systems. As concerns about viewers cutting cable subscriptions to access broadband-delivered programming through services such as Netflix magnified beginning in the fall of 2010, large MVPDs began creating libraries and “any device, anywhere” availability more comparable to the convenience and choice being offered by broadband-delivered programmers. By 2013, the cable giant Comcast, for example, offered subscribers unlimited free access to 30,000 titles, including episodes of 600 television series, through their Xfinity VOD television service, 270,000 titles on Xfinity.com, and 20,000 television shows and movies through the Xfinity app for iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. This was part of the TV Everywhere initiative launched by Comcast and Time Warner in 2009 as a way to allow authenticated subscribers access to their “living room” content on a range of devices and eventually outside the home.
MVPDs aggressively overhauled their value proposition to audiences in the face of widespread cultural adulation of the alternative Netflix offered, but as of 2014, it remains difficult to claim VOD as a victory for the cable and telecommunication industry. These industries underutilized VOD capability for a long time and developed them only when a threat emerged. The comparison of the development of VOD in the U.S. market with the iPlayer, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s on-demand application, reveals considerable insight into the implications of the public service mandate versus commercial mandate on innovation, particularly those operating with a functional monopoly, as was the case of the U.S. MVPDs. The BBC launched its iPlayer in 2007, which featured an interface more akin to Netflix’s graphic interface than the text-heavy and awkward-to-navigate interfaces still offered by MVPDs in 2014. BBC’s self-control of program rights and mandate to make programming accessible yielded far more immediate experimentation than evident in the United States, where publicly held companies are punished by the stock market for reinvesting in technological development, and filling libraries requires extended rights negotiations with a multiplicity of parties. The first MVPD to make an interface similar to the iPlayer available began rolling it out in mid-2012, but had not reached its full subscriber base a year later; availability seemed limited to those markets in which competition from a telco existed. Unsurprisingly, despite growing availability, research in 2012 revealed limited use of VOD, and the industry source Variety categorized the report as evidence that the cable industry had “fumbled badly with VOD,” missing “a $6 billion business” and “paving the way for the emergence of over-the-top alternatives like Netflix.”38
Despite its slow start, because VOD is an endeavor of the MVPDs—companies that connect 80 percent of homes to the Internet as well as cable—VOD has a structural advantage likely to secure its centrality to the post-network era.39 Robust and consistent libraries will leave viewers with little need to record programs on their own or to seek additional middlemen to aggregate content, so long as VOD offerings don’t include the bloated commercial pods characteristic of linear viewing. However, creating and maintaining robust and consistent libraries remains a significant challenge for MVPDs that own minimal content rights.
Convenience technologies—including the DVR, VOD, DVD, broadband-delivered program services such as Netflix (also known as SVOD, subscription video on demand), and mobile applications that can be used on devices such as phones and tablets—enabled viewers to more easily seek out specific content and view it on living room screens and in an ever-expanding variety of venues. These technologies increased viewers’ ability to select not only when to watch, but also where, and provided the most expansive and varied adjustments in the technological capabilities of the medium. Convenience technologies encourage active selection, rather than passive viewing of the linear flow of whatever “comes on next” or “is on,” and consequently lead viewers to focus much more on programs than on networks—all of which contributes to eroding conventional production practices in significant ways and to producing the distinctions among prized content, live sports and contests, and linear viewing highlighted in the introduction. The viewing behaviors these technologies enabled, in tandem with the vast choice among outlets that viewers could now access, were vital to the shift of television from what Bernard Miège theorized as a “flow” industry to something more like a “publishing” industry.40 Convenience technologies also increased the deliberateness in viewers’ use of television, which allowed for adjustments in how programs were created, funded, paid for, and distributed.
Matters of Space: The Convenience of Portable Television Devices
DVRs and VOD allowed viewers to capture television from the dictates of the networks’ linear schedules, but on their own, these technologies still confined viewers to conventional “living room” viewing. Freeing viewers to watch content anywhere they desired required another set of technologies that allowed portability. Viewers first experimented with this possibility by watching television series sold on disks on portable DVD players, but rapid technological diffusion quickly made portable viewing much easier. By 2005, the more elegant solution of downloading programs to iPod players and devices also used for gaming, such as the PSP (PlayStation Portable), freed portable television from requiring a physical medium. TiVo-brand DVRs also expanded the convenience of the device through the TiVo ToGo application, which offered easy transfer of programs it recorded to laptops and portable media devices. All this would soon seem most insignificant, though, as broadband-delivered program providers unshackled television from its domestic confines and enabled viewing on laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
As of 2014, the dominant experience of television that developed through its network era and multi-channel transition made it seem like the conveniences of portability and mobility were distinctive technological affordances that required specific assessment, if for no other reason than their different relationship to existing economic models. Per my definition, mobile television is linear, while portable television is nonlinear. Mobile television consequently remains useful for conventional advertiser support, while portable television is chosen in a manner consistent with prized content and may be better monetized through transaction payment. The decades during which living room viewing dominated the experience of television remain paradigmatic in the minds of many in a way that rhetorically counterpoises mobile and portable viewing as some sort of threat, but this is simply our imagination of the future being tainted by knowledge of the past. The previous impossibility of mobile and portable will be forgotten as quickly as the place-based past of telephone calling has been, which will allow fluidity of viewing spaces to seem a “natural” use of television technology instead of the battle for supremacy that characterizes contemporary outlooks.
An important early volley in portable television came with Apple’s October 2005 announcement of the sale of individual episodes for $1.99 on iTunes. Apple’s announcement was important because it attached a particular economic value to an episode of television and the beginning of a repository of television shows available for purchase, which has since been expanded by Amazon and Google. Also important to sketching this history was the release of the Saturday Night Live short “Lazy Sunday” on YouTube in December 2005. This video, initially posted without authorization by the rights holder, NBC, attracted 1.2 million views in just ten days, offering a most preliminary suggestion of a slightly different application of broadband-distributed, nonlinear television. Though YouTube had been designed with the purpose of facilitating amateur sharing, the flurry of posting broadcast- and cable-originated content to YouTube indicated how the site might also serve as a repository that could help viewers manage the abundance of post-network video.
Though there were important developments in the next few years (see table 2.2), the real start to the revolution in portable television began in 2010. In January, Apple announced the iPad, which it released three months later. Though the technology alone is of limited use without applications, the tablet developed into a technology more preferred for portable viewing than the existing laptop and mobile phone screens. Applications and broadband-delivered program services began developing at this time as well. HBO GO launched in February 2010 and was widely hailed by users and the industry as a model for broadband distribution. Users appreciated its easy navigation and depth of content, while the industry appreciated the
