ABSTRACT
The last two chapters have examined how televisual repetition has become a particular brand of culture, in the wake of the television heritage that has developed since the 1970s. Broadcast and cable syndication markets developed in response to these concerns, and series were increasingly crafted with the back end firmly in mind. Boutique television (on both broadcast and cable channels) fostered extensive framing and branding techniques, creating distinctive spaces for televisual repetition. Although the changing concept of the television heritage successfully secured these transmitted spaces, the television industry had far less success in exploiting the most significant new medium of the 1980s and 1990s: home video. While TV-related merchandise ranging from published episode guides to collectible plates had been effectively marketed during this period, the programs themselves remained, for the most part, only available through television; that is, through over-the-air, cable, and satellite broadcasting. Home video’s primary medium, VHS tape, was portable, permanent, and easily accessible to most consumers, and while particularly well suited for film distribution and exhibition, it was incompatible for the mass distribution of entire television series. However, the rapid adoption of Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) technology at the end of the 1990s prompted a reconception of television on home video. The enhanced technical standards and new industrial practices developed for the new format allowed for the delivery of hours of television to consumers in small, tangible packages that also happened to look rather nice on a bookshelf. The rapid development of television on DVD-becoming standard less
than five years after the format’s debut-should be seen in the context of the array of changes that affect how the medium is, and will be, financed,
produced, distributed, experienced, and linked with the rest of the culture. For the past two decades, the domestic set has been transforming, in fits and starts, from an analog, low-definition receiver of broadcast signals to a digital, high-definition, customizable multimedia portal, incorporating hundreds of channels, an augmented audiovisual range, and a greater capacity for interactivity. New technologies, business models, regulatory structures, programming forms, and modes of viewing increasingly mesh with the old, with widely varying, and often unpredictable results. Accordingly, it is impossible to gauge exactly what ‘‘television’’ will be in another decade or so (let alone by the time this book is released). However, it is clear that the centralized, mass-disseminated, ‘‘one-way’’ cultural institution that has held sway since the middle of the twentieth century is largely ceding to a regime premised instead upon individual consumer choice, and marked by highly diversified content, atomized reception, and customizable interfaces. While the development of boutique cable channels described in the last chapter is certainly a key part of this transition, their use of distinction is likely only a harbinger of an emerging media environment in which programming will be the result of direct viewer decisions (limited by corporate offerings, of course), rather than advertiser-supported general transmission. These changes around television are also part of a larger conceptual
shift across all media, as the aesthetic, technological, industrial, and cultural boundaries between previously discrete forms (text, film, broadcasting, video, and sound recordings) are increasingly blurred, challenging established practices and paradigms. As I have suggested throughout this study, technology, industry, and culture are not autonomous domains: each is shaped by the other in particular ways, helping construct particular media forms and practices in particular contexts. While repetition has long been one of the standard practices of media production and distribution, its specific application has varied considerably over time, and between different media forms and regimes. For television, changes in its practices of repetition began in the mid-1970s, as the previous chapters have discussed. The television heritage and the development of cable boutiques fostered the cultivation of the televisual past as a ready source of cultural and industrial capital. One additional mid-1970s event factors large in the development of televisual repetition: the introduction of home video.2 Home video devices-in particular videocassette recorders (VCRs), but also video cameras (camcorders), laserdisc players, Digital/Personal Video Recorders (DVRs/PVRs), and Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) players-may differ in their specific functions, but they all have in common the primary innovation of video technology: the ability to selectively play back prerecorded programs.3
In addition, and just as significantly, most of these devices can also record incoming audiovisual signals onto the fixed media of tape or disc. Whether playing or recording, however, video devices are physically
and culturally connected to television sets, forcing television-as both a technology and cultural form, to borrow Raymond Williams’ description-into a complex new relationship that foregrounds its function as an audiovisual display device, rather than its more established role as a dominant modern cultural institution. This link destabilizes the direct presentation of scheduled television events, and enables people to use their personal media technology to create or access programming on their own terms, rather than stay locked to the fare and schedule dictated by the broadcasting industry.4
