THE TV GUIDE

This research paper aims to outline and allude to possible futures of Western TV by an analysis of the seismic shifts that have affected the medium over the past decades. It is readily apparent that the TV of the past is not the same TV we, in 2015, interact with now.

 

By looking at the alterations to content, distribution and technology that have emerged since the reign of the ‘network era’; this report acts as a rebuttal to the erroneous claims,(Lotz 2014, pg 2), that TV is dead. We explore our contention that it is traditional broadcast television that is dying. TV, defined separate to broadcast, is at the beginnings of a new permutation, unbounded by its traditional constraints, whose form is still emerging, malleable and being determined.

 

At the first, we must acknowledge the difficulty of conducting research on Australian practices. The authors of this paper are graduating Media students of RMIT University, based in Melbourne, a major Australian city. Research on the national characteristics of the medium in Australia are sparse, and are problematicised by the British and U.S lineage our markets are modelled on, (Curthoys 1991; Lotz 2014; Turner & Tay 2009). TV in Australia owes a lot of its construction to its older ‘parents’, however as noted in Turner, (2009, pg 3), to ignore the “diversity, complexity and variance of national characteristics” in preference to a “generalised anglophone market” is a trap that has been consistently fallen into in past TV scholarship. Turner makes the point that the question of ‘what is television?’, very much depends on where you are. The scope and timeframe of our research restricted us from delving completely into the specifically Australian industry shifts. However we seek to provide a measure of ‘fill’ in the scholarship void by framing our investigations on the current state of TV from an Australian perspective; for implications to an increasingly globalised, Western TV future.