Streaming Series Transforming Television and its Cultural Practices

How do streaming platforms like Netflix change television, and what can the paratexts of television and streaming series tell us about the ongoing transformation of television as both a medium and a cultural practice? This book offers a key to a sophisticated analysis of television’s economic and institutional diversification in the contemporary platform ecology.

Drawing attention to the commercial, dispositive and textual framing of audiovisual series in the age of pay-tv, DVD boxsets and video-on-demand, Jana Zündel contributes to a television theory that is conceived laterally and informed textually. The analysis combines an attention to surfaces with a keen understanding of its changing infrastructures. It reveals the connections between the textual organization of a series episode and the economic and wider disposition of the different kinds of television. The book argues that television is evolving into a hybrid medium and offers a new conceptual framework to account for this transformation.

Tracking the differentiation and pluralization of television as a medium and a reception practice by looking at TV and web series and how they are framed on platforms and through paratexts, this book allows for insights into an overarching transformation in media culture, which television has already helped to shape. It will be of interest to researchers in media and cultural studies in general, and television studies, studies in audiovisual series, digital media culture, interface studies and platform studies in particular.