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This book explores how infrastructures and strategies for distributing online television news are developed and maintained. Focusing on MSNBC, a hybrid company built to link television and the Internet, it challenges often-simplistic assumptions about how media is produced and considers the route that online news takes to reach consumers. It discusses the notion of “conversation economy,” articulated by John Battelle in his 2005 book The Search, and the tendency of online journalists to select story topics partially on the basis of whether an article is likely to generate page views through sharing and search. Part 1 of the book considers the path taken by MSNBC television programs as they made their way to online audiences; Part 2 examines MSNBC's online distribution platforms from the vantage points of different system builders within the larger organization; and Part 3 focuses on how MSNBC's distribution channels were built to serve a broad array of online audiences.

This chapter examines the potential of media distribution, and the balance of structure and agency enacted in different approaches to it, to inform our view of a wide array of major social and scholarly concerns. In particular, it considers the key role played by the technologies and practices of media distribution in the conditions under which people congregate and imagine their communities. It first explores the impact of distribution on the conditions of media work in the media industries, paying attention to media ownership models and their effect on media distribution strategies. It then discusses the ability of online distribution networks to spur social change by cutting across social and regional boundaries and helping to reconfigure them; how distribution renders societal groups and subcultures visible; how states impinge on distribution as a form of political oppression; and how distribution platforms can promote public participation. It also analyzes the implications of distribution platforms for political activism as well as for film and literary culture.

This book has explored trends in the distribution of online television news and the underlying sociotechnical systems by looking at the case of MSNBC. It has described concepts and offered insights regarding new and emerging organizational forms and distribution networks that are often said to be hallmarks of the Internet. It has suggested that many significant relationships shaping both access to content and the nature of the systems delivering it can be discovered by tracing the path of media as it reaches its intended audience. This concluding chapter discusses contemporary, multifaceted media organizations and their efforts at online distribution. It also considers the notions of epistemic cultures and heterogeneous engineering and how tracing out the “voltas” of media distribution allows us to reevaluate the so-called “moments of tracing.” Finally, it assesses the role of transparent intermediaries, or “business-to-business” distribution firms, in the distribution of a provider's content while remaining invisible to end users.

This chapter focuses on the construction of MSNBC.com's web video player, the primary means by which NBC's cable news and broadcast news programs were made available to users and audiences online. More specifically, it examines the video player's interface and other features in order to elucidate the complex relationships, interests, and motivations devoted to the design of the everyday objects used in online distribution. It also considers the importance of syndication to MSNBC's web presence and how MSNBC.com was able to dramatically expand the reach of its online video by pushing clips to other web properties in Microsoft's online services division, including Bing and MSN.

This chapter examines the technical underpinnings of MSNBC.com's next-generation content management system called SkyPad. It first describes Newsvine's M3 architecture before turning to SkyPad, which was developed to take in and spit out almost any type of multimedia content and allow for the construction of entirely new websites and brands on the fly. It considers SkyPad, along with M3, as a representative of an emerging vision for enlisting provincial editorial groups and diverse audiences in the online distribution of mainstream media products. It also looks at MSNBC.com's series of ever more generic tools for online publishing that are intended to address the need for increasingly divergent and niche editorial products.

This chapter describes how courts and lawmakers struggle with concepts of tangibility and intangibility as they apply the first sale or exhaustion doctrine to new technological environments. The difficulty of applying the exhaustion or first sale doctrine to digital works relates in great part to the difficulties of adapting traditional concepts of personal property, goods, services, sales, and licences to copies of copyright works and other information products, in an ever-changing technological environment (identified in Chapter 4). After looking at the main theoretical justifications of the first sale or exhaustion doctrine, and concluding that the property theory is the most plausible explanation of the first sale doctrine, the chapter questions the extent to which the doctrine of exhaustion or first sale will remain relevant as users increasingly experience copyright works through services and decreasingly through individualized copies.

This chapter looks at the tangible and intangible property divide through the effect of technological protection measures on a larger pool of users than traditional copyright users: that is, those inadvertent copyright users who buy, for example, a car or a tractor without suspecting that it embeds copyright works (e.g., software), let alone digital locks blocking access to important components of the physical object. The chapter explains how the adoption of legal regimes of technological protection measures worldwide shifted the paradigm for copyright users by redefining the rules of engagement of how they access and experience digital works. It explores how the progressive intrusion and enforcement of digital locks in the world of physical objects will either trigger favourable legal reform for copyright users, or will further trivialize user rights. It examines the changing role of technological protection measures, as users increasingly access copyright works through services.