This online proliferation of content is one consequence of television’s digital transformation. The internet has become a distribution channel and archive for a diverse range of content, scattered unevenly across hundreds of platforms and portals. The digital mobility of content raises questions for scholars and students of media distribution, and also requires a rethinking of some of the assumptions that lie at the heart of television studies, because television content now circulates through the same infrastructure as other media, including ebooks, music, short videos, feature films, and podcasts. This has a number of significant conceptual implications for television studies that will be examined throughout this book.
Internet-Distributed Television as an Ecology
The first step in our analysis is to disaggregate the ecology of services, platforms, set-top boxes, and apps that constitute the field of internet-distributed television. Internet distribution of television content is not a unitary phenomenon; it involves a wide array of different services, institutions, and practices. Consider the way many viewers in broadband-enabled areas, especially younger audiences, watch TV: they use Google to search across sites for relevant free video streams, moving between the bits and pieces of content scattered around free video sites; they use third-party apps that filter and suggest particular programs; they follow recommendations from friends’ posts on social media; they have active and lapsed subscriptions to video portals, some of which may be shared with friends and family; and they may also purchase individual episodes or season passes on their laptops and phones. In addition, some may use BitTorrent and illegal streaming sites, or share downloaded episodes and full seasons via USB sticks, cloud storage, and Bluetooth transfers. Depending on where they live and how tech-savvy they are, they may also use a VPN (virtual private network) or a proxy service to access offshore media or get around government restrictions on digital media services.
A point that is not new but bears repeating is that an increasing proportion of the global audience now understands television as an online service dispersed across an ecology of websites, portals, and apps, as well as a broadcast and cable/satellite-distributed medium. Key elements of this distribution ecology include
online TV portals, such as BBC iPlayer (United Kingdom), ABC iView (Australia), NRK TV (Norway), and Toggle (Singapore), which are provided by major broadcast networks and cable/satellite providers through websites and apps and typically include some combination of new-release content, library content, and live channel feeds;
subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Now, Hayu, and CBS All Access, which offer a curated library of content for a monthly subscription fee;
transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) services, such as iTunes, Google Play Store, Microsoft Films & TV, and Chili, which offer sell-through content at different price points for purchase and/or rental;
hybrid TVOD/SVOD/free portals, such as YouTube, Youku, and Tencent Video, which offer free user-uploaded and professional content plus an additional tier of premium content available through subscription or direct purchase;
video-sharing platforms, such as Daily Motion, which offer a range of free, ad-supported amateur and professional content, often informally uploaded;3
informal on-demand and download services, including BitTorrent, Popcorn Time, file-hosting sites (cyberlockers), and illegal streaming sites;
unlicensed live, linear channel feeds, delivered through pirate websites, illegal TV streaming boxes, and live streaming services such as Periscope; and
recommender and aggregator apps, such as JustWatch, that advise what content is available across the various services.
This ecology is interconnected and highly dynamic, and therefore difficult to measure. To give a sense of scale, the European Audiovisual Observatory’s MAVISE database of online video services currently lists 546 free streaming services, 448 transactional services, 367 subscription services (including adult sites), and 28 video-sharing platforms.4 There is a lot of leakage between these categories. For example, catch-up services are becoming more and more SVOD-like, adding recommender systems and personal logins, while SVOD services are becoming more and more like conventional networks by producing their own exclusive content. Meanwhile, YouTube, Youku, and other hybrid sites tend to absorb innovations from many directions, combining advertising-funded free content, original content, live streams, user uploads, and pirated material in the one platform. To make things more complicated, there are also a wide range of gaming consoles, set-top boxes, dongles, and media players (Apple TV, Playstation, Amazon Fire stick, generic Android streamer boxes, Kodi boxes) that aggregate content from various sources, further blurring the line between distributors, aggregators, channels, and hardware providers.
Recent scholarship in media and television studies draws our attention to different parts of this ecology for different analytical purposes. For example, Stuart Cunningham and David Craig (2019) and Aymar Jean Christian (2017) emphasize the centrality of open platforms (especially YouTube) and networked sharing practices to contemporary television industries, thus advancing an expanded definition of internet television that includes social media platforms. Lotz’s (2017a) category of internet-distributed television is defined more narrowly to refer to portals for professionally produced content (“the crucial intermediary services that collect, curate, and distribute television programming via internet distribution,” such as CBS All Access, Netflix, and HBO Now). Catherine Johnson uses a distinct term, “online television,” to refer to a larger category of “closed and editorially managed” services that distribute “actively acquired/commissioned content” (Johnson 2017, 10)—a definition that would include public-service broadcaster portals as well as commercial SVODs and AVODs, but not open video platforms. These different ways of defining internet television are all instructive because they bring into focus particular parts of the ecology. This book focuses specifically on SVOD, but it does so with the understanding that SVOD represents only one line of development within a wider ecology.
The present instability within television distribution is remarkable, although historical precedents do exist. Recall that broadcast television evolved as a hybrid medium combining prerecorded material, live programming, movies, short-form programming, and advertisements. Early television was an empty container into which existing art forms and business models could be poured. The internet is now doing something similar for television, absorbing its existing textual forms and associated business models and putting them together in new combinations. Present distinctions between some of these categories may soon be rendered obsolete, a question addressed further in Chapters 1 and 2.
While I am interested in these historical questions, my primary focus is on the international geography of online television distribution—the spatial patterns that determine the availability and unavailability of television content to audiences in different parts of the world. These patterns are highly complex and volatile. This book describes a number of different phenomena that may sometimes appear contradictory. For example, while internet distribution has created new forms of mobility for content and audiences, it has also served to reduce mobility in other cases (e.g., via geoblocking), leading to increased territorialization. The relationship between television and its intended “zone of consumption” (Pertierra and Turner 2013) is variously stretched, dissolved, and reinforced. I want to emphasize that this is not the same thing as saying television is now everywhere, that it has been spatially liberated or deterritorialized, that space does not matter, or that content now circulates in a totally friction-free manner. This is not the case at all. Television is still bounded and “located” in all kinds of ways, as we will see