Interrogating ‘disruption’: Global television culture between continuity and change

Abstract

In recent years in the traditional locations where the television industries meet to confer and trade a new buzzword can be heard. On trading floors and in board meetings, in keynote addresses and on expert panels, in French Riviera pavilions and Miami poolside cabanas -wherever executives meet to discuss the latest trends -conversations keep circling back to the question of 'disruption'.Travelling perhaps in the shoes of tech executives from Amazon, YouTube or Netflix, who now regularly join the ranks of television network and content studio executives in their annual soirées, talk of disruption permeates television industry discourse. A quick glance at the programme for the 2019 National Association for Television Programing Executives (NATPE) in Miami or the 2018 MIP Com International Market of Communications Programmes in Cannes echoes that fascination. One NATPE panel rationale articulates this interest in disruption with the profound changes reshaping television audience practices as they are now 'skipping commercials, time-shifting their viewing, and cutting cable'. While this is described as 'scary' for networks who depend on models of 'linear television', this same 'disruption' is also acknowledged as giving media brands 'a lot of power and the ability to evolve their thinking in creative ways' (NATPE, 2019). On the other side of the pond, a similar discussion took place at a MIPCom panel titled, 'Just How Disrupted is the Distribution Game?' that brought together executives from NBCUniversal, ITV Studios, FremantleMedia China and Red Arrow Studios International to discuss new opportunities in the multiplatform age (MIPTrends, 2018). Finally, the same discourse is just as pervasive in the media trade press coverage, where stories like the one in a recent Forbes magazine tells us that 'the future of media' involves 'disruptions ' and 'revolutions' (Alsin, 2018).This label of disruption used to describe the upheavals caused by accelerated technological innovation has become so prevalent that it seems to merit special attention not

‘Queering’ TV, one character at a time: How audiences respond to gender-diverse TV series on social media platforms

“…Yet although television has long been ‘defined by its own contradictions’ (Joyrich, 2009: 16), new forms of ‘internet-distributed television’ (Lotz, 2017) challenge further the ontology of the medium. As TV explodes into ‘various forms of multiplicity’ (Shahaf and Ferrari, 2019: 155), the ‘queer’ character of TV appears even more manifest today. In this situation, content providers are forced to change their branding strategies as a way to distinguish themselves from their competitors.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue: Contemporary Irish Television

“…The primary focus on RTÉ programming highlights and facilitates interrelated critical appraisals of how it has variously responded to its challenges as a public service broadcaster seeking to promote national inclusivity and represent diversity in an increasingly competitive Anglophone media landscape, a devoutly neoliberal political and economic environment, and a country where institutional abuses and the 2008 crash have destabilized the narrative of national cohesiveness and destiny underpinning its foundation. The focus might be questioned for perpetuating the narrowly nationalist concerns of Irish television studies (Brennan 2019); and for its concern with “legacy” media in a “disruptive” multi-platform/ portal era in television’s evolution (Shahaf and Ferrari 2019). However, the articles illustrate how, as Lotz (2018, 491) observes, “as compelling a case can be made for continuity” as “disruption” in television as “the pre-existing technologies, industrial formations, governmental policies and practices of looking also persist.”…”