Television in the Contemporary Media Environment

This chapter discusses the case that creating "television" has become possible for those outside the television industry. It focuses on digital distribution—and a very particular aspect of digital distribution. On-demand access to television introduced a more profound break from these earlier norms of the television experience around 2010. Internet-distributed television—such as the series delivered by Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Video—may seem very different from television because of the difference in viewers&s; relationship to the content. Often legacy-media industries—those industries that existed before digital distribution—provided these services, while others are digital endemic—or those that exist only in digital form. Netflix dominated the early years of Internet-distributed television in the US, though, in these years, most continued to think of it as separate from television. The pace of new services and technologies, and increasing blending among legacy and digital-endemic media, has led to a lot of confusion.