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,
