In the last ten years, television has reinvented itself in numerous ways. The demise of the U.S. three-network system, the rise of multi-channel cable and global satellite delivery, changes in regulation policies and ownership rules, technological innovations in screen design, and the development of digital systems like TiVo have combined to transform the practice we call watching tv. If tv refers to the technologies, program forms, government policies, and practices of looking associated with the medium in its classic public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television. Exploring these changes, the essays in this collection consider the future of television in the United States and Europe and the scholarship and activism focused on it. With historical, critical, and speculative essays by some of the leading television and media scholars, Television after TV examines both commercial and public service traditions and evaluates their dual (and some say merging) fates in our global, digital culture of convergence. The essays explore a broad range of topics, including contemporary programming and advertising strategies, the use of television and the Internet among diasporic and minority populations, the innovations of new technologies like TiVo, the rise of program forms from reality tv to lifestyle programs, television’s changing role in public places and at home, the Internet’s use as a means of social activism, and television’s role in education and the arts. In dialogue with previous media theorists and historians, the contributors collectively rethink the goals of media scholarship, pointing toward new ways of accounting for television’s past, present, and future. Contributors. William Boddy, Charlotte Brunsdon, John T. Caldwell, Michael Curtin, Julie D’Acci, Anna Everett, Jostein Gripsrud, John Hartley, Anna McCarthy, David Morley, Jan Olsson, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Lisa Parks, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, William Uricchio

Focusing on the growing power of transnational media corporations in an increasingly globalized environment for distribution of television content, and on the effects of mergers and acquisitions involving local and independent television production companies, this book examines how current and recent re-structurings in ownership across the television industry reflect changing business models, how they affect creativity and diversity of television output, and to what extent they call for new approaches to regulation and policy. Based on a major study of the UK production sector as a case study, it offers a unique analysis of wider transformations in ownership affecting the television production industry worldwide and of their economic, socio-cultural and policy implications.

This collection of essays, by well known writers on the subject of writing for television, is divided into three sections, with the first one devoted to the debates on quality television. The second one focuses on literature and television. The final section examines 'Science on television', with series editors from Britain and Germany giving first-hand accounts of the scope for serious science reporting on television.

HDTV and the Transition to Digital Broadcasting bridges the gap between non-technical personnel (management and creative) and technical by giving you a working knowledge of digital television technology, a clear understanding of the challenges of HDTV and digital broadcasting, and a scope of the ramifications of HDTV in the consumer space. Topics include methodologies and issues in HD production and distribution, as well as HDTV's impact on the future of the media business. This book contains sidebars and system diagrams that illustrate examples of broadcaster implementation of HD and HD equipment. Additionally, future trends including the integration of broadcast engineering and IT, control and descriptive metadata, DTV interactivity and personalization are explored.

The essays in Rethinking Media Change center on a variety of media forms at moments of disruption and cultural transformation. The editors' introduction sketches an aesthetics of media transition—patterns of development and social dispersion that operate across eras, media forms, and cultures. The book includes case studies of such earlier media as the book, the phonograph, early cinema, and television. It also examines contemporary digital forms, exploring their promise and strangeness. A final section probes aspects of visual culture in such environments as the evolving museum, movie spectaculars, and "the virtual window." The contributors reject apocalyptic scenarios of media revolution, demonstrating instead that media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, an accretive process in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.

This book examines the development of television broadcasting in Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea. It explores the policy regimes guiding the development of television broadcasting as a powerful institution and the extent to which new forms of television have become part of each country's contemporary media mix. It analyses the interests involved in key policy decisions, the institutional dynamics promoting or inhibiting new media markets, and the relative importance in the different countries of cable, satellite, digital broadcasting, and the use of the Internet for purposes associated with television broadcasting. The nature of television regimes in each of the three countries is very different, and the contrasting situations provide great insights into how television is developing, and how it could develop further, both in East Asia and worldwide.

TV Drama in Transition reflects upon changing dramatic forms on television in the context of broad cultural shifts over the past two decades. Analyses of a wide range of series (from Heartbeat to Middlemarch and Our Friends in the North; from NYPD Blue to Twin Peaks to The X-Files) are interspersed with accounts of new technologies, viewing dispositions and the political economy of culture. This book is generally concerned as much with the condition of culture in the 1980s and 1990s, as specifically with TV drama.