This is one in a series of essays running this week and next about the state of television in 2015. The series is based on developments at the recent Television Critics Association press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., where broadcast and cable networks, along with streaming services like Netflix, presented new and existing shows to TV critics and reporters.
It is a secret only intermittently discussed that the anointed Golden Age Of Television is also very often The Golden Age Of Nobody Knowing What The Frosted Flakes Is Going On, and one of the reasons for that is that nobody even knows for sure what it means to watch television anymore.
Let’s take a quick romp through an existential crisis on which we touched previously: What even is television? (If you said “a vast wasteland,” you may be watching the television of many years ago and I’d like to borrow your time machine and take a mulligan on a certain sixth-grade dance.)
Consider a regular episode of a regular show that runs on a regular channel like HBO or CBS or SyFy. Let’s run down the number of ways a person might watch that episode. No show is going to be available in every one of these ways, of course, but there are shows where lots and lots of them are possible, and while some of them are similar, they actually all can raise slightly different challenges when you’re making, monetizing, and marketing television, not to mention measuring its audience.
[A side point: “Monetize” is a terrible word; it is only human that it should make your blood turn briefly to acid and your body tense and your teeth vibrate as if the high-pitched squeal of malfunctioning audio equipment is accompanying you everywhere you go. But it’s also a handy way to pull in the many, many ways in which people try to make money from television, which include subscriptions to cable, subscriptions to online services, money from ads, individual episode purchases, other revenue streams like merchandise and songs from musical episodes, and on and on.]
So here we go.
- Using an antenna and receiving the show over the air at the time it’s first on, which is not only still possible for many of TV’s most popular shows, but could increase in popularity for people who stop paying for cable subscriptions.
- Using a cable subscription and watching it on cable (and when I say “cable” in this list, you can assume that means “cable or satellite”) at the time it’s first on, using your television.
- Watching it on your phone, tablet or computer, using an app or a piece of hardware that lets you stream or transfer your cable TV from your physical television to other devices.
- Recording it on a DVR and watching it within a day or two.
- Recording it on a DVR and watching it months later.
- Watching a re-airing on the same network in the same week.
- Watching a re-airing on the same network weeks or months later. (These are reruns. They are much less dependably available than they were 20 years ago.)
- Watching it someday in syndication.
- Watching it on demand through your cable provider (like Comcast or Time Warner).
- Paying for an a la carte single-network service, like the HBO NOW service that recently premiered, that serves programming to a set-top box or other device without a cable subscription.
- Paying for a package of channels that can be streamed without a cable subscription, like the recently launched Sling TV.
- Using a third-party service like Hulu with a subscription to the service (which often means shows are available pretty quickly after air).
- Using a third-party service like Hulu without a subscription to the service (which sometimes means a longer delay before the episode is available).
- Using a third-party service like Hulu that separately allows side subscriptions to particular premium channels for an extra cost – Hulu has just debuted this model in a partnership with Showtime.
- Using an app or web site owned by the network that doesn’t require a cable subscription sign-in, or an embed on another site of the video the network provides. (Like watching an episode of The Daily Show on Comedy Central’s site or embedded on somebody else’s site.)
- Using an app or web site owned by the network that requires that you log in with your cable subscription.
- Purchasing the episode or the full season through a third-party seller like Amazon, Google or Apple and watching it on your computer.
- Purchasing the episode or the full season through a third-party seller and watching it on a set-top box like Apple TV or Roku.
- Purchasing the episode or the full season through a third-party seller and watching it on your phone or your tablet, either via download or streaming.
- Waiting until it’s available free on a service like Amazon Prime, Hulu or Netflix and catching up then.
- Buying a DVD set.
- Checking DVDs out of the library.
- Watching with a friend who has access through any of these methods.
- Downloading a bootleg.
- Watching a bootleg on YouTube or another similar service.
So that’s 25 that I can think of, 23 of them above-board (we’ll return in another piece to the two that aren’t). We are currently assuming you can’t stream television to a watch, and we are not counting Google Glass or consuming a show in the form of clips instead of full episodes (which is really common for, for instance, late-night and sketch shows). There are probably some I’m forgetting.