The end of television?

Foto: John Marquis/Flickr

What is happening with television? There is currently widespread debate about the future of television and the impact of technological and market changes. Many predict that television will be dead in a few years time. 

Free download (pdf):

The End of Television—Again! How TV Is Still Influenced by Cultural Factors in the Age of Digital Intermediaries

Gunn Enli, Trine Syvertsen

This article discusses the impact of convergence and digital intermediaries for television as a medium, industry and political and cultural institution.

The article argues that there are many different answers to what is happening to television. The local and national situation is still important. It is also important how existing television broadcasters respond and the strategies they design.

The article explores the current situation for Norwegian television and point to four contexts that each plays a part in constraining and enabling today's television operators: the European context, the public service context, the welfare state context and the media ecosystem context.

Open access thematic issue

(Not Yet) the End of Television

Media and Communication, 4(3) 2016

A complete journal issue discussing the future of television, all articles can be freely downloaded.

The articles discusses the future of television from different perspectives and based on different cultural and national contexts: Latin-America, Australia and New Zealand, Europe and the US. 

Academic Editor: Milly Buonanno writes in the introduction:

In November 2014 Netflix CEO pronounced that television will be dead by 2030. Hardly a new prediction, in actual fact, as statements of the soon-to-come collapse of broadcast TV have resounded in media pundits declarations since mid–Eighties. … Media and cultural studies’ fascination with technological transformations in the digital age, and the ensuing establishment of the (hierarchized) distinction between new media and old media, has in fact turned the obsolescence of television as we knew it into a key issue in early 2000s years, thus making ‘the end of TV” a familiar trope in scholarly discourses (Katz & Scannel, 2009).