Distribution Is Queen: LGBTQ Media on Demand

The research analyst who assured the Economist in 2009 that “people would sooner unplug their refrigerators than their cable boxes” may be eating his words.¹ Perhaps he’d now muse that folks would rather sacrifice toilet paper than broadband. In “My Life as a Television Throwback,” Taffy Brodesser-Akner describes her cobbled-together viewing habits after her husband was laid off. Her family canceled cable and watched TV online through the usual streaming suspects, but also via digital antennae, forcing an encounter with “slow” TV—programs as scheduled during the week, interstitials and all.² While my personal battle with AT&T to maintain cable service after a windstorm rages on after visits from six technicians, none of whom could climb a telephone pole, most of my friends have pulled the plug on cable and satellite. My dirtiest professional secret? I’m finding myself increasingly jealous of their lower monthly bills. And I write and teach about TV! But I am also anxious about what new online consumption patterns mean for the production and distribution of feminist and LGBTQ media.

Now that video streaming represents a quarter of total Internet usage, mainstream television and film distributors are struggling to create pay-per-view, commercial-sponsored, and subscription online formats enticing enough that viewers stop downloading pirated media for free. Unfortunately, distributors for independent, alternative, and niche media are also suffering a siphoning off of their profits—and these companies often barely break even on festival favorites that don’t otherwise garner consumer interest. A clear consequence of rapidly shifting consumption practices for the vitality of alternative media is that to ensure profit, work that reproduces popular Hollywood narratives and aesthetics tends to get picked up over more experimental fare, even by companies that have previously taken chances with riskier material. In what follows, I examine the digital strategies and harnessing of consensual fan labor that queer distributors, in particular, employ to stave off their own economic collapse. I turn to two of the largest LGBTQ film and television distributors, Wolfe Video and the Logo network, respectively, as case studies. As I detail, Wolfe’s e-commerce business model incorporates “hiring” consumers as online subcontractors, partnering with digital video distributors, and maximizing content-sharing sites like Pinterest to socially distribute its films. The basic cable channel Logo uses mobile social media applications, such as Foursquare, and mines user data across access devices to create individualized media experiences for television fans. These practices reflect some of the seismic shifts in the structure of for-profit media distribution over the past decade—moves toward providing media content for the consumer on demand and across multiple platforms.

Given consumers’ new strategies for avoiding costly subscriptions, cable providers are retrenching, offering bundled deals, expanding video-on-demand (VOD) services for the customers they’ve kept, and developing online and mobile VOD sites that resemble HBO GO’s successful format. Apparently concerned that maybe “content is king” after all, multisystem operator Comcast even purchased the media conglomerate NBC Universal, first buying a controlling stake in 2011, followed by the whole company in 2013.³ Since the downturn of the economy, the film industry has experienced its own share of initial bed-wetting, given lower box-office and home entertainment sales.⁴ There’s also no money in local video-rental chains, unless you’re talking about those little red boxes outside of drugstores. Rental giant Hollywood Video closed its doors and Blockbuster declared bankruptcy.⁵ Initial estimates that viewers would buy nearly a billion more movies through legal online sources than on Blu-ray or DVD in 2012 ended up being inflated;⁶ but while 2012 didn’t quite mark the first year that Internet media viewing profits exceeded hard-copy revenue, online sales will inevitably beat out traditional delivery and home entertainment formats.

While both large and small media distributors experiment with pay-to-watch online delivery systems, consumers’ insecurity in the new economy, married with changes in streaming technology and file sharing, invites forms of consumption off the corporate grid. In 2011, Maria Pallante, the US register of copyrights, shouted...