Abstract
We Now Disrupt This Broadcast complements Amanda Lotz’s other recent published works, most particularly her self-proclaimed ‘treatise’ Portals (2017). While Portals offers a detailed academic conceptualisation of internet-distributed television and its emergence, We Now Disrupt This Broadcast positions itself differently, targeting a broader audience that encompasses business and media scholars, industry workers and the general interest reader (p. xiv). As such, its ‘story’ (situated between 1996 and 2016) is told through a unique structure. The book comprises 30 short chapters (between two and eight pages each), followed by over 60 pages of extensive notes. These notes indicate the academic rigour of Lotz’s research and the scholarly significance of the main body of text. Lotz’s structural innovation is a worthwhile endeavour, combining scholarly insight with a level of accessibility that is rarely achieved in academic works. With this book and Portals’ own innovative publication (released ahead of We Now Disrupt This Broadcast in order to capture its particular moment in the ever-shifting television landscape), Lotz’s evident desire to find an academic process conducive to the immediacy and impact of 21st-century media developments is commendable.
However, the unique structure Lotz deploys is not without its drawbacks. From an academic perspective, the most useful material concerns the economic intricacies of the US television industry, as it moved from ‘broadcast’ to ‘broadcast/cable’ paradigms and subsequently to the emergence of internet-distributed television alongside broadcast and cable (p. 187). The business-focused specifics offered by Lotz provide an alternative perspective on the ‘multiplatform’ era as discussed by Trisha Dunleavy (2018) and further complement the continuing work on internet-distributed television being undertaken by scholars such as Mareike Jenner (2018); the latter’s economic assessment of Netflix focuses more on the user-end than business practices. Lotz’s intricate material is presented as long discursive endnotes, with no distinction in the main text between these notes and those that contain a brief comment or single citation, making the text something of a challenge to navigate. Scholarly response to Lotz’s work is not aided by the absence of a discrete bibliography and a rather sparse index (the role of which is particularly important when continually reading across main text and endnotes). At times, Lotz’s positioning of her endnotes as optional further information also results in the most diligent readers finding information repeated multiple times. This is most apparent in the various notes that restate the attraction of cable series for actors (pp. 207, 213, 215). It would be unfortunate if the scholarly benefit of Lotz’s book is overlooked due to these practical frustrations.
Lotz’s study is firmly – although often not explicitly – situated in the specific context of US television. In many ways this is beneficial, with technological developments usually realised within the US industry in the first instance. When it comes to internet-distributed ‘portals’, the number available in the United States still far outstrips any other territory, making it the best place to look for an understanding of the multiplatform era beyond Netflix. The American paradigms that Lotz evaluates present a critical framework for future scholarship on the situations of other, less economically dominant countries. Nevertheless, there are occasions where a more international perspective would aid Lotz’s analysis. This is especially clear as Lotz commences the second part of her study, establishing 2010 as the beginning of the internet-distributed ‘revolution’ (p. 114). While accurate and insightful in the US context, this analysis ignores that video on demand portals were already familiar to viewers in the United Kingdom following BBC iPlayer’s launch at Christmas 2007. Netflix’s subscription model of course represents a groundbreaking (and even revolutionary) development, but characterising legacy television merely as responding to its innovations effaces the prior role played by networks outside the United States. On this subject, the very categorisation of ‘legacy television’ is troubling. This loaded term (Lotz also discusses ‘legacy’ companies and media industries at various points) is assumed throughout the book, but never defined. This categorisation may hold true in terms of business practices but is hard to conceptualise or justify when used to encompass all television programming from broadcast and cable platforms. The assumptions inherent to this terminology also seem to exclude any non-US practices from Lotz’s narrative.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that Lotz’s most developed and intriguing arguments are found when she casts her eye beyond US borders. This is displayed most strongly in her chapter on Game of Thrones (2011–present), which is presented as television’s first ‘global blockbuster’ (p. 141). Outlining the marketplace and textual circumstances that allowed Game of Thrones to be simulcast in 170 markets from its fifth season, Lotz deftly connects the HBO serial’s international distribution to Netflix’s own programming strategies and global aspirations (pp. 142, 144). The discussion usefully emphasises the benefits to both HBO and Netflix of internally produced programming, informing Lotz’s encouragement of further vertical integration through ‘studio portals’ (p. 250). Lotz also contemplates Netflix’s achievement of international reach by early 2016, seeming to pinpoint here its realisation as ‘something akin to the first global television network’ (p. 117). Unfortunately, this idea is not returned to when she later identifies the ‘tipping point’ of 2015 (p. 176), with the scope retracted again to the US-specific relationship between legacy and internet-distributed television. The discussion of the global blockbuster serves as a digression in Lotz’s project, and it is again left to Jenner and others to expand upon the significance of television’s increasingly global aspirations. Nevertheless, this book is a useful resource to inform subsequent academic work, as the international sequel to Lotz’s ‘story’ comes into view over the coming years.