Page 72 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 60
segmented? Which programmes are recorded most by which viewers? And when are they
played back? Thus, VCR use is now being meticulously scrutinized with such questions
in mind. Since 1986, for example, Nielsen has added a weekly VCR Special Analysis
Report to its services package (Potter et al. 1988; Sims 1989).
The networks’ interest in such information is dominated by the drive to know how
time shifting affects the audience-maximizing effectiveness of their carefully arranged
schedules. If, as one researcher has put it, ‘VCR ownership heightens overall awareness
of the TV schedule because owners are making decisions on whether to view or tape
programmes’ (Rosenthal 1987:69), viewers will be able to interrupt the flow of
programmes as dictated by the networks’ schedules and construct their own schedules.
This would make all sorts of tried and tested scheduling tricks, such as ‘hammocking’ (a
strategy which is intended to boost the ratings of a programme by placing it in between
two popular programmes) less effective: viewers can no longer be ‘captured’ so easily.
Poltrack (in ibid,: 39) refers to this phenomenon by calling it ‘schedule cannibalization’,
a voracious metaphor that indicates the apprehension, if not implicit regret, felt in
network circles about the new freedoms viewers have acquired through the VCR. VCR
users as wild savages!
But the networks are also creative in inventing effects of the VCR that they can bend
to their advantage. For example, one survey found that 4 per cent of the audience for a
series like LA Law comes through the VCR, as against only 2 per cent for The Cosby
Show (ibid.). Thus, as recorded programmes are included in the Nielsen ratings, the VCR
can be seen as enhancing, if only slightly, the ratings performance of LA Law. Such play
with statistics has led NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff to cheerfully remark that VCRs ‘are
actually helping our ratings rather than competing with them’ (in Broadcasting 6 April
1987:90). And Barry Cook, NBC’s managing director of special media research, predicts:
‘I don’t see the VCR becoming a dominant force. It could allow the network to take more
of risk in scheduling a new show against strong competition’ (in Rosenthal 1987:68). In
other words, the networks furiously attempt to interpret the new situation caused by the
VCR in manageable terms. They make every effort, at least rhetorically, to render the
entrance of the VCR compatible with their own programming and scheduling strategies.
What is at stake in such strategies is the remapping of the audience in the VCR era. To
illustrate the networks’ ambition to incorporate VCR use in a streamlined map, just note
some of the more daring suggestions made by Poltrack to regulate recording and
playback practices. Drawing on survey findings that Saturday night is the night on which
the VCR is used most (both for playbacking recorded tapes and for watching rented
tapes), he noted that, where it used to be network strategy to discourage taping, now the
time might have come to promote it: ‘for example, [by] encouraging stay-at-homes to
watch rented tapes early and then watch network programs, or tape shows from previous
nights and watch them then, or night-outers to record Saturday night programming to
watch later that night’ (in ibid., 67). Exactly how Poltrack imagined such streamlined
VCR viewing behaviour could be orchestrated is not mentioned, nor whether he should
be taken entirely seriously. What is significant here however is the very emergence of
such ideas from the networks’ point of view.
Advertisers, for their part, are sceptical. Not surprisingly, they are most worried about
the fate of their commercials in time shifting practices. What if recorded tapes are not
played back at all? Then, not only the programmes, but also, more importantly, the