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 particular types of television content and make content-specific claims when postulating coming economic models. These three categories don’t quite contain all viewing, and I’m sure we can imagine many instances that present features of multiple categories. My point is to begin to speak of television viewing with greater specificity, because viewers’ increased ability to manage viewing differently has significant implications throughout television’s industrial norms. Creating terminology that acknowledges the different attributes that are enabled by technological and distribution affordances of the post-network era aid in crafting a more sophisticated conversation about television’s present and future. Though disruptions to conventional practices occur—such as iTunes sales of single episodes beginning in 2005 or Netflix’s rich subscription-based on-demand offerings beginning in 2010—acknowledging the range of content now characteristic of television helps make clear that it is a variety of practices and norms that are imperiled, rather than television per se.
Key aspects of the post-network revolution include the enabling of new types of programming such as prized content and the establishment of profound distinctions in the experiences and economic possibilities among existing programming types such as live sports and contests and linear content. Another emerging aspect of the revolution can be found in the growing mechanisms for organizing and packaging content, whether by emergent aggregators such as Netflix or Hulu, emergent devices such as Roku and Boxee, or emergent applications, whether those enabling live streaming of channels over computers or devices such as gaming systems that enable accessing television content through Internet connection. We remain at a most nascent stage of what I suspect will be a massive disruption of norms of television delivery, and it is too soon to predict common viewing behaviors in the future. Nonlinear viewing—that is, viewing not at an externally appointed time—whether by DVR, video on demand (VOD), DVDs, or streaming—has become a primary way of engaging television for some viewers, though these behaviors remain irregular or completely unused by many more. Nonlinear viewing calls into question the continued need for previous ways of organizing television, such as the “channel,” and these early years of preliminary post-network formation have featured the addition of new channel-like distribution and aggregation “middlemen” such as Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube that are each trying to reorganize the content experience. Adding more middlemen, at the same