ABSTRACT
Rumours of the death of television may be exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the head-in-the-sand option has long passed. Television audiences in aggregate have been slowly declining over some time. For example, in Australia, from a regular peak of more than three million per night in the 1990s, average prime-time audiences have fallen by several hundred thousand and there is no suggestion that this trend will abate in the future. Naturally, aggregate audiences remain comparatively very high compared with those for other media, but significant declines among young people are of particular concern to the longer-term future of the broadcast format. The ‘death’ of broadcasting is a staple of the IT and business press, and reaches its apogee in Wired’s (www.condenet.com/mags/wired) discourse and titles such as Television After TV (Spigel and Olsson 2004), The Death of Broadcasting (Given 1998) and ‘Free-to-air TV Heading the Way of Vinyl Records, Says Media Expert’ (Tabakoff 2008). It may even be implied in the title of this book. Whatever the level of rhetorical investment, broadcast TV is widely regar-
ded as a mature industry undergoing slow decline and being challenged fundamentally by viewer shifts to online and interactive engagement. Complicating this ‘substitutionist’ view – after all, as Brian Winston (1998) and most scholars of media and communications history attest, it is rare that media forms are definitively extinguished by the arrival of the new – this chapter explores the ‘reinvention’ of TV through: its interactions with new, internet and mobile media; experiments in the capacity of digital TV’s interactivity; and specific units, often within public broadcasters, that are charged with innovation. How is television reinventing itself in response to the major challenges to its
long-term future? Can a mature industry make the necessary transition to a more fragmented market and a less hierarchical relationship to its ‘user base’? As it examines the answers to these questions, this chapter also broadens the academic and disciplinary frame of reference for television studies to include innovation research.
