Facebook, Amazon) and the consumer electronics industry (Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Apple) remained separate from conglomerates dominating television content (News Corp, Viacom, Time Warner, and Disney) and many other legacy media.
Regulators had the perfect opportunity to intervene in broadcast norms during the digital transition mandated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The forced transition to digital transmission could have allowed Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to revisit the vaguely defined mandate that stations operate in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity” in exchange for the opportunity to use public airwaves to secure billions of dollars in profits, but regulators largely ignored this opportunity. Although regulatory rhetoric might have proclaimed that deregulation would lead to competition, most of the actions of the FCC since the end of the network era have been strongly influenced by the powerful industries the agency was created to regulate.61 For the most part, the changes in industry operation chronicled here did not result from the competition that deregulation was supposed to inspire; instead, they came largely from the actions of companies outside the FCC’s purview (consumer electronics and computing).
The degree to which the medium and the industry redefined themselves with remarkably little re-regulatory input introduced notable challenges by the late multi-channel transition. The interventions made by the regulatory sector—seen most distinctly in the fin-syn rules (explained in chapter 3), shifting cable policies, and deregulation of ownership—had massive implications for the industry’s operation and in structuring the norms of production. At the same time, the relative swiftness with which production components responded to changes in various production practices decreased the relevance of the lumbering regulatory sector in establishing the regulatory conditions appropriate to emerging post-network norms. Regulators could radically adjust the playing field for the industry at any time—as the intermittent threat of mandating à la carte cable service suggested throughout the mid-2000s—but they seemed unlikely to deviate from the “market-driven” logic underscoring their decisions for the previous two decades—that is, except in the case of content regulation. The developments of the multi-channel transition merited sweeping regulatory action that revisited broadcasting’s regulatory foundations; however, by 2013, regulators had established no clear principles that reflected the substantial industrial adjustments occurring.
Each of the following five chapters focuses on a different aspect of production in order to explain the broad changes that have taken place over the past twenty years, the new norms being established in the post-network era, and why these changes in how television is made affect both the types of programs that are produced and the role of these stories in the culture. The next chapter looks at the changing technologies viewers have used to watch television and how new devices have enabled viewers unprecedented control over how, where, and what they view—and increasingly, to even make their content.
2
Television Outside the Box
The Technological Revolution of Television
Never before have the balance sheets, strategies, constituent relationships and very existence of media conglomerates been shaped so radically by technology and changing consumer habits. Never before has so much revenue been put on the line, and never before has there existed the potential for so much content, distribution, packaging and pricing to be placed beyond the reach of the media giants.
—Hollywood Reporter, 20051
TV has evolved in the past, but the current digital revolution shock is unprecedented. And, just as in earlier periods of fecundity, TV production, distribution, and consumption are all being redefined and refreshed by outsiders, from Apple’s Steve Jobs to the new amateur producers peopling YouTube or Blip.tv.
—Wired, 20072
The first epigraph, taken from an uncharacteristically forward-looking think piece by one of the industry’s key trade publications, captures the uncertainty and anticipation of the industry as early as 2005. Industry workers knew that technological change was approaching. Many had seen the diverse platforms and applications debuting at electronics shows long before they would reach the living rooms of middle America, but no one could be certain of how audiences would use the new technologies, how quickly they might adopt them, which devices would prove essential, or what might be the next “killer application.” To make things more challenging, constant technological development made the earth seemingly shift beneath the feet of those trying to adapt. By the time a mid-2000s strategy making use of then-emerging DVD and video-on-demand (VOD) distribution opportunities was in place, unanticipated possibilities in downloading to portable devices made many of those preliminary efforts seem woefully inadequate.
Technologies involved in the digital transition enabled profound adjustments in how viewers used television, and these newly enabled capabilities necessitated modifications in many other industrial practices. Emerging devices considerably enhanced viewers’ ability to control television first in, then out of the home. The increased control over how, when, and where to view provided by digital video recorders (DVRs), DVDs, electronic programming guides (EPGs), digital cable boxes, laptops, smartphones, and tablets expanded convenient uses of television. These devices enhanced the comparatively limited capabilities first afforded by analog technologies such as VCRs and allowed viewers far more flexibility in when and where they watched television.
Live broadcast has long been perceived as an inherent technological attribute of television—perhaps because audiences lacked technological tools to control their viewing throughout the network era. As new technologies emerged, the industry initially perceived liveness to be important and endeavored to identify technological solutions that would enable reception of live television almost anywhere—what I categorize as mobile television. However, as U.S. viewers came to use various television technologies, the ability to control viewing, which included using tools to both time-shift and place-shift, emerged to have far greater desirability than the ability to view live television outside the home.
In discussing technological advancements, I differentiate between portable and mobile television use, a distinction not commonly observed in industry discussions. In my parlance, viewers use mobile television when they access live television outside the home, as opposed to the time- and place-shifting characteristic of portable television. These distinctions can seem confusing because many devices allow both portable and mobile television use: Laptops, tablets, and smartphones can be used to download content and store it for nonlinear viewing or to stream live video. While viewers may rarely think of these distinctions, they are important because the liveness of mobile viewing preserves the advertising model particular to linear viewing in a manner quite different from the mostly nonlinear use of portable television. Portability fits clearly within the realm of expanding convenient uses of television, while the desire for immediacy characterizes mobile television. In sum, this chapter distinguishes between mobile television technology use, which accounts for out-of-the-home live viewing, and portable television technology use, in which viewers take once domestic-bound content anywhere for viewing at any time.
Additionally, technological advancements in audio and visual quality—many of which resulted from the digital transmission of television signals—expanded the theatricality of television until the distinction intended by the word (to signify the feeling of watching a film at the theater) became insignificant. The emergence of high-definition sets as replacements for the long inferior NTSC television standard particularly contributed a technological revolution in the quality of the television experience. Digital transmission alone allowed some enhancement of television’s audio and visual fidelity, but the high-definition images in particular appeared as crisp as reality and offered the detail available on film.
Each
