ABSTRACT
The digital is often couched within a euphoric celebration of a landmark rupture. Away from this euphoria, my focus in this chapter has been the web-based creative media channels, particularly the TVF comedies. Marked by irreverence, informality and witty commentary, the early TVF videos made their mark by establishing a witty reappropriation of the membrane of the popular. They drew upon a vast variety of popular content to repurpose it - as an insurrection upon the cathartic mainstream of Indian media content, as a youthful outside to the familial domesticity addressed by television. By arguing that this insurrection had its affective basis in a post-censorious imaginary, I establish that the advertorial imperatives of the ‘free’ realm of the digital sit heavily upon the insurrection. Regardless of the noisy tendencies of the digital, it remains tethered to a well-identified target. As the most successful of online streaming platforms, TVF’s journey illustrates the limits of digital media. To unsubscribe itself from a narrow target demographic and its attendant advertorial compulsions, the digital must renegotiate its contract with older media, particularly television.
