Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium

Our experience now makes hard distinctions between different media less logical. Film and television can no longer be understood so easily in terms of space (theater/home) or materiality (film/video) or aesthetics (big screen, cinematic/small screen, televisual). Both are experienced in various spaces and on screens of various dimensions. Industrially, media are not very well split into film and television companies. Television is a more profitable side of the business for the Hollywood studios than cinema, and filmed entertainment accounts for production and distribution of both media. Since the triumph of the VCR as a consumer technology, Hollywood has earned most of its income from what the studios call home entertainment—as of the early 2000s, films and television programs distributed on DVD and other forms of digital video such as VOD and downloads. These nontheatrical sources of revenue, by all accounts, provide the media conglomerates with several times more income than the multiplexes.4 As Caetlin Benson-Allott puts it in her study of video spectatorship, “movies are now primarily videos for both their makers and their viewers.”⁵ Furthermore, increasingly the profit centers of the media conglomerates are cable television providers and channels, which deliver a wide variety of “filmed” entertainment. When Comcast completed its acquisition of a majority share of NBC Universal in 2011, it signaled the rise of the cable and Internet provider to the top spot in the industry hierarchy in terms of revenue and corporate power, a position built on its ability to exploit the most lucrative forms of video content. Notably, its most valuable assets would not be its film and TV production studio or television network but its cable systems and channels providing video of many kinds to its customers, and the Internet connections it provides along with cable service, which also are channels for video. According to 2012 figures, Netflix and BitTorrent together accounted for around 40 percent of traffic over wireline broadband networks.⁶

Before the digital age, cinema and television had more distinct and opposed identities. In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan called one cool and the other hot. Jane Feuer wrote in 1983 that “the differences between television and … cinema, are too great not to see television as a qualitatively different medium.”7 But in 2000, Anne Friedberg wrote that “the differences between the media of movies, television, and computers are rapidly diminishing.”⁸ In the time between these statements, many changes had occurred on all of the levels at which we can approach media: texts, industries, audiences, and technologies. Digital platforms and the practices associated with them were changing the relationality of movies and TV in particular as distinct and opposed media. In recent years one hears many more statements like Friedberg’s than Feuer’s. Digital video is the format for movies, television shows, web videos, and whatever audiovisual texts fail to match these categories. It is, more and more, the moving image.

For decades, media experts and prognosticators foresaw a future of television sets connected to computer networks, as the home screen would deliver content such as news, sports results, and stock market reports as ordered up by the viewer, who might participate more in civic life electronically and vote using CATV lines. Two-way transmission was supposed to be one of the blessings soon to come along with cable TV, according to a report published by the Rand Corporation in 1971.9 The networked television could be used for home shopping and banking and to send and receive electronic mail, but in hopeful prognostications it was most often pictured as a source of useful information and edifying entertainment. Life foresaw a time not too far off from 1970 when “the computer, the cable TV data bank and the [video] cassette reach their full conjunction.”¹⁰ The same 1970 Saturday Review column on the “The Video Revolution” singing the virtues of home video also predicted that the future home TV set would have “total access to such of the world’s wisdom and pleasure as eyes and ears may receive,” including “a storehouse of all the published materials in existence.”¹¹ This would augur the end of print newspapers and magazines, which Life imagined would appear instead on television screens.

Computer networks did deliver data in the form of text and sometimes image to the home in the late 1970s and early 1980s using telephone and cable lines and home TV sets in France, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and several other countries. (Sometimes they also used computer monitors or special display sets.) Many of the American companies involved in testing and offering this service were in the cable TV industry, including Warner-Amex, Cox, and Times Mirror. One of the names for this interactive technology of “pushbutton fantasies,” videotex, speaks to the identity of video as an alternative use of a CRT display for more interactive or productive or socially beneficial purposes than TV, but also to the importance of the CRT display as a commonplace object bridging experiences of television and computers.12 An illustration of videotex on the cover of a 1983 issue of the personal computer magazine Byte represents an idealized future convergence of technologies that resemble already familiar artifacts and experiences. A modified model 500 Bell System telephone with a screen on its face produces a magical shaft of light, while television rabbit ears protrude from behind and a QWERTY keyboard peripheral looks as much like a calculator as a typewriter. The videotex display offers a menu of options: news, banking, shopping, electronic mail, games, and computing—but no watching television (fig 4.1).

In the 1990s, the Googlesque dream of offering all of the world’s published materials to users in their homes seemingly began to be realized in earnest. The Internet, a more open network than the services to be offered through videotex, expanded from institutional use in government and higher education and became available to the consumer market just as it also gave birth to the World Wide Web. The Internet promised to integrate television—or at least video—into its virtually infinite potential range of offerings, though not until the bandwidth became robust enough to allow for transmission of data-heavy moving-image files. At the same time, the idea of connecting the television set to the Internet promised to further open up TV to a new range of content and to the interactivity of digital media. Desktop video editing, another of video’s revolutions, promised to make every enthusiastic camcorder user with a Mac computer into a sophisticated media producer with the means to share polished audiovisual content online. Whether digital video was standard or high definition, the differences between digital and its analog predecessor in terms of image quality promised to overcome some of the perceived deficiencies of videotape, widely regarded as an aesthetically degraded and flawed format.13

The cultural implications of televisions being networked and of networks conveying moving pictures were in some ways consistent with the history of rhetoric about video. The promise of computerized video had long been seen as democratizing and liberating, echoing earlier constructions of video as a force for the good of civil society. Many notions familiar from blue skies cable discourses and alternative video art reappeared in the 1990s as if no one had imagined them before. Online video, Mitchell Kapor argued in a futurecasting Wired magazine essay from 1993, would open up the “distribution bottleneck” of TV networks, Hollywood studios, and video stores, granting more access and power to ordinary people. The “unencumbered distribution of video programming of all kinds,” he proposed, would serve the public interest better than established commercial institutions, making video at last into “a people’s medium.”¹⁴ (When YouTube debuted more than a decade later, it was understood according to the same tropes of democratization and participation.) As so often in the twentieth century, during the 1990s, video was understood in terms of its potential to overcome perceived problems of broadcasting-dominant mass media.

By becoming more two way, PC/TV would further depart from its identification as a passive medium in which the audience submits to the control of broadcasters. Two-way television would be not merely active but interactive, an idea from the culture and rhetoric of personal computers going back to the early 1970s that attached to any technology being married to computers. The interactive user was giving and taking input/output in real time to and from an electronic machine, feeling the full power of the computer entirely under his or her control.15 The ideological implications of interactivity as a key buzzword of the PC culture of the 1980s and 1990s was to empower ordinary individual users as masters rather than servants of technology, and as newly liberated from the one-way flow of data characteristic of mass-mediated communication. Thus accounts of PC/TV combinations would contrast the image of television’s spectators as a mass audience of couch potatoes with the more active individual engagement of computer users.¹⁶ This transformation might also diminish the strength of television’s precomputer identity as the familiar set was set on a path of collision with other media and technologies not only in terms of their materiality but also in popular imagination. A report in Fortune presented this as a fundamental shift in TV’s status, parallel to the upheaval in broadcasting when television was first introduced. “The boob tube we were weaned on is being jacked into the PC and reinvented as a two-way device.”¹⁷

Convergence was another buzzword of this time, in both tech circles and also in the popular press, a phenomenon hyped by manufacturers of computer wares and of consumer electronics such as television sets and components, as well as executives in the media and telecommunications industries. Convergence talk took on connotations of techno-utopianism even as it was often acknowledged to be corporate PR razzle-dazzle. In the not-too-distant future, fulfilling many predictions promised during the 1990s, everyday life would be transformed for the better by technological convergence. All of these various industries were to melt into one, the better to serve customers an endless stream of instantaneous and virtually limitless information and entertainment. The key individual elements to converge—the personal computer, television set, and telephone—were to come together in a new form of convenient communication that would be at once interactive and instantaneous. Wired portrayed a future in which “a seamless high-speed network” would transmit “voice, data, and video services to everyone.”18 Some of the imagined uses of this convergent technological bundle would be voice and text data transmission, but most typically the future was represented as multimedia rather than merely reproducing existing single-media uses. Many of the most bold and breathless predictions for the convergent future described video applications of the TV-computer marriage, particularly two-way videoconferencing in business settings and interactive television in the home.

Some accounts of video under convergence proposed literal ways of mapping the experience of the World Wide Web onto TV programming as a path to transforming video into an interactive medium. For instance, according to some imaginings, an image on the TV screen would be hyperlinked so the viewer might click it for more information, such as the identity and credits of a familiar-seeming actor or advertising tying in with the program.19 This innovation remains largely beyond everyday experience, but some forms of literal TV–Internet convergence were actually realized during the mid-1990s. Beginning in 1996, WebTV, a set-top box paired with a subscription, provided Internet service for the home TV as an alternative to a PC and modem. This device would use the TV set as an Internet terminal and was pitched at consumers who wanted to surf the web and send and receive e-mail but were uncomfortable with computers.²⁰ At the same time, media companies such as TV networks also began to integrate the Internet into marketing and promotion of their content, launching companion websites offering program information and encouraging the television audience to visit them.²¹ In all of these examples, the degree of interactivity of these products and uses was seen as merely a prelude to a future in which video itself could be sent and received over the web, gushing through fiber-optic computer network cables. In this kind of use, video sheds its earlier associations with television and magnetic recording, and becomes a constantly flowing stream of data across global info networks.

An early instance of this deeper integration of video into the web was Homicide: Second Shift, which in 1997 was spun off of the NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Streets and billed as “NBC’s Premiere Online Series.” The two shared a setting and situation, but the web series had its own cast of detectives portrayed in a multimedia format combining text, audio and video, still images, and animation. During episodes in 1998 and 1999, the web and broadcast series did a number of double crossovers, with cast members and storylines integrating into both web and TV installments.22 An NBC director of interactive programming hyped one such event as “an actual convergence of entertainment media” rather than a tie-in or promotion.²³ This was received as something of a publicity stunt, but it anticipated later uses of online video as an adjunct to television broadcasts and an extension of television narrative into the new media space of the web.

Most uses of the Internet by broadcast networks in this period were still straightforwardly promotional, aimed at drawing the young, active, hip audiences feared to be abandoning TV for the Internet back to the set. In the mid-2000s, television shows themselves followed promotions and spin-offs online and at the same time, webisodes and other extensions of TV narrative online proliferated. These extensions have always had a promotional function, as the Hollywood studios claimed in 2007 and 2008 during a labor dispute over digital media residuals, but they also serve to diminish the centrality of the television broadcast as a text and to expand web video’s presence and cultural force. The proliferation of video streaming online might serve as a complement to TV received over the air or by cable or satellite. The networks offer streaming episodes to protect against piracy, to hawk their broadcast product, and to serve advertising online.24 One effect is to diminish distinctions between broadcast, cable, VOD, streaming, and downloaded content, particularly among consumers growing up in an environment of convergent media.

Over time, video distributed on the Internet has also become an alternative to TV accessed through its more traditional channels, producing a sense of difference between old and new TV technology and modes of experience that go along with them. This online video distribution includes YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes, which might be accessed through web-connected TV peripheral devices such as Apple TV, Roku, and video game consoles. Literally it might mean coming together, but practically speaking convergence has also meant substitution of video for television, as well as television’s inclusion within the wider set of practices, texts, and technologies called video. Online video has weakened television’s distinctiveness as a medium. It has made possible watching television shows without “watching TV,” whatever that might mean. And it has provided a crucial context for the cultural legitimation of some kinds of television programming at once associated with new digital technologies of agency (DVDs, DVRs, the Internet) and perceived to be a departure from the older, less legitimate conception of television from the network era.²⁵ In delivering on the promise of convergence, though not on all of its more utopian fantasies, networked video has been the occasion for reconsidering many cultural categories.

Digital convergence has particularly intensified the ambiguity in defining television and cinema in relation to one another, and to video. No longer so easily distinguishable technologically, television and cinema retain many of the cultural associations and practices that contribute to their identity. But these are also threatened by emergent cultural practices and protocols of use associated with new technologies and with Millennial media consumers less invested than older generations in traditional conceptions of media. One way of describing Millennials’ uses of media is platform agnostic consumption, a term that gained wider currency from a 2007 David Denby trend piece in the New Yorker on the changing status of cinema in the digital age. Denby claimed that young people, according to Hollywood “home-entertainment specialists,” tend not to distinguish between movies seen in a theater, on a TV or computer screen, or on a mobile device like a video iPod (video-enabled phones were just beyond the horizon in 2007, and tablets were a few years off). A platform agnostic will watch movies on the Internet, on television, on “screens of all sizes,” without distinguishing these experiences in terms of value and authenticity. Being able to access content on demand is most important to them.26 An unstated assumption of this widespread conception of the audience might also be that it is medium agnostic: it does not insist on cinema or television being defined by film or broadcast transmission, respectively. At the time of Denby’s writing, film was still projected mainly using film. But that too has changed, making video all the more central to moving-image media.

Denby’s stance was that the younger generation’s lack of investment in cinema as film projected in a theater posed a threat to movie culture, but Millennial agnosticism might just as well be seen as a boon to a video culture that includes movies. Feature films and TV shows, along with many other forms of video, have moved freely among platforms and technologies and formats in the digital age, coming to us on theater screens, in browser windows, on DVD and Blu-ray, through cable or satellite VOD, streaming services, iTunes or BitTorrent downloads, and numerous other sources. Cinema’s putative loss has been video’s gain.

Cinephiles might also decry the influence of textual forms associated with video, such as “MTV” or “small-screen” aesthetics. Such comparisons are unlikely to be generous toward video, and the agenda is generally the defense of film and the culture surrounding it. As taste is often constructed around distaste, cinema has been defined by its negation of television as an artistic medium and social institution.

These anxieties have often been expressed in a genre of popular early twenty-first-century film writing that one critic dubbed the “Death of Movies” think piece.28 (Sontag’s “Decay of Cinema” essay was a founding instance of this genre.) Conventions of such criticism include faulting contemporary Hollywood’s excessive profit seeking and overreliance on digital technologies, questioning the younger generation’s cultural habits and preferences, expressing nostalgia for an earlier period of cinephilia when the movies were better and more central to elite culture, and distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable modes of movie experience. Many such think pieces are premised on a distinction between film and television in terms of cultural value. TV can play the bad guy in this story (draining film’s audience, substituting inferior technology and aesthetics) or less often the good guy (offering a positive alternative to mainstream movies in the form of quality TV dramas and comedies).

One of the most famous of these think pieces was Godfrey Cheshire’s “Death of Film/Decay of Cinema,” published in the New York Press in 1999.²⁹ This essay has been noted for its prescience in predicting many far-off events at the time of its publication, particularly the shift from photochemical film to digital video in both production and exhibition. The replacement of 35mm film with digital video projection has been widely recognized as a turning point in the history of the movies. Unlike sound, widescreen, 3D, and other technological changes in film history, however, digital projection has not been promoted very heavily as a value-added feature to attract audiences to the theater, and it has probably quite often gone unnoticed by ordinary cinemagoers. But to cinephiles, it has been an occasion for some consternation, perhaps for this very reason. The change might seem all the more insidious, to those objecting to film’s coming obsolescence, for going unnoticed. Cheshire articulated many of the pains and stresses of this transition long before digital projection became commonplace.

He correctly predicted that film exhibition would give way to video technology, and he portrayed this dramatically, describing the transition to digital as the “overthrow of film by television.” While television broadcasting, film projection, and digital cinema projection are all technologically distinct in many ways, the association of digital video with TV and its distinction from film produces a rhetorical coupling of video and TV and a break between film and digital video even when projected in a movie theater in high definition. As a consequence of the movie theater’s digital conversion, movies of the future would lack the “esthetic singularity [and] cultural centrality” they enjoyed in the twentieth century. Cheshire expressed concern over the effect of the change on the projected image, its quality and effect. The video picture, according to Cheshire, replaces film’s solidity with TV’s immediacy, denying the audience film’s characteristic “perspective and discrimination.” Movie culture would consequently face a kind of nomenclature anxiety, uncertain about whether it would still be appropriate to refer to film schools, film festivals, or film criticism. Clearly the identity and continued existence of the medium were at stake in this development. And beyond the qualities of the video image, the forms of content and experience typical of television were also feared likely to encroach onto cinema’s turf. Wired for digital video projection, the movie theater of the future would transition into a place to watch satellite or Internet telecasts of live events. “The ‘moviegoing’ experience,” he predicted, “will be completely reshaped by—and in the image of—television.” Sporting events, celebrity weddings, and rock concerts would take the place of feature films. Theaters would program episodes of TV shows like the Seinfeld finale if the box office prospects were appealing enough.

Some of Cheshire’s predictions have come to pass. Movie theaters have found some success screening live performances in high definition, such as operas from the Met in New York City, though this is hardly their main business. Whether the shift to digital projection has spelled such a drastic transformation in movies, however, seems open to discussion. The now-standard format of 2K projection, a considerably higher-resolution picture than the 1080p of HDTV, is harder for most people to distinguish from 35mm film than VHS cassettes, with their 480 lines of standard definition resolution. Still, connoisseurs of the image are quick to recognize differences in color and light, in the texture of the image, in the quality of grain and pixels, and in the potential for film to degrade, suffer scratches and other damage, and to be badly projected. Digital movies have become, in one critic’s words, “something new, or something else.”30

What they have become is high-definition digital video, replacing photochemical emulsion and a mechanical apparatus with sensors, pixels, data, servers, files, and software. But there has been a reluctance to call theatrical projection video projection. More commonly the movies’ new format is called digital cinema or just “digital.”31 This usage is an elision marking the persistence of cultural hierarchy in which films or movies are above video or television. Still, to some in the artistic community invested in cinema as film, the new format of movies is not merely a technological change but another medium entirely. In a 2012 dialog between its film critics on the subject of the “revolution” of digital movies, the New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott posed these questions: “Will digitally made and distributed moving-picture narratives diverge so radically from what we know as ‘films’ that we no longer recognize a genetic relationship? Will the new digital cinema absorb its precursor entirely, or will they continue to coexist?”³² Quentin Tarantino would likely vote against absorption, proclaiming his intention to stop directing features for theatrical release before shooting them digitally—“I hate that stuff”—for digital exhibition, or as he calls it, “television in public.”³³

Digital cinema and digital television are not typically considered together, but a comparison reveals an inversion in terms of cultural status and place in popular imagination during the era of digital convergence. The expansion of video in the digital age to include movies and television among other forms of media has been understood as a significant upgrade for TV and a threat to the very existence of cinema. Digital television has been framed in terms of democratization, expansion of access, and new opportunities for aesthetic progress such as more “complex” storytelling, or Netflix’s strategy of releasing all thirteen episodes of a TV season at once for “nonlinear” consumption.34 The new technological ensembles for television distribution and consumption have been seen as sources of liberation and legitimation. This is framed against television’s network-era history as a mass medium characterized by limited choices of “least objectionable programming.” By contrast with its earlier status, TV in the convergence era has seen significant improvement in its place on the cultural hierarchy. Movies, on the other hand, have suffered to some extent. TV and movies are both negotiating new identities, but only for movies is it often portrayed as a degradation. There have been some rumblings about the “death of television,” but this can be represented hopefully, even excitedly, breaking the control of the broadcasting institutions when web video technologies such as YouTube are seen to be “exploding TV.”³⁵ The death of cinema discourse, by contrast, conveys a much different affect. Rueful and valedictory, it conveys cinephiles’ chagrin over the decline and loss of a cherished film culture.

In some important ways, the digital age has merely continued and intensified discourses that circulated before computers and media began to converge. The ideas about television, cinema, and video from the era of videotape formed a foundation of meaning for later understandings of these categories. Conceptions of passivity and activity, of authenticity and aesthetic value, have been important throughout phases two and three. But the digital age has also introduced new meanings and ambiguities, pushing all of these categories closer to one another even as they might attempt to form new lines of distinction, and making video all the more central to cultures of the moving image.