Amanda D. Lotz

Television after the network era

Netflix and Streaming Video is the first book to provide a comprehensive foundation for understanding the business of subscriber-funded streaming video and its implications for the role of these services in culture. Drawing on Lotz’s two decades of research, it highlights the similarities and differences among streaming video services (Netflix; Amazon) and video distribution technologies (broadcast; satellite; internet). Making a number of provocative and thought-provoking arguments, the book first reveals how the reliance on subscriber payment and video on demand produces different norms and strategies compared to previous video businesses. It then investigates Netflix and how its particular blend of characteristics distinguishes it from other subscriber-funded video on demand services. The author expertly shows that, by understanding the underlying economic and technological dynamics of these services (and their differences), it is possible to better assess the actions taken by the companies and what the future of video may encompass. The book is a must-read for students and scholars of Media and Communications Studies, as well as those wishing to learn more about Netflix and streaming video services.

The Business of Subscriber-Funded Video on Demand

Netflix and Streaming Video

How the internet disrupted the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries and what this tells us about surviving technological disruption. Much of what we think we know about how the internet "disrupted" media industries is wrong. Piracy did not wreck the recording industry, Netflix isn't killing Hollywood movies, and information does not want to be free. In Media Disrupted, Amanda Lotz looks at what really happened when the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries were the ground zero of digital disruption. It's not that digital technologies introduced "new media," Lotz explains; rather, they offered existing media new tools for reaching people. For example, the MP3 unbundled recorded music; as the internet enabled new ways for people to experience and pay for music, the primary source of revenue for the recorded music industry shifted from selling music to licensing it. Cable television providers, written off as predigital dinosaurs, became the dominant internet service providers. News organizations struggled to remake businesses in the face of steep declines in advertiser spending, while the film industry split its business among movies that compelled people to go to theaters and others that are better suited for streaming. Lotz looks in detail at how and why internet distribution disrupted each industry. The stories of business transformation she tells offer lessons for surviving and even thriving in the face of epoch-making technological change.

Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars

Media Disrupted

Aswin Punathambekar

Daniel Herbert

The study of media industries has become a thriving subfield of media studies. It already comprises a diverse intellectual history, a range of fascinating questions and topics, and many theoretical and methodological frameworks. Media Industry Studies provides the roadmap to this vibrant area of study. Blending a comprehensive overview of foundational literature with an examination of the varied scales and sites media industry studies have considered, the book explores connections among research questions, topics, and methodologies. It includes examples from many media industries – film, television, journalism, music, games – and incorporates emerging scholarship considering the industrial contexts of social and internet-distributed media. Offering an account of the intellectual traditions and approaches that have defined the subfield to date, Media Industry Studies is an indispensable resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars.

Media Industry Studies

The emergence of "male-centered serials" such as The Shield, Rescue Me, and Sons Of Anarchy and the challenges these characters face in negotiating modern masculinities. From the meth-dealing but devoted family man Walter White of AMC’s Breaking Bad, to the part-time basketball coach, part-time gigolo Ray Drecker of HBO’s Hung, depictions of male characters perplexed by societal expectations of men and anxious about changing American masculinity have become standard across the television landscape. Engaging with a wide variety of shows, including The League, Dexter, and Nip/Tuck, among many others, Amanda D. Lotz identifies the gradual incorporation of second-wave feminism into prevailing gender norms as the catalyst for the contested masculinities on display in contemporary cable dramas. Examining the emergence of “male-centered serials” such as The Shield, Rescue Me, and Sons of Anarchy and the challenges these characters face in negotiating modern masculinities, Lotz analyzes how these shows combine feminist approaches to fatherhood and marriage with more traditional constructions of masculine identity that emphasize men’s role as providers. She explores the dynamics of close male friendships both in groups, as in Entourage and Men of a Certain Age, wherein characters test the boundaries between the homosocial and homosexual in their relationships with each other, and in the dyadic intimacy depicted in Boston Legal and Scrubs. Cable Guys provides a much needed look into the under-considered subject of how constructions of masculinity continue to evolve on television.

Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century

Cable Guys

Jonathan Gray

Television Studies provides an overview of the origins, central ideas, and intellectual traditions of this exciting field. What have been the primary areas of inquiry in television studies? Why and how did these areas develop? How have scholars studied them? How are they developing? What have been the discipline’s key works? This book answers these questions by tracing the history of television studies right up to the digital present, surveying emerging scholarship, and addressing new questions about the field’s relationship with the digital. The second edition includes an examination of how internet-distributed services such as Netflix have adjusted the stories, industrial practices, and audience experience of television. For all those wondering how to study television, or even why to study television, this new edition of Television Studies will provide a clear and engaging overview of key topics. The book works as a stand-alone introduction and, by placing key works in a broader context, can also provide an excellent basis for an entire course.

Television Studies

The collision of new technologies, changing business strategies, and innovative storytelling that produced a new golden age of TV. Cable television channels were once the backwater of American television, programming recent and not-so-recent movies and reruns of network shows. Then came La Femme Nikita, OZ, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead. And then, just as “prestige cable” became a category, came House of Cards and Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, and other Internet distributors of television content. What happened? In We Now Disrupt This Broadcast, Amanda Lotz chronicles the collision of new technologies, changing business strategies, and innovative storytelling that produced an era termed “peak TV.” Lotz explains that changes in the business of television expanded the creative possibilities of television. She describes the costly infrastructure rebuilding undertaken by cable service providers in the late 1990s and the struggles of cable channels to produce (and pay for) original, scripted programming in order to stand out from the competition. These new programs defied television conventions and made viewers adjust their expectations of what television could be. Le Femme Nikita offered cable's first antihero, Mad Men cost more than advertisers paid, The Walking Dead became the first mass cable hit, and Game of Thrones was the first global television blockbuster. Internet streaming didn't kill cable, Lotz tells us. Rather, it revolutionized how we watch television. Cable and network television quickly established their own streaming portals. Meanwhile, cable service providers had quietly transformed themselves into Internet providers, able to profit from both prestige cable and streaming services. Far from being dead, television continues to transform.

How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All

We Now Disrupt This Broadcast

Timothy Havens

An engaging and accessible introduction to the field, Understanding Media Industries helps students develop deeper and more critical knowledge of industries. This book provides students with a thorough discussion of how media industries work, why they work as they do, and the broader theoretical and practical implications of media industry structure and function. The authors' unique Industrialization of Culture Framework organizes the book and helps students to consider media industries in different nations and historical periods.

Understanding Media Industries

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2008 After occupying a central space in American living rooms for the past fifty years, is television, as we’ve known it, dead? The capabilities and features of that simple box have been so radically redefined that it’s now nearly unrecognizable. Today, viewers with digital video recorders such as TiVo may elect to circumvent scheduling constraints and commercials. Owners of iPods and other portable viewing devices are able to download the latest episodes of their favorite shows and watch them whenever and wherever they want. Still others rent television shows on DVD, or download them through legal and illegal sources online. But these changes have not been hastening the demise of the medium. They are revolutionizing it. The Television Will Be Revolutionized examines television at the turn of the twenty-first century —:what Amanda D. Lotz terms the “post-network” era. Television, both as a technology and a tool for cultural storytelling, remains as important today as ever, but it has changed in fundamental ways as the result of technological innovations, proliferating cable channels targeting ever more specific niche audiences, and evolving forms of advertising such as product placement and branded entertainment. Many of the conventional practices and even the industry’s basic business model are proving unworkable in this new context, resulting in a crisis in norms and practices. Through interviews with those working in the industry, attendance of various industry summits and meetings, surveys of trade publications, and consideration of an extensive array of popular television shows, Lotz takes us behind the screen to explore what is changing, why it’s changing, and why these changes matter.

Amanda D. Lotz

About

Books

Join the club