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Introduction

As I was dashing through an airport in November 2001, the cover of Technology Review displayed on a newsstand rack caught my eye. Its cover story was titled “The Future of TV,” and the inside pages provided a smart look at likely coming developments.¹ Even by the end of 2001, which was long before viewers or television executives truly imagined the reality of downloading television shows to pocket-sized devices or streaming video online, it was apparent that the box that had sat in our homes for half a century was on the verge of significant change. The future that the author, Mark Fischetti, foresaw in the article depicted the television world that would be available to early adopters by the mid-2000s fairly accurately (by “2000s,” I mean the first decade of the twenty-first century, not the century in its entirety). His focus, though, was on the living room television set, and his vision did not anticipate the portability of computing that would develop over the late 2000s to break down distinctions between television and “computer” screens, or that mobile phones would so quickly become pocket computers and portable televisions. But right there in his third paragraph is the sentiment that television and consumer electronics executives uttered incessantly beginning in 2006 as the mantra of the television future: “whatever show you want, whenever you want, on whatever screen you want.”

Even though Fischetti presciently predicted the substantial adjustments in how we view television, where we view it, how we pay for it, and how the industry would remain viable and vital, many other headlines in the intervening years predicted a far more dire situation. Reports and articles bore ominous titles like “The End of Television as We Know It” (IBM Business Consulting Services), “The Death of Television” (Slate), “Why TV Will Never Be the Same” (Business Week), and “How Old Media Can Survive in a New World” (Wall Street Journal).² By 2007, a Wired article better captured the emerging contradictions with the title “The TV Is Dead. Long Live the TV.”³ Predicting the coming death of television became a new beat for many of the nation’s technology and culture writers in the mid-2000s. When television contrarily persisted, the naysayers turned instead to the dominant cable delivery model, announced the imminent demise of the cable industry, and suggested that legions of viewers would soon cancel cable subscriptions. Sounding the death knell for cable, prognosticators proposed that viewers would go “over the top” (OTT) of their cable boxes to access favorite shows through Internet delivery of content by using services such as Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, or a wide range of authorized and unauthorized web-based sources; Max Fisher’s Atlantic article “Cable TV Is Doomed” is indicative of the new apocalyptic theme.⁴ But despite such claims and endless fawning over the latest gadget or gizmo that would usher in the demise of television or cable, both persisted. Showtime’s CEO, Matt Blank, wryly joked at the 2013 Cable Show that industry journalists’ favorite topics were companies with no revenues and no earnings, followed by those with some revenues and still no earnings; “old” television companies like his that were flush with both proved of little interest.

The journalists weren’t alone in their uncertainty about the future of television or even the definition of television, as new ways to use television and new forms of content confounded even those who used the device every day. In 2004—before much legal or illegal streaming of video online occurred—the longtime broadcast television executive Rich Frank told a Las Vegas ballroom full of television executives about a recent visit with his young grandson. He asked the boy which network was his favorite, expecting to hear a broadcast network or perhaps Nickelodeon in response. But without a moment’s hesitation the boy replied, “TiVo.” By 2013, a child might instead answer “PBS.org” or “the videos on daddy’s phone.” If the period from 2000 through 2010 led audiences to imagine that television would become something different than it had been during the preceding half century, the period from 2010 through 2014 introduced and normalized aspects of the future of television, such as the presumption that “television” is not only viewed on a television set. By that time, the industry slowly but meaningfully expanded viewers’ ability to watch “whatever show you want, whenever you want, on whatever screen you want.”

We may continue to watch television, but the new technologies available to us require new rituals of use. Not so long ago, television use typically involved walking into a room, turning on the set, and either turning to specific content or channel surfing. Today, viewers with digital video recorders (DVRs) may elect to circumvent scheduling constraints and commercials, while others download or stream the latest episodes of their favorite shows, either within or outside the conventional setting of the living room. And this doesn’t even begin to touch upon the vast array of content created outside the television industry that appears on video aggregators such as YouTube or social networking sites.

As a result of these changing technologies and modes of viewing, television use has become increasingly complicated, deliberate, and individualized. Television as we knew it—understood as a mass medium offering programs that reached a broad, heterogeneous audience and spoke to the culture as a whole—is no longer the norm in the United States, though most certainly neither is going “over the top.” But despite what many initially thought, changes in what we can do with television, what we expect from it, and how we use it have not been hastening the demise of the medium; instead, they are revolutionizing television.

To explore this revolution, this book offers a detailed and extensive behind-the-screen exploration of the substantial changes occurring in television technology, program creation, distribution, and television economics, why these practices have changed, and how these changes are profoundly affecting everyone from television viewers to those who study and work in the industry. It examines a wide range of industrial practices common in U.S. television and assesses their recent evolution in order to explain how and why the images and stories we watch on television find their way to us as they do in the twenty-first century. These changes are so revolutionary that they suggest the nascent development of a new era of television, the effects of which we have only begun to detect.

What Is Television Today?

Television is not just a simple technology or appliance—like a toaster—that has sat in our homes for more than sixty years. Rather, it functions as both a technology and a tool for cultural storytelling. We know it as a sort of “window on the world” or a “cultural hearth” that has gathered our families, told us stories, and offered glimpses of a world outside our daily experience. It brought the nation together to view Lucy’s antics, gave us mouthpieces to discuss our uncertainties about social change through Archie and Meathead, and provided a common gathering place through which a geographically vast nation could share in watching national triumphs and tragedies. A certain understanding of what television was and could be developed during our early years with the medium and resulted from the specific industrial practices that organized television production processes for much of its history. Alterations in the production process—the practices involved in the creation and circulation of television—including how producers make television programs, how studios finance them, and how audiences access them, have created new ways of using television that now challenge our basic understanding of the medium. Changes in television have forced the production process to evolve during the past twenty years so that the assorted ways we now use television are mirrored in and enabled by greater variation in the ways television is made, financed, and distributed.

We might rarely consider the business of television, but production practices inordinately affect the stories, images, and ideas that project into our homes. The industrial transformation of U.S. television has begun to modify what the industry creates. Industrial processes are normally nearly unalterable and support deeply entrenched structures of power that determine what stories can be told and which viewers matter most. But beginning in the mid-1980s, the U.S. television industry began reinventing itself and its industrial practices to compete in the digital era by breaking from customary norms of program acquisition, financing, and advertiser support that in many cases had been in place since the mid-1950s. This period of transition created great instability in the relationships among producers and consumers, networks and advertisers, and technology companies and content creators, which in turn initiated uncommon opportunities to deviate from the “conventional wisdom” or “industry lore” that ruled television operations. Industry workers faced a changing competitive environment triggered by the development of new and converging technologies that expanded ways to watch and receive television; they also found audiences willing to explore the innovative opportunities these new technologies provided.

Rather than enhancing existing business models, industrial practices, and viewing norms, recent technological innovations have engendered new ones—but it is not just new technologies that have revolutionized the television industry. Adjustments in how studios finance, make, and distribute shows as well as in how and where viewers watch them occurred simultaneously. None of these developments suggested that television would play a diminished role in the lives of the nation that spends the most time engaging its programming, but the evolving institutional, economic, and technological adjustments of the industry have significant implications for the role of television in society.

The industry remains in the throes of rapid and radical change in 2014 as the television transformation moves from a few early adopters to a more general and mass audience. As new uses become dominant and shared by more viewers, television’s role in culture continues to evolve. Understanding these related changes is of crucial interest to all who watch television and think about how television communicates ideas, to those who study media, and to those who are trying to keep abreast of their rapidly changing businesses and remain up-to-date with new commercial processes.

Despite changing industrial practices, television remains a ubiquitous media form and a technology widely owned and used in the United States and many similarly industrialized nations. Yet the vast expansion in the number of networks and channels streaming through our televisions and the varied ways we can now access content has diminished the degree to which societies encounter television viewing as a shared event. Although once the norm, society-wide viewing of particular programs is now an uncommon experience. New technologies have both liberated the place-based and domestic nature of television use and freed viewers to control when and where they view programs. Related shifts in distribution possibilities that allow us to watch television on computer screens, tablets, and mobile phones have multiplied previously standard models for financing shows and profiting from them, thereby creating a vast expansion in economically viable content. Viewers face more content choices, more options in how and when to view programs, and more alternatives for paying for their programming. Increasingly, they have even come to enjoy the opportunity to create it themselves.

Although television maintains the technological affordances of a mass medium that, in principle, remains capable of serving as the cultural hearth around which a society shares media events—as we did in cases such as the Kennedy assassination or the Challenger explosion—it increasingly exists as an electronic newsstand through which a diverse and segmented society pursues deliberately targeted interests. The U.S. television audience now can rarely be categorized as a mass audience and is instead more accurately understood as a collection of niche audiences. Television has been reconfigured in recent decades as a medium that most commonly addresses fragmented and specialized audience groups, but no technology emerged to replace its previous norm as a messenger to a mass and heterogeneous audience. The development of broadband distribution substantially affected the circulation of ideas and enabled dissemination to even international audiences, yet the Internet allows us to attend to even more diverse content and provides little commonality in experience.

Television’s transition to a narrowcast medium—one targeted to distinct and isolated subsections of the audience—along with adjustments within the broader media culture in which it exists, significantly altered its industrial logic and has required a fundamental reassessment of how it operates as a cultural institution. For the last sixty years, we have thought about television in certain ways because of how television has been, but the truth is that television has not operated in the way we have assumed for some time now. Few of the norms of television that prevailed from the 1950s into the 1980s remain in place, and such norms were themselves the results of specific industrial, technological, and cultural contexts long since passed. In particular, the presumption that television inherently functions as a mass medium continues to hold great sway, but the mass audiences once characteristic of television were, as the media scholar Michael Curtin notes, an aberration resulting from Fordist principles of “mass production, mass marketing and mass consumption.”⁵ Consequently, previous norms did not suggest the “proper” functioning of the television industry any more than did subsequent norms; rather, they resulted from a specific industrial, technological, and cultural context no more innate than those that would develop later.

Understanding the transitions occurring in U.S. television at this time is a curious matter relative to conventional approaches to exploring technology and culture. Historically, technological innovation primarily has been a story of replacement, in which a new technology emerged and subsumed the role of the previous technology. This indeed was the case of the transition from radio to television, as television neatly adopted many of the social and cultural functions of radio and added pictures to correspond with the sounds of the previous medium. The supplanted medium did not fade away, but repositioned itself and redefined its primary attributes to serve more of a complementary than competitive function. But it is not a new competitor that now threatens television; it is the medium itself and those who try to retain practices now clearly suboptimal.

The changes in television that have taken place over the past two decades—whether the gross abundance of channel and program options we now select among or our increasing ability to control when and where we watch—are extraordinary and on the scale of the transition from one medium to another, as in the case of the shift from radio to television. And it is not just television that has changed. The field of media in which television is integrated also has evolved profoundly—most directly as a result of digital innovation. The audience’s experiences with computing and the emergence of the mobile phone as a sophisticated portable screen technology better thought of as a “pocket computer” than a “phone” are now as important to understanding television as the legacy behaviors of domestic viewing. Various industrial, technological, and cultural forces have begun to radically redefine television, yet paradoxically, it persists as an entity that most people still understand and identify as “TV.”

This book explores this redefinition of television specifically in the United States, although these changes are also redefining the experience with television in similar ways in many countries around the world. From its beginning, broadcasting has been “ideally suited” technologically to transgress national borders and constructs such as nation-states; however, the early imposition of strict national control and substantially divergent national experiences prevailed over attributes innate to the technology.⁶ Many different countries experienced similar transitions in their industrial composition, production processes, and use of this thing called television at the same time as the United States, but precise situations diverge enough to make it difficult to speak in transnational generalities and lead to my focus on only the U.S. experience of this transition. As Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay tellingly assessed in 2009, “‘What is television?’ very much depends on where you are.”⁷ The specific form of the redefinition—as it emerges from a rupture in dominant industrial practices—is particular to each nation, yet similarly industrialized countries are experiencing the transition to digital transmission, the expansion of choice in channel and content options, the increasing conglomeration of the industry among a few global behemoths, and the drive for increased control over when, where, and how audiences view “television programs.” The development of an increasingly global cultural economy also has led the fate and fortune of the U.S. television industry to be determined beyond national confines.

Situating Television circa 2014

During its first forty years, U.S. television remained fairly static in its industrial practices. It maintained modes of production, a standard picture quality, and conventions of genre and schedule, all of which led to a common and regular experience for audiences and lulled those who think about television into certain assumptions. Moments of adjustment occurred, particularly at the end of the 1950s when the “magazine” style of advertising began to take over and networks gained control of their schedules from advertising agencies and sponsors, but once established, the medium remained relatively unchanged until the mid-1980s. First, the “network era” (from approximately 1952 through the mid-1980s) governed industry operations and allowed for a certain experience with television that characterizes much of the medium’s history. The norms of the network era have persisted in the minds of many as distinctive of television, despite the significant changes that have developed over the past twenty years. I identify the period of the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s as that of the “multi-channel transition.” During these years, various developments such as the growing availability of cable service and new cable channels, videocassette recorders (VCRs), and remote controls changed our experience with television, but did so very gradually, in a manner that allowed the industry to continue to operate in much the same way as it did in the network era.

Signs of a subsequent period, a “post-network era,” began to emerge in the early 2000s. Many changes from the norms of the multi-channel transition are readily identifiable, but it remains too early to know the ultimate characteristics and conventions of the post-network era. What separates the post-network era from the multi-channel transition is that the changes in competitive norms and operation of the industry become too pronounced for many of the old practices to be preserved; different industrial practices are becoming dominant and replacing those of the previous eras.

These demarcations in time, which are intentionally general, recognize that all production processes do not shift simultaneously and that people adopt new technologies and ways of using them at varied paces. By the end of 2005, adjustments in how people could access programming—particularly through DVR use and purchase of full seasons on DVD—enabled a small group of early adopters to experience television outside the linear schedules of network programmers in a manner characteristic of a preliminary post-network era.⁸ By 2014, a greater range of viewers were engaging television in places other than the living room screen, but such Internet, mobile phone, and even DVR time-shifted viewing accounted for only a small fraction of overall viewing. As an illustration, Nielsen data from the second quarter of 2013 indicated that the aggregate of time per month spent watching time-shifted TV (12 hours, 35 minutes), using a DVD/Blu-ray device (5 hours, 10 minutes), using a game console (6 hours, 27 minutes), using the Internet on a computer (not specifically for viewing video content) (27 hours, 21 minutes), watching video on the Internet (6 hours, 28 minutes), or watching a video on a mobile phone (5 hours, 45 minutes) amounted to only 63 hours and 46 minutes, a good bit less than half of the 146 hours, 37 minutes viewers still spent watching “traditional” TV.⁹ Indeed, much about the nuances of shifts in behavior is lost in aggregate averages, and change of this scale is necessarily gradual and profoundly varied when more individualized behaviors are considered. Even as I made final edits to this manuscript in early 2014, it remained impossible to assert that a majority of the audience had entered the post-network era or that all industrial processes had “completed” the transition, but the eventual dominance of post-network conditions appeared to be inevitable.

Table I.1. Characteristics of Production Components in Each Period

The characteristics of the three phases of television, explored in more detail in chapter 1, are summarized in table I.1.

And So, the Television Will Be Revolutionized

The world as we knew it is over.

—Les Moonves, president, CBS Television, 2003

The 50-year-old economic model of this business is kind of history now.

—Gail Berman, president of entertainment, FOX, 2003¹⁰

These bold pronouncements by two of the U.S. television industry’s most powerful executives only begin to suggest the scale of the transitions that took place as the multi-channel transition yielded to new industrial norms characteristic of a post-network era. Television executives commonly traffic in hyperbolic statements, but the assertions by Moonves and Berman did not overstate the case. Here they reflected on the substantial challenges to conventional production processes as a result of scheduling and financing the comparatively cheap but widely viewed unscripted (“reality”) television series that flooded onto network schedules in the early 2000s. Yet the issues brought to the fore by the success of unscripted formats offered only an indication of the broader forces that threatened to revise decades-old business models and industrial practices.

A confluence of industrial, technological, and cultural shifts conspired to alter institutional norms in a manner that fundamentally redefined the medium and the business of television. The U.S. television industry was a multifaceted and mature industry by the early years of the twenty-first century, when Moonves and Berman made these claims. As post-network adjustments became unavoidable, many executives expressed a sense that the sky was falling—and indeed, the scale of changes affecting all segments of the industry gave reasonable cause for this outlook. A single or simple cause did not initiate this comprehensive industrial reconfiguration, so there was no one to blame and no way to stop it.

An important harbinger of the inevitability of the post-network era occurred in mid-2004, when the rhetoric of industry leaders shifted from advocating efforts to prevent change to accepting the present and coming industrial adjustment. This acceptance marked a transition from corporate strategies that sought to erect walls around content and retard the availability of more personalized applications of television technology to efforts to enable content from traditional providers to travel beyond the linear network platform.¹¹ In his detailed history of the invention of media technologies, Brian Winston illustrates how existing industries have repeatedly suppressed the radical potential of new technologies in an effort to prevent them from disrupting established economic interests. Unsurprisingly, the patterns Winston identifies also appear in the television industry, in which “supervening social necessities” such as a desire for greater control over television content led inventors to create technologies that provided markedly new capabilities (such as the DVR), while those with business interests threatened by the new inventions sought to curtail and constrain user access.¹² Nonetheless, many of the conventional practices and even the industry’s basic business model proved suboptimal in this new context and resulted in crises throughout all components of the production process. Considerable uncertainty persists about the new norms for programming and how power and control will be reallocated within the industry.

New technological capabilities and consumers’ response to them forced the moguls of the network era to imagine their businesses anew and face fresh competitors who had a vision of a new era. As suggested by the duration of the multi-channel transition, this industrial reconfiguration often produced unanticipated outcomes and developed haphazardly. Much of the sense of crisis within the industry resulted from the inability of powerful companies to anticipate the breadth of change and to develop new business models in response. Those who dominated the network era sensed their businesses to be simultaneously under attack on multiple fronts, which often led to efforts to stifle change or deny the substance of the threats to conventional ways of doing business.¹³ Entrenched network-era business entities consequently did not lead the transition to the post-network era; rather, mavericks such as TiVo, Apple, Google, and Netflix identified businesses that connected with viewers’ desires and forced industrial evolution.

Contrary to the persistent headlines, television is not on the verge of death or in any way dying. Although indications of all kinds of change abound, there is little to suggest that the central box through which we view will be called anything other than television in this lifetime. Adjustments throughout the television industry will not turn us into “screen potatoes” or lead us to engage in “monitor studies.” We have processed and will continue to process coming changes through our existing understandings of television. We will continue to call the increasingly large boxes that serve as the focal point of our entertainment spaces television—regardless of how many devices we need to connect to them in order to have the experience we desire or whether they are giant boxes, flat sheets of glass mounted on walls, or some technology yet only imagined. We are even likely to conceptualize almost all video that conforms to the conventions we’ve come to associate with television as television, even if we stream it years after its production, if we watch it on personal-size mobile phone screens, or if it is produced for entities never distributed as television, such as Netflix or Amazon. The U.S. television industry may be evolving, the experience of television viewing may be evolving, but our intuitive sense of this thing we call television remains intact. A revolution is on its way, but it will not overthrow television; the growing accessibility and manipulability of video will expand its sovereignty and embed it ever more deeply into our cultural experience.

The adjustments characteristic of a still largely imagined post-network era will be far more profound than the changes evident so far. One thing revealed by the current conditions of the nascent post-network era is that television content no longer can be considered uniformly. Since the early 2000s, the broad constellation of television programming has fractured into at least three distinct entities that are fundamentally different in ways very meaningful to the commercial underpinnings of the industry.

One type of content enabled by the post-network era is what I distinguish as “prized content.” Prized content describes programming that people seek out and specifically desire. It is not a matter of watching “what is on”; prized content is deliberately pursued. Prized content also compels some audience members to follow news of its development, to read endless chatter on blogs and news sites, to seek out missed episodes, control viewing, and even pay for this most valued content. Prized content is determined by the audience member—what I prize may not be prized by you—though there may be features more likely to make content prized by larger or specific audiences. Prized content is a post-network-era phenomenon that emerges in defiance of the technological affordances of mid-twentieth-century broadcasting, which created the norm of a linear content flow that provided specific content at certain network-determined times and that has served as the dominant organization for television. Though these norms remain entrenched and still persist in 2014, post-network-era affordances of digital distribution enable prized content to be viewed in more deliberate ways, though also in accord with the traditional linear scheduling. The opportunity to experience television independently from an externally determined flow fractures the monolithic television experience to create this category of prized content.

Emergent distribution technologies have enabled a television practice that allows greater selection—perhaps parallel to the transition in filmgoing in the mid-1940s, when audiences began seeking out particular films rather than continuing the rote behavior of going to the theater each week and viewing whatever movie was playing. Many observers reference examples of what I consider prized content in declarations of a “new golden age” of television or in “Best of” lists developed in the last decade.¹⁴ A sampling of content of the last fifteen years that was prized by a significant audience might include The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, Lost, West Wing, Friday Night Lights, Breaking Bad, and Downton Abbey, among many others. Notably, that significant audience may only be two to three million viewers, far from the mark of contemporary mass hits that are watched by many more, but that may not inspire the same passion as prized content. Audiences with different tastes might include Real Housewives, Jersey Shore, or Duck Dynasty as similarly compelling cases of prized content, underscoring how prized content is not an aesthetic or evaluative distinction assessed based on features of the show, but is distinguished by how audiences desire to experience it.

Prized content is so compelling that it suffers from interruption, be it the interruption of commercial pods or the interruption of a week’s passage between conventional “airings.” The media scholar Jason Jacobs has also identified disruption—and digital television’s ability to eliminate and reduce it—as a defining distinction of what I’d categorize as the network and post-network eras.¹⁵ Preliminary data about the use of video on demand and DVR playback by genre reveal that the far greatest use of these devices is to view dramas, which affirms the idea that many viewers particularly desire a different experience with this narrative form than traditional television experience has allowed.¹⁶ The desire for control over pace of viewing and the opportunity to re-view enables—and perhaps even makes superior—nontraditional economic models such as direct, transactional payment. Rather than model existing norms of viewer behavior, engagement with prized content might be more comparable to how audiences read a novel.

A second distinct type of content is that of “live sports and contests.” Indeed, live sporting events are far from new—they can be found among the earliest broadcasts—but as the break from the multi-channel transition has become more profound, the exceptionality of live sporting events has become inescapable. Live sports, as well as live televised contests such as American Idol or Dancing with the Stars, resist all of the ways the technologies and distribution opportunities of the post-network era enable audiences to disrupt prized content from residual viewing norms and economic strategies. As they do with prized content, audiences place high value on watching particular contests as specifically sought-after content, but full enjoyment of this content features exceptional time sensitivity that necessitates live or near-live viewing. The formats of most contests naturally allow for action breaks, which has made sports programming resistant to the commercial-skipping and illegal-downloading technologies that have imperiled the economics of other programming forms.¹⁷ Sports and contests thus remain optimal for the traditional mechanisms of television advertising and the economics that support it, and also offer seemingly endless opportunities for sponsorship and branding, further expanding their economic value.

Sports programming has been a frequent topic in discussions of the future of television precisely because the increasing fees demanded by rights holders and eventually passed on to television viewers—whether or not they view sports—have grown so significantly as to threaten the equilibrium of programming costs. The investment house Sanford C. Bernstein & Company released research in 2013 illustrating that live sports accounts for 20 percent of viewing by cable subscribers but 50 percent of the cost of their subscriptions.¹⁸ The journalist Derek Thompson captured the dilemma of costs and audience demand for televised sports well: “Without live sports,” he asserts, “the TV business could fall apart; and because of live sports, the TV business could fall apart.”¹⁹ The value of live televised sports has increased because so little other programming continues to unite comparatively large audiences who watch at an appointed time and remain captive through the commercials. When we talk of the future of “television,” we must do so in a way that acknowledges that the features that distinguish prized content and live sports and contests prepare them for very different industrial norms.

I distinguish the final type of programming as “linear content,” though most recognize this as plain old television. Not long ago, all television was linear, and much of what is viewed still is. Linear content is what people watch when they watch “what is on,” or it might be distinguished by the notion of “I’m going to watch television” as opposed to “I’m going to watch Sons of Anarchy.” Like sports, linear content is viewed live, but likely with much less intention than most sports. The motivation for viewing is not watching particular content, but a desire for companionship, distraction, or entertainment that may or may not make the content the viewer’s focus. Linear television might be the television viewed when you sit down in the evening to see what’s on; it is the morning talk show that airs as you ready for work, and the evening news that plays as you prepare dinner. By definition, linear content is not time-shifted, so the established model of advertising remains effective, if “effective” is a term that could ever really describe the economic benefits of airing commercial messages in content that viewers attend to only casually.

I offer these categories of television to illustrate the need to speak of particular types of television content and make content-specific claims when postulating coming economic models. These three categories don’t quite contain all viewing, and I’m sure we can imagine many instances that present features of multiple categories. My point is to begin to speak of television viewing with greater specificity, because viewers’ increased ability to manage viewing differently has significant implications throughout television’s industrial norms. Creating terminology that acknowledges the different attributes that are enabled by technological and distribution affordances of the post-network era aid in crafting a more sophisticated conversation about television’s present and future. Though disruptions to conventional practices occur—such as iTunes sales of single episodes beginning in 2005 or Netflix’s rich subscription-based on-demand offerings beginning in 2010—acknowledging the range of content now characteristic of television helps make clear that it is a variety of practices and norms that are imperiled, rather than television per se.

Key aspects of the post-network revolution include the enabling of new types of programming such as prized content and the establishment of profound distinctions in the experiences and economic possibilities among existing programming types such as live sports and contests and linear content. Another emerging aspect of the revolution can be found in the growing mechanisms for organizing and packaging content, whether by emergent aggregators such as Netflix or Hulu, emergent devices such as Roku and Boxee, or emergent applications, whether those enabling live streaming of channels over computers or devices such as gaming systems that enable accessing television content through Internet connection. We remain at a most nascent stage of what I suspect will be a massive disruption of norms of television delivery, and it is too soon to predict common viewing behaviors in the future. Nonlinear viewing—that is, viewing not at an externally appointed time—whether by DVR, video on demand (VOD), DVDs, or streaming—has become a primary way of engaging television for some viewers, though these behaviors remain irregular or completely unused by many more. Nonlinear viewing calls into question the continued need for previous ways of organizing television, such as the “channel,” and these early years of preliminary post-network formation have featured the addition of new channel-like distribution and aggregation “middlemen” such as Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube that are each trying to reorganize the content experience. Adding more middlemen, at the same time that channels become increasingly superfluous, seems a short-lived disruption, though one likely to aid a longer-term paradigm shift.

The following pages update understandings about television’s industrial practices from which others might build analyses of the substantial adjustments occurring within other media systems and their societies of reception. The book also contributes to the necessary rethinking of “old” media in new contexts. The deterioration of the foundational business model upon which the commercial television industry long has operated suggests that a substantive change is occurring. Examining the industry at an embryonic moment of norm creation sheds light on how power is transferred during periods of institutional uncertainty and reveals how new possibilities can develop from emerging industrial norms. There is a similarity between the industrial moment considered here and that examined in Todd Gitlin’s 1983 book Inside Prime Time.²⁰ Both books chronicle the consequences of industrial practices of the television industry at the close of an era. Gitlin, however, captured this moment unintentionally, while this work is reflexively aware of the transitory status of the practices it explores.

Perhaps paradoxically, I take a particular type of television—“prime-time programming”—as the book’s focus. Despite significant industry changes, as I completed the book, prime-time programming remained the most viewed and most widely discussed form of “television,” though its high costs did not make it the most lucrative. The post-network era threatens to eliminate time-based hierarchies, but the distinctive status of prime time is determined as much by its budgets and production practices as by the time of day in which it has traditionally “aired.” Changing industrial norms bore consequences for all programming. Adjustments in production components also affected affiliate and independent stations in significant and particular ways, but the breadth of these matters prevents me from addressing them here. Although the affiliates represent a large part of the television industry, the consequences of post-network shifts affected these stations in substantially different ways depending, among other things, on whether the station was owned and operated by a network, whether it was located in a large or small market, and the network with which the station was affiliated.²¹

The next chapter develops the distinctions of the network era, multi-channel transition, and post-network era with greater detail and briefly steps away from the book’s main focus on how shifts in industrial practices and business norms affect programming to meditate on some of the more abstract and bigger issues—some might say theories—called into question by these institutional adjustments. Concerns about how television operates as a cultural institution, the adaptation of tools used to understand it, and the development of new ones aid us in thinking about intersections of television and culture that may not be the primary concern of those who work in the industry. Such questions and concerns are nonetheless of crucial importance to the rest of us who live in this world of fragmented audiences and wonder about the effects of the erosion of the assumptions we have long shared about television.

Each aspect of production examined in chapters 2 through 6 changed on a different timetable in the course of the multi-channel transition. By 2005, profoundly different technological capabilities and distribution methods had emerged, though these new possibilities were pushed further by 2010, once broadband distribution of full-length professional content suggested greater change. Though indications of post-network technologies and distribution norms may now be evident, other production components remain insubstantially adjusted. Thus, each of these chapters focuses on a particular production component—technology, creation, distribution, financing, and audience measurement—and explores the process of transition, what practices have changed, and their consequences with regard to how television functions as a cultural institution.

With a focus on technology, chapter 2 explores how new devices have made television more multifaceted and allowed more varied uses than were common during the network era. By 2005, new television technologies enabled three distinct capabilities—convenience, mobility, and theatricality—that led to different expectations and uses of television and created a diversified experience of the medium in contrast to the uniform one common in the network era. Technologies including DVRs, VOD, portable television, and high-definition television—among many others—produce complicated consequences for the societies that adopt them as viewers gain greater control over their entertainment experience, yet become tethered by an increasing range of devices that demand their attention and financial support. The technological field expanded in 2010 as television delivered by Internet technologies expanded the mobility and portability of television and freed the medium from its staid domestic norm to be experienced on an array of screens.

Chapter 3 explores the practices involved in the making of television, particularly the institutional adjustments studios and networks made during and after the implementation of the financial interest and syndication rules, as well as the effects of these adjustments on the content the industry produces. Studios have responded to changing economic models by battling with creative guilds and unions to maintain new revenue streams, shifting production out of union-dominated Los Angeles, and creating vertically integrated production and distribution entities. Changing competitive practices among networks have resulted in significant adjustments in the types of shows the industry produces and expanded the range of profitable storytelling. The chapter thus examines how redefined production norms have created opportunities for different types of programming and required new promotion techniques.

Some of the most phenomenal adjustments in the television industry result from viewers’ expanded ability to control the flow of television and to move it out of the home. Whereas a distribution “bottleneck” characterized the network era and much of the multi-channel transition, the bottleneck broke open in late 2005 and has expanded to offer nearly limitless possibilities for viewers to access programming. Chapter 4 explores how viewers gained access to television in an increasing array of outlets that featured differentiated business models. New distribution methods made once unprofitable programming forms viable and decreased the risk of unconventional programming, opening creative opportunities in the industry and contributing to the fundamental changes in the production processes discussed throughout the book.

Chapter 5 examines the shifting strategies for financing television, particularly the emergence of alternatives to the advertiser-supported model that dominated previous eras. In the last decade, U.S. television has experienced notable expansions in subscription and other direct-pay economic models, as well as a diversifying array of strategies for advertiser support. Here again distinctions among prized content, live sports and contests, and linear viewing reveal divergent futures for financing, and the emergence of more diversified strategies is symptomatic of the conditions of a multifaceted post-network era that relies upon multiple, coexisting financing strategies.

Following the examination of financing and advertising, chapter 6 explores the often-unconsidered role of audience measurement, which proved particularly contentious in the late years of the multi-channel transition and as the post-network era developed. The industry leader, Nielsen Media Research, endeavored to introduce technological upgrades that reallocated advertising dollars, while new distribution methods and advertising strategies required impartial measurement for validation. The existing paradigm of audience measurement proved increasingly insufficient for the variation characteristic of post-network television. This chapter considers the crucial role of audience measurement and developments during the tumultuous early 2000s, as well as the consequences adjustments in this sector might bring to the production of television in the future.

While chapters 2 through 6 include many examples that apply somewhat abstract industrial practices to specific shows and circumstances, chapter 7 takes a detailed look at how technology, creation, distribution, financing, and audience measurement intersect in five very different programs. Each of the five cases explored here owes its existence or success to production practices uncharacteristic of the network era and tells a particular and distinctive story about production processes at the end of the multi-channel transition. These shows, Sex and the City, Survivor, The Shield, Arrested Development, and Off to War, illustrate how changes in multiple practices interconnected to expand the range of stories that could be profitably told on U.S. television, as well as point to some of the implications of this expanded storytelling field for the industry and culture. I also address more recent shows that continue the paths charted by these early shows, but still lack as full a history, such as Girls and Video Game High School or the fortunes of the “stars” produced thus far by YouTube.

The perspective here involves looking ahead, not to predict, but to prepare for a new era of television experience and criticism. The precise forms that the technologies and uses of television will take are not definite, but substantial industrial ruptures are already apparent, and the need for practical information and conceptual models to rethink the medium is evident. The following pages may consequently both serve as a eulogy to the television we have experienced to this point and prepare our understanding of the medium yet to come.