Netflix and the Re-invention of Television

by Mareike Jenner

Overview

This book deals with the ways Netflix has influenced the contemporary television landscape and built the infrastructures of streaming. It focusses on 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. This Second Edition particularly highlights the role Netflix plays in the so-called streaming wars and incorporates recent research in television studies. It also re-evaluates the companies’ incorporation of issues of diversity in its focus on middlebrow television. The book also includes a new chapter on the transnational streaming franchise, networks of texts developed internal to platforms to build infrastructures of transnational streaming.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031392368
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	09/11/2023
Edition description:	2nd ed. 2023
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Mareike Jenner is a Senior Lecturer in Media. Her work focusses on streaming and contemporary television as well as issues of middlebrow culture. Her work includes the edited collection Binge-Watching and Contemporary Television Studies (2021) as well as the monograph American Detective Drama (Palgrave, 2015) and the forthcoming Recycling Middlebrow Culture: Action TV Re-Boots (2024).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to the Second Edition
2. Introduction to the First Edition

Part I: Controlling Television: TV’s Ancillary Technologies
3. Introduction: Controlling Television: TV’s Ancillary Technologies
4. Managing Choice, Negotiating Power: Remote Controls
5. New Regimes of Control: Television as Convergence Medium
6. Digital Television and Control
Part II: Binge-Watching and the Re-invention of Control
7. Introduction: Binge-Watching and the Re-invention of Control
8. Scheduling the Binge
9. ‘Quality’ and the Netflix Brand
10. Diversity, Netflix and the Binge
Part III: Netflix and the Re-invention of Transnational Broadcasting
11. Introduction: Netflix and the Re-invention of Transnational Broadcasting
12. The Transnational and Domestication: Netflix Texts
13. Transnationalising the Franchise
14. The Netflix Audience

15. Conclusion: The More Things Change…

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Proceeding from a rich prehistory organised around a narrative of the shifting power of the viewer to control their experience, and carefully considering the transnational contexts involved, Mareike Jenner's account of Netflix is the most thoughtful and comprehensive analysis I have seen so far.” (Graeme Turner, University of Queensland, Australia)

“Ranging across the history of TV’s ancillary technologies of control, Mareike Jenner smartly contextualises views of Netflix as an industry disruptor. Netflix and the Re-invention of Television also contests corporate discourses, exploring the service’s links to linear TV. Complicating our understandings of binge-watching, algorithmic culture, and transnational television, this is an invaluable guide to the emergent era of “TV IV” and a brilliant contribution to the ever-growing, on-demand catalogue of key TV studies’ texts.” (Matt Hills, University of Huddersfield, UK)

Editorial Reviews

Netflix & the Re-invention of Television provides lucid claims relevant to those who study television in a transnational, post-digital era. It also provides valuable syntheses of history and theory relevant to television’s evolution and intersection with larger political, economic and cultural discourses, particularly in regard to the role that US-based media conglomerates play in non-US contexts. … This is merely a starting point, however, towards considering the myriad ways in which television is being continually shaped, understood and re-invented.” (James M Elrod, Critical Studies in Television, Vol. 15 (1), 2020)

From the Publisher