Viceland is totally expected and totally not
MARCH 4TH, 2016 — POST 060
The future of TV will look a lot like today’s podcasts. With serialised drama expecting more and more commitment from its viewers, the rubber band will eventually snap back and the single, self-contained episode will return to dominance. In turn, factual content will rise to replace the bulk of average-to-sub-par scripted content. I wrote about all this a while ago. One of the observations in that piece was that this model is almost solely embodied in Vice which, at the time, I thought was present only on YouTube. Apparently I had been living under a rock because it was in November of last year that Vice announced a cable television channel of their own. And it was last month that the thing finally went live.
The initial set of series on Viceland, this new channel, follows closely what Vice offered on YouTube with the addition of some new properties. The flagship of these appears to be Gaycation, the Ellen Page-led travel show about LGBT relations around the world. But, on the whole, there’s not much new here. With new seasons of favourites Fuck, That’s Delicious and Huang’s World, it’s all very familiar. And the new stuff is not exactly a departure from Vice’s distinct brand voice — real stories that revel in the world’s diversity.
Building out the Vice brand beyond YouTube makes so much sense. They garner a culture that embraces an extremely keen eye for story, wherever it might be, and for minting an aesthetic that so many respond to. More so than networks like HBO or Netflix, there’s no mistaking a Vice product. Additionally, the years spent grinding out product after product proves extremely fruitful when suddenly you’ve got 24 hours a day to fill with content. And this is where Viceland stops making sense. If there is one great departure from what Vice has been doing up until the launch of Viceland, it is in its distribution. Those 24 hours they have to fill each day are a consequence of Viceland being a decidedly old-world TV channel.
I have to couch all of this by admitting I haven’t watched any of Viceland’s content. But this is in no way due to my negligence. Viceland is an addition to premium cable offerings and, for now, remains exclusive to the US. For a company who built their name on a platform (and arguably in content) that knows no bounds, this is a particularly strange move. Apparently, Vice is betting that broadcast is back and that the shared experience of liveness will extend beyond the monolithic monuments of Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead. Even if they offer app and web experiences for viewing, access to Viceland being tied to a cable subscription will always elevate the broadcast experience as the prescribed method of consumption.
I would have predicted Vice’s pivot to land them alongside Netflix and Hulu as a purely app-driven, entirely on-demand experience. As this service would be (most likely) made up entirely of their own content, the licensing deals that slowed the international reach of Netflix seemingly wouldn’t be an issue. A Vice streaming service ostensibly could’ve launched simultaneously worldwide. With how Viceland has shaken out, Vice is making a huge bet on an old way of doing things for a consumer-base that is categorically enamoured with the new ways.
There is one interesting comparison I can look to as a precedent for this move. Apple Music’s (supposed) killer feature to separate it from Spotify was Beats One radio: a 24-hour live international radio station. The notions of liveness, of presence, of shared experience that broadcast TV and radio historically upheld were back. And the (at least initial) success of Beats One was due to novelty: it was pitched at a generation for whom liveness, presence, and shared experience were not inherent feature of their consumptive practices. It would seem it is something like this that Vice is aiming at with Viceland.
For business, this makes a lot of sense. The shared experience, “event” nature of certain TV can charge phenomenal ad rates. But this requires eyeballs paying attention initially. Vice setting up Viceland as a premium cable channel could be too big a barrier for those eyeballs to see over.
Even if it’s built, they might not come.
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