THE TELEVISION WILL BE REVOLUTIONIZED
The Television Will Be Revolutionized
Second Edition
Amanda D. Lotz
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
© 2014 by New York University
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lotz, Amanda D.
The television will be revolutionized / Amanda D. Lotz. — Second edition.
pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4798-6573-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4798-6525-3 (pb)
1. Television broadcasting. 2. Television broadcasting—United States. 3. Television—Technological innovations. 4. Television broadcasting—Technological innovations. I. Title.
PN1992.5.L68 2014
384.55’0973—dc23 2014015124
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Also available as an ebook
For Wes, Sayre, and Calla
CONTENTS
1 Understanding Television at the Beginning of the Post-Network Era
2 Television Outside the Box: The Technological Revolution of Television
3 Making Television: Changes in the Practices of Creating Television
4 Revolutionizing Distribution: Breaking Open the Network Bottleneck
5 The New Economics of Television
6 Recounting the Audience: Measurement in the Age of Broadband
7 Television Storytelling Possibilities at the Beginning of the Post-Network Era: Five Cases
Conclusion: Still Watching Television
PREFACE
Every book has its own story about the process of its creation—call it a book’s biography. Part of the biography of the first edition of The Television Will Be Revolutionized is that I returned the proofs to New York University Press three days after the birth of my first child, in July 2007. So watching that child head off to kindergarten in the fall of 2012 gave the age of the book an uncommon physical form. Oddly, it was easier to fathom that it was time for kindergarten than that the insights of the book were now five years old.
Much has happened in the television industry in these intervening years, though much has also remained unchanged. When the first edition went to press, I was playing around on the beta version of Hulu—though there was little content, YouTube was still a start-up, the broadcast networks had clunky interfaces for streaming the very little content they made available, and there was nothing but movies or advertorials available through video on demand. A cable executive interviewed for this edition noted that the speed with which broadband-delivered video became ubiquitous caught even most industry insiders by surprise. Those on the forefront had tried out the slow-streaming, blocky, early ventures in this area and didn’t think much of the experience. Then it all seemed to change overnight. Netflix, HBO GO, smartphones, tablets, TV Everywhere, oh my! The vast proliferation of content through various broadband providers is addressed in all of the book’s revised chapters, as it has affected every aspect of the industry and provides the biggest paradigmatic adjustment from the first edition.
The revised second edition updates developments throughout the television industry over the last seven years, focuses the book more on broad frameworks for thinking about these changes than on cataloging a multiplicity of initiatives and experiments, and makes general improvements upon certain aspects that I found suboptimal when I revisited it. In some places, details about the conditions of the industry in 2006 remain because they provide a valuable benchmark of the transition that allows the book to be a history of the present, while other details have been eliminated. Though many consider the book to be about the post-network era, I saw the contribution of the first edition primarily as a calling into existence and systematic explanation of the multi-channel transition period of the 1980s and 1990s. This context building prepares us to be able to talk about and theorize a post-network era and remains unchanged and unchallenged by the last seven years. The second revised edition maintains that
