“This Title Is No Longer Available”: Preserving Television in the Streaming Age

Jp Kelly

doi:10.1177/1527476420928480

Abstract

This article examines several recent changes in the technological composition and market logics of television. It considers what these developments might mean for the medium’s preservational qualities and for our understanding of television history more broadly. By focusing on the growth of streaming, the increasing “datafication” of the TV industry, and the prominence of interfaces and catalogs, I demonstrate that the ephemerality of television is both intensifying and diversifying, creating a number of methodological challenges in the process. These developments are placed in a longer history of critical debates around the preservation of digital media and the prospect of a digital dark age so that we might learn lessons from the past that can be applied to the preservational challenges of the present. The article concludes by proposing a number of practical steps so that future television historians might be better equipped to avoid a “scholarly dark age.”

Highlights

This article examines several recent changes in the technological composition and market logics of television
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The sequence concluded with the sudden appearance of a “Demogorgan” leaping toward the viewer at which point the interface reverted back to its original state

Summary

Introduction

This article examines several recent changes in the technological composition and market logics of television. I argue that ephemerality is confined to television’s more fleeting and marginal texts, but that it permeates the medium in a range of different ways, all of which will have significant implications for media historians, for how we might preserve these increasingly complex and diverse forms of contemporary television, and for how we might access and study them in the future.

Results

Conclusion