The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition. Amanda D. Lotz
of 2014, the dominant experience of television that developed through its network era and multi-channel transition made it seem like the conveniences of portability and mobility were distinctive technological affordances that required specific assessment, if for no other reason than their different relationship to existing economic models. Per my definition, mobile television is linear, while portable television is nonlinear. Mobile television consequently remains useful for conventional advertiser support, while portable television is chosen in a manner consistent with prized content and may be better monetized through transaction payment. The decades during which living room viewing dominated the experience of television remain paradigmatic in the minds of many in a way that rhetorically counterpoises mobile and portable viewing as some sort of threat, but this is simply our imagination of the future being tainted by knowledge of the past. The previous impossibility of mobile and portable will be forgotten as quickly as the place-based past of telephone calling has been, which will allow fluidity of viewing spaces to seem a “natural” use of television technology instead of the battle for supremacy that characterizes contemporary outlooks.
An important early volley in portable television came with Apple’s October 2005 announcement of the sale of individual episodes for $1.99 on iTunes. Apple’s announcement was important because it attached a particular economic value to an episode of television and the beginning of a repository of television shows available for purchase, which has since been expanded by Amazon and Google. Also important to sketching this history was the release of the Saturday Night Live short “Lazy Sunday” on YouTube in December 2005. This video, initially posted without authorization by the rights holder, NBC, attracted 1.2 million views in just ten days, offering a most preliminary suggestion of a slightly different application of broadband-distributed, nonlinear television. Though YouTube had been designed with the purpose of facilitating amateur sharing, the flurry of posting broadcast- and cable-originated content to YouTube indicated how the site might also serve as a repository that could help viewers manage the abundance of post-network video.
Though there were important developments in the next few years (see table 2.2), the real start to the revolution in portable television began in 2010. In January, Apple announced the iPad, which it released three months later. Though the technology alone is of limited use without applications, the tablet developed into a technology more preferred for portable viewing than the existing laptop and mobile phone screens. Applications and broadband-delivered program services began developing at this time as well. HBO GO launched in February 2010 and was widely hailed by users and the industry as a model for broadband distribution. Users appreciated its easy navigation and depth of content, while the industry appreciated the minimal disruption to existing models through the authentication system that allowed only linear HBO subscribers access. Then, in April, the sports giant ESPN rebranded its ESPN 360 service as ESPN3 and by October established an agreement with Time Warner Cable that allowed subscribers full access to ESPN on computers, then mobile phones in April 2011. Finally, in November 2010, Comcast offered its Xfinity TV app for the iPad, which was followed by Time Warner’s TV Anywhere application in early 2011, and the efforts of other MVPDs to allow subscribers to access the content available on their living room set through other devices and in other locations through authentication soon followed.
The fall of 2010 marks the beginning of what I categorize as the “Netflix Surge”: a period during which Netflix presented a much more disruptive—though short-lived—model for broadband-distributed, nonlinear television. In the fall of 2010, Netflix began offering a streaming-only service and, by many measures, provided top-tier content: it featured the content of the subscription network Starz and other licenses achieved at low rates before license holders realized the potential of the service. Netflix’s quick subscriber gains—reported in frenetic blog-era trade press accounts—inspired and fueled unreasonable anxiety about cord cutting, and soon the acronym OTT (over-the-top) began appearing to acknowledge concerns that cable subscribers would use Netflix and other broadband streaming and downloading distribution services as an alternative to cable subscriptions. Certainly, emerging Internet use figures, such as that nearly 25 percent of all evening Internet traffic was Netflix use, were noteworthy,41 but given that Netflix traffic and all that streaming and downloading were, for the most part, traveling through “tubes” provided by the same MVPDs who also provided cable service, the level of anxiety seemed excessive.42
Table 2.2. Key Developments in the Transition to Nonlinear Television
| 2005 June | YouTube launches. |
| 2005 October | iTunes announces $1.99 downloads. |
| 2008 January | Netflix offers unlimited streaming plan. |
| 2009 | Hulu becomes culturally relevant. It doubles its content library, adds Disney as a partner, and by October 2009, has over 855 million video views. |
| 2010 February | HBO GO launches. |
| Late 2010–early 2011 | Major strides in TV Everywhere: Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Cablevision release authenticated apps for iPad. |
| 2011–2012 | Smartphone use expands from 30 to 56 percent of the mobile phone market. |
| MVPD-provided VOD becomes increasingly robust. Begins offering most recent five episodes of original cable and many broadcast series. | |
| 2013 February | Netflix releases full season of House of Cards. |
| 2013 May | Netflix releases full season of Arrested Development. |
| 2013 October | Comcast announces package allowing viewers access to HBO with Internet and limited basic TV subscription. |
It should have been clear to anyone with a background in television economics and distribution that between the cost of renegotiating their content with the expanded subscriber base and the unlikely ability of circa 2010 Internet infrastructure to accommodate growth of Netflix beyond a niche, the Netflix Surge would flame out quickly. Netflix investors went on a wild ride in 2011, with stock prices rising to a high of $298.73 on July 13, 2011, and the service achieved a subscriber base of 24.59 million in the United States at the end of June 2011.43 By the end of September 2011, the service made missteps, announcing a splitting of the by-mail and streaming service in what was effectively a doubling of cost to consumers and lost 800,000 U.S. subscribers, which was most significant for its deviation from high quarterly subscriber gains, and sent the stock price falling to $113.27.44 But this doesn’t diminish Netflix’s contribution to inaugurating a post-network era, and by many measures the service had recovered by 2014. The Netflix Surge was crucial for offering more than a hypothetical thought experiment of how post-network television might operate. It had significant ramifications in pushing MVPDs to innovate to avoid disaggregation of content and presented viewers with a usable interface and the nonlinear tools of recommendation engines and queuing, which helped fuel viewer desire for better nonlinear alternatives.
Netflix and MVPD services’ TV Everywhere initiatives are addressed in greater detail in chapter 4’s exploration of changes in television distribution. Key to the discussion of the convenience of portable television here is the role Netflix played in enabling audiences to consider laptops and tablets “television screens.” Netflix, perhaps more than any other entity, disrupted the long acculturated sense that television content should be viewed on a television set. Similar to the rabid TiVo fandom that permeated the popular culture of those of a privileged habitus in the early 2000s, Netflix again captured pent-up demand for a different kind of television experience, and for a few months, suggested a new world of television. The realities of television economics and the fact that Netflix—at this point a quintessential middleman—owned neither content