male viewer. For instance, in Mobile

ESPN’s aforementioned 2006 Super Bowl commercial a man walks through a

downtown business district that is overrun with athletes who perform a variety of

spectacular physical feats. In a series of commercials for Verizon’s Real TV

mobile television becomes a conversation starter that allows a young man to

interact with the people he encounters on while traversing city streets. One

installment of this series shows the mobile viewer amazed to learn that a gum-

popping frosted blonde bimbo can intelligently discuss his phone’s “seamless

broadcast quality TV with no buffering or downloading.” In another installment,

the same man finds common ground with a coarse and garrulous hot dog vendor

over their shared appreciation of the ability to channel surf on his phone. Despite

the face-to-face nature of these interactions, they are by no means reciprocal.

Instead, they take place at the mobile viewer’s behest, and within own personal
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audiovisual bubble. Like voice calls and text messages, these interactions occur

through the mobile device’s interface, a frictionless environment within which the

mobile viewer is insulated from the tensions, conflicts, or compromises that

characterize urban life. Within this environment, the mobile male’s interlocutors

are reduced to amusing types whose difference is a source of curiosity that is

always entertaining but never threatening.

The social dynamic at the heart of these hybridized fantasies of privatized

mobility and possessive spectatorship was perhaps most clearly (and

disturbingly) revealed by an advertisement for the Amp’d Mobile wireless

network. As noted above, during its brief period of solvency Amp’d Mobile went

to great lengths to cultivate an edgy brand image. A major component of this

branding strategy was a series advertisements that encouraged the company’s

target market (men between the ages of 18 and 24) to imagine using their mobile

phones to control the people and environments they encountered in their

everyday travels. In one such advertisement, set onboard a city bus, yet another

young white male begins issuing orders to his fellow passengers in a flat,

affectless tone. First, he commands an elderly man and an African-American

man to fight, and they immediately spring out of their seats and begin pummeling

each other. Then, he instructs a man in mechanic’s coveralls to turn up his radio,

and an African-American woman to “shake your junk,” at which point she

performs a perfunctory pole dance on one of the bus’s hand rails. Finally, the

man tells the bus driver to hit the brakes. The commercial ends with the bus’s
25

passengers flying in all directions, and the slogan “Have the Power to Entertain

Yourself” superimposed over the screen (Dawson 2007).

If Verizon’s campaign presents the mobile phone as an interface through

which the male, middle class urban adventurer can decode (and accommodate)

sex or class difference, in Amp’d’s campaign it becomes a remote control that

allows this figure to collect, sequence, and consume the people he encounters in

his travels like any other form of digital content. In addition to resonating with

Nokia’s and Verizon’s depictions of mobile television as an instrument of

possessive spectatorship, Amp’d Mobile’s advertisement also evokes Bumfights,

the notorious series of exploitation videos in which homeless people fight or

perform dangerous stunts on tape. Like Bumfights, this advertisement equates

the “power to entertain yourself” with the power to use digital video technology to

endanger and humiliate anonymous urban subalterns. Only whereas Bumfights’

producers plied homeless people with cash, alcohol, and crack cocaine in order

to get them to appear on camera, in Amp’d Mobile’s advertisement the city’s

inhabitants are imagined to be fully obedient and acquiescent to the mobile

viewer’s will. Amp’d Mobile’s urban traveller does not use technology to withdraw

from his surroundings. Rather, via the act of watching television in public spaces

he experiences these spaces as fully privatized, and their inhabitants as

performers in dramas that unfold for an audience of one on the tiny LCD screen

of his mobile phone.5

Within advertisements such as this one, mobile television’s uses and


26

cultural meanings could not possibly have been clearer. Mobile television

bestowed upon its viewer the ability to transform even the most inhospitable of

public environments into a site of privatized spectatorship and consumption

where he could enjoy the same feelings of power, omniscience, connectivity, and

control he experienced at home in front of his television set. Mobile television

thus functioned a potent weapon in conflicts over control of the shared spaces of

everyday life. Curiously, mobile television’s backers promoted this weapon to a

population of consumers who needed it the least. The pleasurable forms of

mobility depicted within these advertisements have in the West at least

traditionally been a privilege monopolized by men. As Janet Wolff (1993)

suggests, experiences of voluntary mobility bear an intrinsic (though by no

means essential) relationship to “constructed masculine identity” (230). For those

who are already at liberty to indulge their wanderlust, the fantasies of privatized

mobility and possessive spectatorship these advertisements narrated would have

hardly seemed fantastic. Rather, mobile television’s promotional materials

reflected their privileged audience’s social and economic status back to them via

redundant displays of technologically enhanced spatial dominion.

There is some small satisfaction to be taken from the fact that mobile

television’s target market of young male early adopters responded with

indifference to the entreaties of companies that, like Amp’d Mobile, stooped to

such blatant sexism, classism, and racism to promote their services. But what of

the many millions who could not (or preferred not) to identify with the privileged
27

men who were the subjects of these promotional materials’ address? In their

determined pursuit of the early adopter market mobile television’s promotional

texts all but barred women, people of color, and working class people from

participating in the fantasies of privatized mobility and possessive spectatorship

they depicted. However, they could not prevent members of these same groups

from interpreting these fantasies through their own experiences of encountering

television, mobile phones, and other media technologies in shared public spaces.

As Anna McCarthy (2001) has noted, on a daily basis women, people of color,

and working class people are exposed to various forms of out-of-home media

that do not address them as mobile and autonomous consumers, but as

members of captive audiences. These encounters are frequently characterized

by monotony instead of novelty, and feelings of powerlessness instead of

omnipotent control. For individuals for whom mobility is not necessarily a

discretionary declaration of consumer sovereignty or masculine agency, but

rather is linked to economic necessity, the conflicts narrated by advertisements

such as the ones discussed above likely would have triggered associations with

these very sorts of indignities. For instance, Amp’d Mobile’s “The Power to

Entertain Yourself” commercial might have evoked recollections of sharing a bus

ride home after a long day of work with an inconsiderate young urban

professional who thought nothing of subjecting his fellow passengers to ribald

tales about his nightlife as he talked loudly on his mobile phone. Along similar

lines, Nokia’s trompe l’oeil special effects might have reminded some urban
28

dwellers of their own experiences of the very real (as opposed to metaphorical)

processes of privatization associated with gentrification.

For reasons that will likely remain obscure, advertisements for mobile

television services appear to have left their target market of young male early

adopters cold. In all likelihood, these same advertisements went a long way

towards persuading people who did not fit this consumer profile that mobile

television was certainly not for them, and moreover quite possibly was a weapon

to be used against them in conflicts over the shopping mall, the city street, and

public transportation. Herein lies what was arguably one of the most damaging

missteps made by mobile television’s backers during the period of the medium’s

U.S. launch. For while Amp’d Mobile, Mobile ESPN, Qualcomm, and their

competitors for the most did quite admirable jobs of rapidly assembling

infrastructure and content for their systems, their promotional materials rarely

touted these accomplishments. Rather, mobile television’s backers used their

promotional campaigns to define the new medium of mobile television as a

weapon in a zero-sum game that, at least according to their advertisements,

would inevitably be won by the Jason Glasbys of the world. By foregrounding

these conflicts, mobile television’s backers placed artificial and arbitrary limits on

the size of the new medium’s potential market. Under the constraints of these

limits mobile television has struggled unsuccessfully to break out of the early

adopter ghetto that its U.S. backers fought so hard to gain a foothold within. As a

result, after more than seven years U.S. mobile television services have only
29

ever managed to attract a small and demographically-homogenous base of

subscribers (Mobiledia, 2007).

Conclusion

Certainly, promotional materials are not exclusively to blame for mobile

television’s troubles in the U.S. Indeed, a much broader range of factors

contributed to the failures of the mobile television ventures whose

advertisements I have discussed in this essay’s preceding pages. Mobile ESPN,

Amp’d Mobile, and FLO TV were all brought down by unique confluences of

events falling both within and beyond these companies’ control. In the case of

Amp’d Mobile, for instance, particularly damaging was the company’s policy of

allowing people with poor credit ratings to sign up for its services. After many of

these subscribers did not pay their monthly bills, Amp’d Mobile was plunged into

a liquidity crisis that prevented it from paying off its own creditors, and that

ultimately brought on its demise. By the time Amp’d Mobile filed for bankruptcy in

2007, the service had only about 175,000 total subscribers, 80,0000 of whom

were delinquent on their bills (Marshall, 2007; Rosenthal, 2007).

Amp’d Mobile’s credit crisis illustrates the devastating effects that

something as seemingly inconsequential as a subscriber credit check policy can

have on a new media venture’s prospects for success. Then again, perhaps

Amp’d Mobile would not have been compelled to extend credit to risky cases had

it been more successful at signing up subscribers in the first place. The question
30

remains, then: “Why did so few people sign up for Amp’d Mobile and the other

mobile television services launched in this period?”

Over the course of this essay I have argued that an engagement with the

promotional materials that accompanied the launch of mobile television services

in the U.S. can be an important first step towards answering this question. Far

greater numbers of people encountered mobile television’s promotional materials

than had chances to experience its technologies or content first hand. These

consumers did not reject mobile television so much as they rejected a particular

definition of its meanings. Understanding mobile television’s failure in the U.S.

thus requires that we first consider the processes by which these meanings were

made, the channels through which they circulated, and the values and

expectations that shaped how adopters and non-adopters interpreted them. This

prescription, I believe, may be generalized to the many other instances in which

consumers have rejected – or even merely responded with indifference to – new

media technologies that were extensively promoted by their backers. Launching

a new media technology involves engineering hardware, designing interfaces,

building out infrastructure, procuring content, constructing manufacturing

facilities, and establishing retail distribution networks. But it also involves telling

stories and making meanings. Though a breakdown at any of these stages may

result in a media technology’s designation as a failure, it is these acts of

communication that are most vulnerable, as they alone involve consumers

directly. Studying the unsuccessful promotion of failed media technologies brings


31

these vulnerabilities into relief, demonstrating the precariousness that

characterizes the launch of every new media technology. To return to the

question that began this essay – “What insights, if any, are to be gained by

studying the unsuccessful promotion of failed media technologies?” If nothing

else these texts make clear that with regards to new media technologies often all

that stands between success and failure is a matter of communication.

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1
Mobile television uses wireless networks to stream content to subscribers’ handsets so that

programming is viewed synchronously with its transmission. Contrast this to portable video

technologies which store content on hard drives for later viewing. For more on this distinction,

see Lotz (2007).

2
Mobile television’s backers have at various points included Verizon, AT&T, Walt Disney Co.,

MTV Networks, Qualcomm, and News Corporation.

3
Amp’d and ESPN Mobile were mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) that leased

wireless spectrum from larger mobile networks and bundled their television services together

with voice communications.

4
Raymond Williams (2003) argues that television expresses and to a certain extent

attenuates one of modernity’s defining contradictions: namely, the tension between, on the

one hand, modern forms of conveyance, social mobility, and patterns of population

distribution, and, on the other, the decidedly privatized character of modern life. According to

Williams, television’s amenability with this thoroughly contradictory way of life derives from its

ability to afford its audiences experiences of vicarious mobility that could be enjoyed within

the privacy of their own homes, a mode of experience he terms “mobile privatization” (19-21).

5
A companion piece from the same campaign features a woman in a similar position of

control, only in this version the action takes place inside during a family reunion, where the

woman commands her family members to engage in similarly demeaning stunts. Here,

however, the control is divorced from geographic mobility, and is confined to the domestic

sphere and the family circle.

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