ABSTRACT
The emergence of modern transmedia practices, and in particular transmedia storytelling and distribution/engagement, during the early years of the twenty-first century has worked to remove the television set from its place as the only domestic point of access to audio-visual entertainment. Increasingly, television programmes are only a part of the experience of engaging with dramatic fictional worlds; more and more drama ‘texts’ are becoming multi-platform experiences, offering the viewer a variety of forms of engagement within the same coherent narrative world. However, it is not only the kind of content available to the audience that is changing; it is also the industry and the way that they are able to access television content that are changing. Even earlier technological developments that had significant ramifications on how the audience could watch such content did not offer such an extreme challenge to the cultural position of the set. The remote control and video cassette recorder (and its evolutionary successors the DVD and personal video recorder) maintained not only the central status of the television set but also the status of its accompanying apparatus, broadcasting. They were additions to the television set, altering the audience's relationship to it but maintaining its cultural importance; you could watch a pre-recorded video or DVD, or record content yourself but you were still bound to the set itself. Now, viewers do not even need to turn their television set on in order to access ‘television’; they can instead turn to their computer or their mobile phone.
