Online TV

Catherine Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315396804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

With growth in access to high-speed broadband and 4G, and increased ownership of smartphones, tablets and internet-connected television sets, the internet has simultaneously begun to compete with and transform television. Online TV argues that these changes create the conditions for an emergent internet era that challenges the language and concepts that we have to talk about television as a medium.

In a wide-ranging analysis, Catherine Johnson sets out a series of conceptual frameworks designed to provide a clearer language with which to analyse the changes to television in the internet era and to bring into focus the power dynamics of the online TV industry.

From providing definitions of online TV and the online TV industry, to examining the ways in which technology, rights, interfaces and algorithms are used to control and constrain access to audiovisual content, Online TV is a timely intervention into debates about contemporary internet and television cultures. A must-read for any students, scholars and practitioners who want to understand and analyse the ways in which television is intertwining with and being transformed by the internet.

1

From broadcast to online TV

Introduction

In 2015 the UK media regulator, Ofcom, stated that the ‘key enablers of on-demand television are now mass-market’ (Ofcom 2015, p.18). Coming almost a decade after the first on-demand player, Channel 4’s 4 On Demand (4OD), was launched by a UK broadcaster, this statement spoke to a series of changes to the media landscape in the early 2010s that, this book will argue, demand a reconceptualisation of television as a medium. For Ofcom, the key enablers of on-demand television were threefold: broadband access, ownership of smartphones and tablets, and the roll-out of internet-connected television sets. Although Ofcom was writing specifically about the UK context, this book will argue that these three factors can be understood as the conditions for an emergent ‘internet era’ in which television and the internet become indelibly intertwined. This era is characterised by the development of the internet into a medium for accessing audiovisual content at the same time that the technologies for accessing television are connected to the internet. Taken together, this book will argue, these changes are not only driving the development of on-demand services (as Ofcom claims) but are also transforming television into online TV : services that facilitate the viewing of editorially selected audiovisual content through internet-enabled devices.¹

Increased broadband access, ownership of smartphones and tablets, and roll-out of internet-connected television sets create the conditions for the development of online TV in a number of ways. Higher levels of broadband access enable the internet to become a ubiquitous part of everyday life. However, for online TV it is the development and uptake of superfast broadband, as well as 4G for out-of-home access, that is particularly significant because it facilitates the streaming and downloading of audiovisual content that takes up large amounts of bandwidth. Broadband access (and superfast broadband and 4G in particular) is, therefore, a crucial driver in the development of online TV. Meanwhile, rises in smartphone and tablet ownership enable flexible and individualised access to internet-delivered audiovisual content beyond the television set and outside of the home. Smartphones and tablets have effectively become what Peter Rice (Chairman of Walt Disney Television) referred to in 2016 as television sets in your pocket.² Smartphones and tablets not only make access to television ubiquitous, they also situate television viewing alongside other forms of mediated activity, such as reading, writing and communicating, enabling users to switch between different applications and tasks all within one device.

If smartphones and tablets turn television into something you can carry with you in your pocket and easily interact with, then internet-connected televisions further blur the boundaries between television and computing technologies, potentially transforming the ‘goggle box’ in the corner of the living room into a multifaceted site of media entertainment. Darcy Gerbarg and Eli Noam describe internet-connected television as ‘the quintessential digital convergence medium, putting together television, telecommunications, the Internet, computer applications, games, and more’ (2011, p.xxi). Through internet-connected televisions it is possible to access television programmes and movies on demand, watch an array of content on YouTube, play games, look at photos, chat with friends through social networks and conduct any of the other myriad activities associated with contemporary convergent internet-connected devices.³

This book will argue that the internet era represents a distinct phase in the development of television that differs from the earlier broadcast, cable/satellite and digital eras of television. Media periodisations are always contested and depend on the focus of a given study. I have written elsewhere about the value of different models of media periodisation and my own preference for technologically based periodisations for television (Johnson 2012, pp.6–10). There I argued that changes to the technologies used to deliver television provide a useful focus for assessing changes to television as a medium. Television’s origins in broadcasting are fundamental to the ways in which television has been studied, regulated, produced and consumed. The growth of cable/satellite technologies in the 1980s and digital technologies in the 1990s challenged foundational assumptions about television as a medium of broadcasting – that it cannot be paid for at the point of reception, that it is a medium of the masses, that it is a national medium. The internet era that emerged in the 2010s represents a further shift in the way that television services are delivered to audiences that, once again, challenges normative definitions of television as a medium.

My concern here in particular with the technologies used to deliver television is important, because it is only since the early 2010s that the internet has started to have a significant impact on the delivery of television programming. As I shall examine in more detail below, from the 1990s television companies began developing and using websites to engage their audiences beyond the television set. In this period, the internet was largely understood as a separate medium to television; a medium that required its own distinct forms of content, from websites and blogs to experiments in interactive, multiplatform and transmedia storytelling. What changed around 2010, however, was the increased ubiquity of the internet as a means of delivering television programming and other audiovisual content to audiences, facilitated by the rise of superfast broadband and 4G, adoption of tablets and smartphones, and increased ownership of internet-connected television sets. It is the consequences of this emergence of the internet as a mainstream means of distributing audiovisual content that is the focus of this book. As the internet simultaneously intertwines with and competes with television as a means of providing viewing experiences, it becomes harder to conceptualise television as a medium distinct from the internet. Therefore, this book asks: how do we conceptualise television as a medium in a period in which the internet and television compete and converge in the delivery of audiovisual content?⁴

It is worth stating at the outset that while widespread, such changes are not uniform around the world. As Jinna Tay and Graeme Turner (2008, p.72) have argued, we need to pay attention to the uneven nature of television’s development in different national and regional contexts as the media landscape has become more complex. Elizabeth Evans et al. point to a series of factors that shape the (uneven) development of online viewing in different geographic contexts, arguing that ‘Differences in network coverage, broadband access and speed, levels of device ownership, corporate strategies and IT Internet policy or media regulation all contribute towards setting the contextual parameters of online viewing’ (2016, pp.410–1). In countries where internet and/or television infrastructure is less developed or only accessible to those with disposable income in urban centres, the development of television plays out differently from the Western contexts of Europe, Australasia and Northern America that have dominated television studies. Evans et al. and Tay and Turner caution against making generalised claims about television when the changes to television infrastructure, technology, industry and policy are so variable around the globe. Indeed, Tay and Turner argue that ‘We can no longer talk about “television” as if it were a singular entity if we are to adequately understand the social, cultural and political functions of the media today’ (2008, p.72).

Therefore, it is important to remember that while the rise of online TV can be traced around the globe it is not universal and emerges primarily in economies with developed technological infrastructures and/or amongst segments of the population with access to the disposable income and technologies required to access internet-connected television services. The primary examples throughout this book are drawn from the UK context in which, as the quote from Ofcom that opened this book indicates, fulfils the three conditions that characterise the internet era.⁵ The focus on the UK in this book stems partly from the time constraints of writing a book about such a fast-moving media landscape and partly in order to rebalance the US-centrism of current scholarship about online TV (Landau 2016; Lotz 2016; Robinson 2017; Wolk 2015). However, in researching this book my aim has been to draw on as wide a range of secondary literature as possible, including work from scholars in Asia and Latin America, as well as in Europe, Australasia and North America. This book also works to develop theorisations that can be adapted to any regional or national context, beginning, in this chapter, with a conceptual framework for tracing change and continuity to television as a medium over time. Although the book draws primarily on the Western context, this conceptual framework is designed to be flexible enough to be adapted to different regional or national contexts and, specifically, to facilitate comparative analysis in order to enhance understanding of the varied and uneven ways in which changes to television are enacted around the world.

The work of scholars such as Tay and Turner speaks to a broader difficulty in conceptualising television, a medium that Joshua Green describes as a ‘leaky object that both aspires to, or borrows from, other media’ (2008, p.96). Although there has been much academic attention on the transformation of television by digital technologies (see, for example, Bennett & Strange 2011; Jenner 2016; Meikle & Young 2008; McDonald & Smith-Rowsey 2016; Spigel & Olsson 2004), over its long history television has undergone seemingly continuous technological and cultural transformation. William Uricchio has written that,

Television’s ongoing change seems endless – from tubes, to transistors, to chips; from cathode ray displays, to plasma, to projection; from broadcast, to cable, to Internet streaming; from dial-up, to remote control, to algorithmic recommendation; from mass audiences, to niche audiences, to individuals.

(2014, p.275)

When attempting to theorise television as a medium, therefore, it is important that we avoid essentialist claims. At the same time, however, it is possible to identify the core components that make up any given medium. Amanda Lotz speaks to this point when she writes that ‘A “medium” derives not only from technological capabilities, but also from textual characteristics, industrial practices, audience behaviors, and cultural understanding’ (2016, p.3). In this sense, television needs to be understood as a cultural construct or, as Mike Van Esler puts it, a ‘concept rather than an object or technology’ (2016, p.133). However, taking a conceptual approach to television need not involve erecting binary oppositions between television as concept and as object/technology. As I shall go on to argue, we can conceptualise television as a medium made up of different technological, cultural, industrial, organisational and experiential components.

Adopting a conceptual, rather than empirical, approach to television in this book is a deliberate choice designed, in part, to deal with the difficulty of researching such a fast-moving ecosystem as the world of internet-connected television. This is a media environment characterised by rapid change, where new initiatives rise and fall in the blink of an eye and scholarship can date with startling speed. Empirical studies play an important role in providing a snapshot of these changes as they happen. However, this book starts from the contention that the transformations we are witnessing challenge the usefulness of the terminology and concepts that we have at hand to talk about television. Therefore, we need to take a step back from tracing the details of change in individual contexts and spend some time thinking about what language and concepts we need to make sense of these changes. M.J. Robinson writes that ‘What we call things creates meanings that affect how they are perceived’ (2017, p.5). For example, if I were to ask you ‘Did you watch television yesterday?’ I can no longer be sure that we would both be operating from the same conceptual understanding of what ‘watching television’ constituted. Perhaps you watched an episode of Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–) on an online streaming service on your laptop while travelling home from work or college on the bus. For some, this would count as watching television, regardless of the service and technology used to access the content. For others, this would not count as watching television because it bears little resemblance to the experience of viewing linear television channels on a set in the living room.

These questions of terminology are important not just for academics, but also for industry and regulators. How we conceptualise television as a medium shapes how we understand its role and function in society. For example, early conceptualisations of broadcast television as a domestic mass medium for the delivery of audiovisual content from a central point to dispersed viewers within a specific nation led to the regulation of UK television as a public service. When VHS and DVD emerged as alternative ways of delivering television, a different mode of regulation was adopted, with VHS tapes and DVDs being subjected to a ratings system borrowed from that used for movies. In this sense, VHS tapes and DVDs of television programmes were not seen as TV-like, but rather understood as consumer products (Kompare 2006) that should be regulated through mechanisms adopted from cinema ratings that were designed to increase consumer knowledge. In the internet era, one service can combine both means of accessing television, allowing viewers to watch an aggregated stream of linear content (akin to broadcasting) or to purchase an individual programme for download (akin to buying a DVD). As former distinctions collapse it becomes important to ask what we mean by television: what are the characteristics that make something TV-like?

One of the dangers of a conceptual approach, however, is that the terminology, models and frameworks developed can be understood as rigid, classifying concepts that could be seen to close down, rather than open up, explorations of difference and change. By contrast, this book understands the conceptual frameworks that it develops as tools for thinking with, rather than as rigid models. Specifically, my adoption of a conceptual approach stems from my own sense that as television as a medium has become more fragmented, complex and convergent, we need new tools that help us think through and analyse these changes. The conceptual models and frameworks outlined in this book should not, therefore, be approached as rigid categorisations, but rather as tools to be adapted, challenged and played with through different lenses and in divergent contexts. Specifically, they are designed to help us think through what is happening to television, rather than to be seen as immutable models of what television is or was.⁶

This first cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. From broadcast to online TV
• 2. Defining online TV
• 3. Online TV industry and technologies
• 4. Online TV content production and distribution
• 5. Online TV interfaces
• 6. Online TV data and algorithms
• Conclusion: The volatility of online TV
• Glossary
• Index