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
