core response 05_jacqueline maldonado

Lotz does well to recount the evolving technologies of television in her chapter, moreover their relationships and how that impacted eventual growth and change. I found it interesting to consider the finite ending of 2007 as the mobile television combating the quality programming on it, and the very iPod Lotz refers to from an airplane passenger aside her as she writes (78). Mobility and technologies have become second nature; I recount the start of the semester where I was itching for a monitor just to have another screen as a specified viewing-screen distinct from my working-screen of my laptop, because a laptop is unfit to watch in the context of home for some distorted reason but is totally fine outside of the house. Meanwhile buying movies and shows from iTunes for the screen of an iPod Classic was always meant to be a travel plan, whether that travel was a short car ride to the grocery store or a plane ride to the grandparents. Different screens meant different things which we are well versed in applying to modern programming (save for Quibi, rip).

So how do we get from 2007 to 2023? The streaming wars is clearly at the forefront of minds with mergers galore, but what sets this apart other than adding to sources on our ever moving screen experiences? Even the change in ‘the box’ as what once was a cable box can now be reduced to an actual stick you just pop in the TV input and, again, select from sources galore. While we arguably remain in the post network era (unless she said something different in We Now Disrupt This Broadcast I cannot remember that is on me) but refined, maybe all that’s left is to somehow jam television straight into our brains to maximize mobility.

I hate that I actually like that idea. But it isn’t so much about the spaces themselves that Lotz, or this week entirely, has to leave us reevaluating: it’s the ways in which this constant crave for new content can be satiated next. As Lotz speaks to the HD television in the home in the early 2000’s, emphasis is given to the “required shifts in production techniques and technologies” done to provide for them (72). As viewers begin to take a larger role in determining the space television will occupy it is the industry itself that has to react and provide, and now just as ever, fight to get ahead of the curve.