The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition. Amanda D. Lotz

and content unlikely to be found on broadcast networks.¹⁵ Their niche audience strategy and the supplementary income they gained from the fees paid by cable providers led cable channels to develop shows that have much more specific target audiences than those of broadcast series. The ability of cable channels to succeed with smaller audiences has made broadcasters’ mission difficult; once given an option, viewers have found the more precisely targeted content offered by many cable channels more satisfying than broadcasters’ least objectionable fare. Yet the expanse of cable channels has spread audiences thinly, and most cable channels remain constrained by their much smaller audiences and related lower advertising prices.

      Indications of a Post-Network Era

      The choice and control that viewers gained during the multi-channel transition only continued to expand as evidence of a post-network era emerged. Others (myself included) have previously used “post-network” to indicate the era in which cable channels created additional options for viewers—similar to the way I use the phrase “multi-channel transition” here. The term “post-network” is best reserved, however, as an indicator of more comprehensive changes in the medium’s use, one I suspect will ultimately take a nonlinear form. Here, “post-network” acknowledges the break from a dominant network-era experience, in which viewers lacked much control over when and where to view and chose among a limited selection of externally determined linear viewing options—in other words, programs available at a certain time on a certain channel. Such constraints are not part of the post-network television experience in which viewers now increasingly select what, when, and where to view from abundant options. Though I once intended the post-network distinction to simply indicate the erosion of network and channel control over how and when viewers watch particular programs, it has grown more feasible to imagine a post-network era devoid of networks or channels as the distinctive industrial entities they’ve served as thus far. In the early years of the post-network era, networks and channels have remained important sites of program aggregation, operating with distinctive identities that help viewers find content of interest. The gradual transition away from previous norms of mass audiences, new ways of accessing and paying for content, and the economic crises to which they contribute have decreased the profit margins of some sectors of the industry. Though multi-channel video programming distributors (MVPDs) such as Comcast, Charter, or DirecTV have passed costs for the ever-growing array of content to their subscribers, evidence of a breaking point for incremental cost increases has presented itself and reveals the inefficiency of bundling collections of unwanted channels into cable packages, and even of bundling unwanted programs into channels. Though this inefficiency could be tolerated in an era in which the license fees for channels were more modest, the fast growth in program costs—described by a cable industry financial analyst in 2013 as “multiples of the rate of inflation”—may yield a more radical departure from existing norms of packaging content, especially for those who predominantly view prized content and live sports and contests.¹⁶

      Chapters 2 through 6 provide detailed considerations of the new industrial conditions that suggest the gradual establishment of a post-network era. These conditions include emerging technologies that enable far greater control over when and where viewers watch programming; multiple options for financing television production that develop and expand the range of commercially viable programming; greater opportunities for amateur production that have arisen with and been augmented by a revolution in distribution that exponentially increases the ease of sharing video; various advertising strategies including product placement and integration that have come to coexist with the decreasingly dominant thirty-second ad, as well as new economic models built on subscription and transaction payment; and advances in digital technologies that further expand knowledge about audience viewing behaviors, allow for pay-per-click advertisement pricing, and create opportunities to supplement sampling methods with census data about use. Once again, adjustments in the production process change the use of television as viewers gain additional control capabilities and access to content variation. Additionally, other new technologies have expanded portable and mobile television use and have removed television from its domestic confines.

      Unlike the fairly uniform experience of watching television in the network era, by the end of the multi-channel transition, there was no singular behavior or mode of viewing, and this variability only continues to increase as the post-network era develops. For example, research on early DVR adopters found that they sometimes engaged television through the previously dominant model of watching television live. However, at other times and with other types of programming they also exhibited an emergent behavior of using the device not only to seek out and record certain content but also to pause, skip, or otherwise self-determine how to view it. Control technologies have effectively added to viewers’ choice in experiencing television, as they have enabled far more differentiated and individualized uses of the medium.

      Two key non–television-related factors also figure significantly in creating the changes in audience behaviors that characterize the post-network era: computing and generational shifts. The diffusion of personal computers relates to changing uses of television in notable ways. During the multi-channel transition, when viewers began to experience television as one of many “screen” technologies in the home, the initial contrast between the experience of using computers and watching television led users to differentiate between screen media according to whether they required us to push or pull content, lean back or lean forward, and pursue leisure or work. Subsequently, however, digital technologies have come to dismantle these early differentiations and tendencies of use and have allowed for the previously unimagined integration of television and computers—of all types—in the post-network era. This integration occurred concomitantly first with the growth in home computer ownership, which rose from 11 percent in 1985 to 30 percent in 1995, 67 percent by 2005, and 80 percent by 2013.¹⁷ Second, the rapid diffusion of smartphones—devices in 65 percent of homes owning televisions by 2013—further disrupted expectations of devices and the capabilities of screens even since preliminary suggestions of the post-network era emerged. Mobile devices, however, are not necessarily used for mobile viewing: 2013 research revealed that 64 percent of smartphone TV/video use occurs in the home, suggesting that most use is simply for the convenience of viewing more places within the home.¹⁸ Smartphones have quickly accustomed their users to expect to be able to engage in any “computer” need from any location, which has encouraged expectations of convenient access to television content.

      The technological experience of personal computing and smartphone use is important beyond the growing convergence of media in the latter part of the multi-channel transition period because of the new technological aptitudes and expectations embodied in their use. The presumption that technologies “do” something useful and that we “do” something with them has played a significant role in adjusting network-era behavior with regard to television. The media theorist Dan Harries refers to the blending of old media viewing and new media using as “viewsing.”¹⁹ Thinking about such activities as being merged, rather than as being distinct, takes important steps beyond the binaries between computer and television technologies commonly assumed in the past and addresses the multiple modes of viewing and using that audiences began to exhibit by the end of the multi-channel transition. The distinction of “computing” has also become as unstable as “television,” as computing has moved beyond the PC and become integrated into a wide range of mobile devices used constantly and in an array of contexts in a manner that makes the notion of computing as an activity done at a desk increasingly residual.

      Related generational differences have also played a key role in changing uses of television.²⁰ Many of the distinctions such as broadcast versus cable—let alone between television and computer—that have structured understandings of television are meaningless to those born after 1980. Most members of this generation (dubbed “Millennials” or “digital natives”) never knew a world without cable, were introduced to the Internet before graduating from high school, and carried mobile phones with them from the time they were first allowed out in the world on their own.²¹ The older edge of this generation provoked a new economic model in the recording industry through rampant illegal downloading, while their younger peers may own elaborate music