Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In her Reading & Comprehension passage, my 8 yo daughter was horrified to learn that there were no TV’s in India around 50 years back. And that we got to 2 TV channels only around 30 years back, and even then only in the metros first. She didn’t believe me when I added that TV broadcast were not 24 x 7, that they were only available in a certain time window: As someone born in the age of cable and who now lives on Internet based TV (Netflix etc) only ever since we cut off cable, these are alien concepts for her: Then again, the move to Internet TV means kids these days are not guilty of being like this in front of the TV, something our generation was very guilty of: Watching Internet TV is not “passive entertainment”; they actively search for what they like and watch it. As one comedy serial put it, the definition of Hell used to be that if you went to the bathroom, you missed it for good; if you missed an episode, it wouldn’t come again for years. Not ...

As kids, I remember how we waited for the Sunday morning cartoon and the Sunday evening movie: it was the only time of the week when either category of item came! If you missed it, it was gone forever. With the advent of cable TV, those issues went away and we got used to the age of 24x7 shows of all categories and of course, repeat’s and re-runs. If you missed it, you could always watch the repeat later. Then came the Internet; and one could find many TV shows on YouTube. With that ended the tyranny of the TV schedule: you could watch a show when you wanted to. And with the smartphone, you could watch it where you want it. My 4 year old discovered the “when” side of things recently when she found episodes of Mister Maker on YouTube even after the show had stopped coming on TV. Sooner or later, she’ll be asking for some other TV serial and we’ll tell her not everything is available on YouTube. I wonder how long it will be before she learns about streaming video content ...

In a world where the TV screen isn’t the only screen in town, where the tablet, the smartphone and even the good old PC/laptop screen vie for attention, you could expect the TV show industry to do something to hold on to their viewers. So what did they do? Well, they’ve accepted the reality that the “two-screen experience” (or even more screens) is here to stay. TV shows in the West even ask you to “log on to the show's website and participate in real-time chats and interactive razzle-dazzle”, as this article by Thomas Doherty says. The term for this “decorative wraparound material”? Paratext. The longer definition? “The paratext is the satellite debris orbiting and radiating out from the core text: what the post-­telecast chatfest Talking Dead is to The Walking Dead, what Madonna-vs.-Lady Gaga mashups are to the original music videos, what Wolverine action figures are to the X-Men franchise—what all the buzzing swarms of trailers, teasers, bloopers, tweets, swag, webisode...

When a new season of that TV serial you like comes just once a week, isn’t it frustrating? You want to see the next episode, but it’s 7 days away, and by then, you lose the flow… That is why Netflix, the company that streams movies to your device, tried an interesting experiment: they released the entire season of its original programming serial all at once. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, pointed out that the same thing happened 200 years back, with, hold your breath, books! Back then, fiction was written for magazines, one chapter per issue. But once it became economically viable to print books, you got all the chapters at one shot! Hastings feels TV content is headed the same way: the “serialized release model” may be nearing its end. Another advantage Hastings sees with the new model is, again, what happened with books: variable sized chunks. After all, chapters in a book are of variable size, so why can’t episode lengths in the new system, “depending on the natural rhy...