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 process coming changes through our existing understandings of television. We will continue 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