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

      PREFACE

      Every book has its own story about the process of its creation—call it a book’s biography. Part of the biography of the first edition of The Television Will Be Revolutionized is that I returned the proofs to New York University Press three days after the birth of my first child, in July 2007. So watching that child head off to kindergarten in the fall of 2012 gave the age of the book an uncommon physical form. Oddly, it was easier to fathom that it was time for kindergarten than that the insights of the book were now five years old.

      Much has happened in the television industry in these intervening years, though much has also remained unchanged. When the first edition went to press, I was playing around on the beta version of Hulu—though there was little content, YouTube was still a start-up, the broadcast networks had clunky interfaces for streaming the very little content they made available, and there was nothing but movies or advertorials available through video on demand. A cable executive interviewed for this edition noted that the speed with which broadband-delivered video became ubiquitous caught even most industry insiders by surprise. Those on the forefront had tried out the slow-streaming, blocky, early ventures in this area and didn’t think much of the experience. Then it all seemed to change overnight. Netflix, HBO GO, smartphones, tablets, TV Everywhere, oh my! The vast proliferation of content through various broadband providers is addressed in all of the book’s revised chapters, as it has affected every aspect of the industry and provides the biggest paradigmatic adjustment from the first edition.

      The revised second edition updates developments throughout the television industry over the last seven years, focuses the book more on broad frameworks for thinking about these changes than on cataloging a multiplicity of initiatives and experiments, and makes general improvements upon certain aspects that I found suboptimal when I revisited it. In some places, details about the conditions of the industry in 2006 remain because they provide a valuable benchmark of the transition that allows the book to be a history of the present, while other details have been eliminated. Though many consider the book to be about the post-network era, I saw the contribution of the first edition primarily as a calling into existence and systematic explanation of the multi-channel transition period of the 1980s and 1990s. This context building prepares us to be able to talk about and theorize a post-network era and remains unchanged and unchallenged by the last seven years. The second revised edition maintains that contribution here and also expands on what can be said of the post-network era as it has come into greater relief. The structure and organization of the book remain largely intact; substantive adjustments are noted below.

      It is the curse of a project like this to be inevitably out of date. During the time lag of the production process alone, new developments will occur. There are even developments that transpired before I submitted the manuscript that I elected to exclude because their consequences and likelihood of lasting impact, though potentially substantial, were not yet clear (Aereo; Chromecast). Here, I’ve focused more on frameworks for understanding developments than on cataloging what different companies are doing in 2014 because of the inevitable change. For example, YouTube seems to have a new monetization strategy about every nine months, so instead of detailing the strategy in place at the moment of manuscript submission, I focus more on the industrial differences of advertising and subscription economic models and the consequences they’ve produced for content in other