to call the increasingly large boxes that serve as the focal point of our entertainment spaces television—regardless of how many devices we need to connect to them in order to have the experience we desire or whether they are giant boxes, flat sheets of glass mounted on walls, or some technology yet only imagined. We are even likely to conceptualize almost all video that conforms to the conventions we’ve come to associate with television as television, even if we stream it years after its production, if we watch it on personal-size mobile phone screens, or if it is produced for entities never distributed as television, such as Netflix or Amazon. The U.S. television industry may be evolving, the experience of television viewing may be evolving, but our intuitive sense of this thing we call television remains intact. A revolution is on its way, but it will not overthrow television; the growing accessibility and manipulability of video will expand its sovereignty and embed it ever more deeply into our cultural experience.
The adjustments characteristic of a still largely imagined post-network era will be far more profound than the changes evident so far. One thing revealed by the current conditions of the nascent post-network era is that television content no longer can be considered uniformly. Since the early 2000s, the broad constellation of television programming has fractured into at least three distinct entities that are fundamentally different in ways very meaningful to the commercial underpinnings of the industry.
One type of content enabled by the post-network era is what I distinguish as “prized content.” Prized content describes programming that people seek out and specifically desire. It is not a matter of watching “what is on”; prized content is deliberately pursued. Prized content also compels some audience members to follow news of its development, to read endless chatter on blogs and news sites, to seek out missed episodes, control viewing, and even pay for this most valued content. Prized content is determined by the audience member—what I prize may not be prized by you—though there may be features more likely to make content prized by larger or specific audiences. Prized content is a post-network-era phenomenon that emerges in defiance of the technological affordances of mid-twentieth-century broadcasting, which created the norm of a linear content flow that provided specific content at certain network-determined times and that has served as the dominant organization for television. Though these norms remain entrenched and still persist in 2014, post-network-era affordances of digital distribution enable prized content to be viewed in more deliberate ways, though also in accord with the traditional linear scheduling. The opportunity to experience television independently from an externally determined flow fractures the monolithic television experience to create this category of prized content.
Emergent distribution technologies have enabled a television practice that allows greater selection—perhaps parallel to the transition in filmgoing in the mid-1940s, when audiences began seeking out particular films rather than continuing the rote behavior of going to the theater each week and viewing whatever movie was playing. Many observers reference examples of what I consider prized content in declarations of a “new golden age” of television or in “Best of” lists developed in the last decade.14 A sampling of content of the last fifteen years that was prized by a significant audience might include The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, Lost, West Wing, Friday Night Lights, Breaking Bad, and Downton Abbey, among many others. Notably, that significant audience may only be two to three million viewers, far from the mark of contemporary mass hits that are watched by many more, but that may not inspire the same passion as prized content. Audiences with different tastes might include Real Housewives, Jersey Shore, or Duck Dynasty as similarly compelling cases of prized content, underscoring how prized content is not an aesthetic or evaluative distinction assessed based on features of the show, but is distinguished by how audiences desire to experience it.
Prized content is so compelling that it suffers from interruption, be it the interruption of commercial pods or the interruption of a week’s passage between conventional “airings.” The media scholar Jason Jacobs has also identified disruption—and digital television’s ability to eliminate and reduce it—as a defining distinction of what I’d categorize as the network and post-network eras.15 Preliminary data about the use of video on demand and DVR playback by genre reveal that the far greatest use of these devices is to view dramas, which affirms the idea that many viewers particularly desire a different experience with this narrative form than traditional television experience has allowed.16 The desire for control over pace of viewing and the opportunity to re-view enables—and perhaps even makes superior—nontraditional economic models such as direct, transactional payment. Rather than model existing norms of viewer behavior, engagement with prized content might be more comparable to how audiences read a novel.
A second distinct type of content is that of “live sports and contests.” Indeed, live sporting events are far from new—they can be found among the earliest broadcasts—but as the break from the multi-channel transition has become more profound, the exceptionality of live sporting events has become inescapable. Live sports, as well as live televised contests such as American Idol or Dancing with the Stars, resist all of the ways the technologies and distribution opportunities of the post-network era enable audiences to disrupt prized content from residual viewing norms and economic strategies. As they do with prized content, audiences place high value on watching particular contests as specifically sought-after content, but full enjoyment of this content features exceptional time sensitivity that necessitates live or near-live viewing. The formats of most contests naturally allow for action breaks, which has made sports programming resistant to the commercial-skipping and illegal-downloading technologies that have imperiled the economics of other programming forms.17 Sports and contests thus remain optimal for the traditional mechanisms of television advertising and the economics that support it, and also offer seemingly endless opportunities for sponsorship and branding, further expanding their economic value.
Sports programming has been a frequent topic in discussions of the future of television precisely because the increasing fees demanded by rights holders and eventually passed on to television viewers—whether or not they view sports—have grown so significantly as to threaten the equilibrium of programming costs. The investment house Sanford C. Bernstein & Company released research in 2013 illustrating that live sports accounts for 20 percent of viewing by cable subscribers but 50 percent of the cost of their subscriptions.18 The journalist Derek Thompson captured the dilemma of costs and audience demand for televised sports well: “Without live sports,” he asserts, “the TV business could fall apart; and because of live sports, the TV business could fall apart.”19 The value of live televised sports has increased because so little other programming continues to unite comparatively large audiences who watch at an appointed time and remain captive through the commercials. When we talk of the future of “television,” we must do so in a way that acknowledges that the features that distinguish prized content and live sports and contests prepare them for very different industrial norms.
I distinguish the final type of programming as “linear content,” though most recognize this as plain old television. Not long ago, all television was linear, and much of what is viewed still is. Linear content is what people watch when they watch “what is on,” or it might be distinguished by the notion of “I’m going to watch television” as opposed to “I’m going to watch Sons of Anarchy.” Like sports, linear content is viewed live, but likely with much less intention than most sports. The motivation for viewing is not watching particular content, but a desire for companionship, distraction, or entertainment that may or may not make the content the viewer’s focus. Linear television might be the television viewed when you sit down in the evening to see what’s on; it is the morning talk show that airs as you ready for work, and the evening news that plays as you prepare dinner. By definition, linear content is not time-shifted, so the established model of advertising remains effective, if “effective” is a term that could ever really describe the economic benefits of airing commercial messages in content that viewers attend to only casually.
I offer these categories of television to illustrate the need to speak of
