Netflix Nations. Ramon Lobato
of personalized choices” (Bennett 2011, 2). Kelsey (2010, 231) writes that, “We don’t just watch TV, we send and receive it, gather and organize it on our personal touch screens, meanwhile interacting with sites to produce, wittingly or not, the consumer feedback that helps broadcasters determine a season’s programming (if TV still even thinks in terms of seasons).” Tryon (2013, 14) argues that “contemporary media platforms actively solicit an individualized, fragmented, and empowered media consumer, one who has greater control over when, where, and how she watches movies and television shows,” warning that “this offer of liberation from the viewing schedule is often accompanied by increased surveillance.” In response to these shifts, alternative periodizations of television technology are also emerging. Some experts now refer to TVI (broadcast only), TVII (cable era), and TVIII (digital distribution), terms that draw our attention to the successive waves of transformation that have swept through television technology and the television industry (Todreas 1999; Pearson 2011; Johnson 2007).
The work of U.S. television scholar Amanda Lotz offers a richly textured account of these transformations. Across a number of books—especially the second edition of The Television Will Be Revolutionized (2014), Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television (2017a), and We Now Disrupt This Broadcast (2017b)—Lotz provides a forensic examination of the changes in the underlying economic models of television when it moves online, and how these models shape programming, production, and circulation. Lotz begins by explaining how the fundamental logic of television has been predicated on linearity: “Almost all the conventions of television—a flow of content, program length, expectations of weekly episodes—derive from practices developed to cope with the necessity of the linear schedule” (Lotz 2017a, 15). In contrast, the on-demand character of internet-distributed television, and its precedents in earlier on-demand services (such as pay-per-view movies delivered by cable), presents a different mode of distribution that has more in common with the record store, bookstore, or library. In this way, internet-distributed television “allow[s] behaviors that were peripheral in an age of analog, physical media such as time shifting, self-curation, and à la carte access to become central and industrialized practices” (17).
Lotz sees Netflix as a central part of this story, not only because the company “disrupted the long acculturated sense that television content should be viewed on a television set” (Lotz 2014, 71) but also because it introduced new kinds of filtering, aggregation, and recommendation systems that have since become widespread. She points to the Netflix Queue (now called a List) as a key site through which users negotiated the shift to nonlinear television, noting that “the queuing that Netflix introduced provided its subscribers with a different paradigm for thinking about and organizing viewing behavior, and one that substantially challenges the long dominant, linear, ‘what’s on’ proposition” (74). In other words, Lotz regards the online distribution of content as highly significant because it marks a transformation in the underlying structure and business models of television by freeing content from a linear schedule and by introducing new pricing models (including all-you-can-stream subscription packages) and audience expectations about the content, novelty, and value of TV services. As she writes, “The affordance of internet protocol technologies to deliver personally-selected content from an industrially curated library is the central difference introduced by this new distribution mechanism” (Lotz 2017a, 4).
Within the various contributions to the future-of-TV debate, we can see different degrees of emphasis on change as opposed to continuity. Lotz foregrounds the transformative dimensions of internet distribution in her work, while other scholars focus on the continuities. In this second category, we often find the work of media historians, who are—by training and temperament—ambivalent about diagnoses of radical change. William Uricchio, for example, stresses that notions of personal TV and interactive TV go back much further than the internet era and can be traced right through the history of the medium, with precursor concepts to be found throughout the twentieth century:
Television offers a striking case where both the technological platform and its deployment protocols have shifted radically and more or less continually since the late 19th Century. We’ve seen the project of the televisual ally itself with platforms such as the telephone, radio, film, and networked computer; and we’ve seen its protocols include person-to-person communication, entertainment and news, surveillance, telepresence and so on (not to mention legal and regulatory rule sets). (Uricchio, forthcoming, 11)
Uricchio reminds us that if we wish to understand the future of television we do not have to start with the internet. Instead, we can look back to early video game technologies, the introduction of cable and satellite systems, the VCR and TiVo, and even the remote control—all of which have contributed in different ways to television’s personalized, postbroadcast present by variously expanding the range of content available, increasing viewer control over the flow of images, and introducing elements of interactivity (Wasser 2002; Boddy 2004; Uricchio 2004; Thomas 2008). Following Uricchio, we can look back even further, to a range of visionary early twentieth-century experimental television technologies that prefigured “what in today’s terms might be understood as Skype, surveillance video, large screen public display, and domestic news and entertainment” (Uricchio 2004, 7–8). This is why many scholars who use terms such as postbroadcast and postnetwork are careful to emphasize that they signify not epochal change (from X to Y) but rather the sedimented layering of different technologies, systems, institutions, and viewing cultures, such that cable, satellite, internet, and mobile technologies coexist with and are structurally integrated into broadcast television (Turner and Tay 2009; Parks 2004; Lotz 2014).
A second lesson from this literature is that we should not write off the institutional power of television just yet. Toby Miller lucidly argues that television as an industry sector is far from dead—and anyone who claims otherwise is likely to be proven wrong by history. Miller is highly critical of the death-of-TV discourse and mocks the assumption that “the grand organizer of daily life over half a century has lost its pride of place in the physical layout of the home and the daily order of drama and data” (Miller 2010, 11). Instead, he emphasizes the industrial continuities (especially in production and advertising) that persist into the internet age. Miller offers a series of counterarguments in response, noting that a lot of internet media is basically television; that television institutions are still structurally central to digital media markets; that broadcast television is still strong and important globally; that there are more TV stations opening up worldwide than ever before, especially in emerging economies; and that audience ratings suggest we are actually watching more television content than ever before (it is just distributed differently).
This is indicative of one response to the future-of-TV debates, which is to affirm the centrality and vitality of television institutions in the face of their digital dethronement. As Tim Wu (2015) reminds us, “Overestimating change in the television industry is a rookie mistake.” A different formulation of the argument can be found in media business commentator Michael Wolff’s book Television Is the New Television (2015). Setting out to destroy what he sees as the Silicon Valley myth of television’s disruption at the hands of the digital, Wolff argues that the recent history of media is better understood the other way around—that television has ultimately tamed and absorbed digital media. For Wolff, Netflix is a classic example of this reverse engineering of the digital. The service is much more television-like than internet-like, Wolff argues, because it shuns many of the interactive affordances of internet media in favor of established narrative structures, aesthetics, and experiences. In Wolff’s account, as Netflix morphed from a DVD rental company to a digital studio, it actually moved closer to television by “bringing television programming and values and behavior—like passive watching—to heretofore interactive and computing-related screens” (Wolff 2015, 91). He adds:
Other than being delivered via IP, Netflix had almost nothing to do with the conventions of digital media—in a sense it rejected them. It is not user generated, it is not social, it is not bite size, it is not free. It is in every way, except for its route into people’s homes—and the differences here would soon get blurry—the same as television. It was old-fashioned, passive, narrative entertainment. (93–94)
In this argument, we can see a variation on the future-of-TV arguments: the idea that television has already shaped the future of digital media in its own image and will