Now in a second edition, this textbook surveys the channels, platforms, and programming through which television distribution operates, with a diverse selection of contributors providing thorough explorations of global media industries in flux. Even as legacy media industries experience significant disruption in the face of streaming and online delivery, the power of the television channel persists. Far from disappearing, television channels have multiplied and adapted to meet the needs of old and new industry players alike. Television viewers now navigate complex choices among broadcast, cable, and streaming services across a host of different devices. From Networks to Netflix guides students, instructors, and scholars through that complex and transformed channel landscape to reveal how these industry changes unfold and why they matter. This second edition features new players like Disney+, HBO Max, Crunchyroll, Hotstar, and more, increasing attention to TV services across the world. An ideal resource for students and scholars of media criticism, media theory, and media industries, this book continues to offer a concrete, tangible way to grasp the foundations of television—and television studies—even as they continue to be rewritten.

German Crime Dramas from Network Television to Netflix approaches German television crime dramas to uncover the intersections between the genre's media-specific network and post-network formats and how these negotiate with and contribute to concepts of the regional, national, and global. Part I concentrates on the ARD network's long-running flagship series Tatort (Crime Scene 1970-). Because the domestically produced crime drama succeeded in interacting with and competing against dominant U.S. formats during 3 different mediascapes, it offers strategic lessons for post-network television. Situating 9 Tatort episodes in their televisual moment within the Sunday evening flow over 38 years and 3 different German regions reveals how producers, writers, directors, critics, and audiences interacted not only with the cultural socio-political context, but also responded to the challenges aesthetically, narratively, and media-reflexively. Part II explores how post-2017 German crime dramas (Babylon Berlin, Dark, Perfume, and Dogs of Berlin) rework the genre's formal and narrative conventions for global circulation on Netflix. Each chapter concentrates on the dynamic interplay between time-shifted viewing, transmedia storytelling, genre hybridity, and how these interact with projections of cultural specificity and continue or depart from established network practices. The results offer crucial information and inspiration for producers and executives, for creative teams, program directors, and television scholars.

How streaming services and internet distribution have transformed global television culture. Television, once a broadcast medium, now also travels through our telephone lines, fiber optic cables, and wireless networks. It is delivered to viewers via apps, screens large and small, and media players of all kinds. In this unfamiliar environment, new global giants of television distribution are emerging—including Netflix, the world’s largest subscription video-on-demand service. Combining media industry analysis with cultural theory, Ramon Lobato explores the political and policy tensions at the heart of the digital distribution revolution, tracing their longer history through our evolving understanding of media globalization. Netflix Nations considers the ways that subscription video-on-demand services, but most of all Netflix, have irrevocably changed the circulation of media content. It tells the story of how a global video portal interacts with national audiences, markets, and institutions, and what this means for how we understand global media in the internet age. Netflix Nations addresses a fundamental tension in the digital media landscape – the clash between the internet’s capacity for global distribution and the territorial nature of media trade, taste, and regulation. The book also explores the failures and frictions of video-on-demand as experienced by audiences. The actual experience of using video platforms is full of subtle reminders of market boundaries and exclusions: platforms are geo-blocked for out-of-region users (“this video is not available in your region”); catalogs shrink and expand from country to country; prices appear in different currencies; and subtitles and captions are not available in local languages. These conditions offer rich insight for understanding the actual geographies of digital media distribution. Contrary to popular belief, the story of Netflix is not just an American one. From Argentina to Australia, Netflix’s ascension from a Silicon Valley start-up to an international television service has transformed media consumption on a global scale. Netflix Nations will help readers make sense of a complex, ever-shifting streaming media environment.

This book deals with the various ways Netflix reconceptualises television as part of the process of TV IV. As television continues to undergo a myriad of significant changes, Netflix has proven itself to be the dominant force in this development, simultaneously driving a number of these changes and challenging television’s existing institutional structures. This comprehensive study explores the pre-history of Netflix, the role of binge-watching in its organisation and marketing, and Netflix’s position as a transnational broadcaster. It also examines different concepts of control and the role these play in the history of ancillary technologies, from the remote control to binge-watching as Netflix’s iteration of giving control to the viewers. By focusing on Netflix’s relationship with the linear television schedule, its negotiations of quality and marketing, as well as the way Netflix integrates into national media systems, Netflix and the Re-invention of Television illuminates the importance of Netflix’s role within the processes of TV IV.

How streaming services and internet distribution have transformed global television culture. Television, once a broadcast medium, now also travels through our telephone lines, fiber optic cables, and wireless networks. It is delivered to viewers via apps, screens large and small, and media players of all kinds. In this unfamiliar environment, new global giants of television distribution are emerging—including Netflix, the world’s largest subscription video-on-demand service. Combining media industry analysis with cultural theory, Ramon Lobato explores the political and policy tensions at the heart of the digital distribution revolution, tracing their longer history through our evolving understanding of media globalization. Netflix Nations considers the ways that subscription video-on-demand services, but most of all Netflix, have irrevocably changed the circulation of media content. It tells the story of how a global video portal interacts with national audiences, markets, and institutions, and what this means for how we understand global media in the internet age. Netflix Nations addresses a fundamental tension in the digital media landscape – the clash between the internet’s capacity for global distribution and the territorial nature of media trade, taste, and regulation. The book also explores the failures and frictions of video-on-demand as experienced by audiences. The actual experience of using video platforms is full of subtle reminders of market boundaries and exclusions: platforms are geo-blocked for out-of-region users (“this video is not available in your region”); catalogs shrink and expand from country to country; prices appear in different currencies; and subtitles and captions are not available in local languages. These conditions offer rich insight for understanding the actual geographies of digital media distribution. Contrary to popular belief, the story of Netflix is not just an American one. From Argentina to Australia, Netflix’s ascension from a Silicon Valley start-up to an international television service has transformed media consumption on a global scale. Netflix Nations will help readers make sense of a complex, ever-shifting streaming media environment.

A Companion to Television is a magisterial collection of 31 original essays that charter the field of television studies over the past century Explores a diverse range of topics and theories that have led to television’s current incarnation, and predict its likely future Covers technology and aesthetics, television’s relationship to the state, televisual commerce; texts, representation, genre, internationalism, and audience reception and effects Essays are by an international group of first-rate scholars For information, news, and content from Blackwell's reference publishing program please visit www.blackwellpublishing.com/reference/

Netflix is the definitive media company of the 21st century. It was among the first to parlay new Internet technologies into a successful business model, and in the process it changed how consumers access film and television. It is now one of the leading providers of digitally delivered media content and is continually expanding access across a host of platforms and mobile devices. Despite its transformative role, however, Netflix has drawn very little critical attention-far less than competitors such as YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Comcast, and HBO. This collection addresses this gap, as the essays are designed to critically explore the breadth and diversity of Netflix's effect from a variety of different scholarly perspectives, a necessary approach considering the hybrid nature of Netflix, its inextricable links to new models of media production, distribution, viewer engagement and consumer behavior, its relationship to existing media conglomerates and consumer electronics, its capabilities as a web-based service provider and data network, and its reliance on a broader technological infrastructure.

Television audiences and its industry alike have been confused by the emergence of new ways to watch television. On one hand, the programs seem every bit like the television we've long known, while the way we can watch, what we can watch, and the business models supporting them differ significantly. Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television pushes understandings of the business of television to keep pace with the considerable technological change of the last decade. It explains why shows such as Orange is the New Black or Transparent are indeed television despite coming to screens over internet connection and in exchange for a monthly fee. It explores how internet-distributed television is able to do new things - particularly, allow different people to watch different shows chosen from a library of possibilities. This technological ability allows new audience behaviors and new norms in making television. Portals are the "channels" of internet-distributed television, and Portals identifies how the task of curating a library of shows differs from channels' task of building a schedule. It explores the business model--subscriber funding--that supports many portals, and identifies the key differences from advertiser or direct purchase. Portals considers what we know about the future of television, even though we remain early in a process of transformative change.

This book is about television in Latin America. Its national and regional industries create most television programming there within genres developed over time in the region. However, part of the programming has always come from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. With cable, satellite and now streaming TV, that inflow of foreign programming has increased substantially. While many in the audience still prefer national or regional programs for their cultural proximity, an increasing number among the upper-middle and middle classes, particularly the young, are turning to the new foreign services, like Netflix, Amazon and Disney for class distinction, cosmopolitanism or other motives. Among the television industries, global, regional and national actors are creating a variety of programs and channels (broadcast, pay-TV and streaming) to segment and appeal to different parts of the audience.

“A luminous, moving and visual record of fleeting moments of connection.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A visionary work of radical empathy. Known for immersion journalism that is more immersed than most people are willing to go, and for a prose style that is somehow both fierce and soulful, Jeff Sharlet dives deep into the darkness around us and awaiting us. This work began when his father had a heart attack; two years later, Jeff, still in his forties, had a heart attack of his own. In the grip of writerly self-doubt, Jeff turned to images, taking snapshots and posting them on Instagram, writing short, true stories that bloomed into documentary. During those two years, he spent a lot of time on the road: meeting strangers working night shifts as he drove through the mountains to see his father; exploring the life and death of Charley Keunang, a once-aspiring actor shot by the police on LA’s Skid Row; documenting gay pride amidst the violent homophobia of Putin’s Russia; passing time with homeless teen addicts in Dublin; and accompanying a lonely woman, whose only friend was a houseplant, on shopping trips. Early readers have called this book “incantatory,” the voice “prophetic,” in “James Agee’s tradition of looking at the reality of American lives.” Defined by insomnia and late-night driving and the companionship of other darkness-dwellers—night bakers and last-call drinkers, frightened people and frightening people, the homeless, the lost (or merely disoriented), and other people on the margins—This Brilliant Darkness erases the boundaries between author, subject, and reader to ask: how do people live with suffering?