What is Television?

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

The opening of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College)

I read something a long time ago about how to draw hands. The problem with drawing hands isn’t that you don’t really know what they look like; its that you think you know exactly what they look like, and that makes it surprisingly difficult to actually see hands - that is, to look with the fresh eyes of an artist, instead of just drawing the image that’s already in your mind.

So, apparently, the best way to draw hands isn’t to just stare really carefully at your hand and then try really hard to draw a hand that looks like a hand, but instead to draw the shape around it; the negative space where the hand isn’t. Or to put it another way, you draw the space that you’re not used to thinking about when you think about hands, because either one is just the absence of the other.

Just like how the shape of the water in a glass and the shape of the glass that the water is in are really the same shape.

I still can’t draw hands, but I do think this is a useful model for trying to answer challenging questions; instead of staring hard at the question and thinking hard about what the answer might be, try to look around it and get a better idea of the shape of the question.

So...

What is television?

I don’t really know - but I’ve been increasingly and uncomfortably aware that I’ve not really known for a good few years now. I happen to work in a building called Television Centre, in the Strategic Intelligence team of a media agency; I deal with people who plan and buy TV adverting, data from the UK’s TV measurement system, and I look after specialised tools for planning TV and video advertising. So “what, exactly, is television” is the kind of question I feel that I should have a snappy answer to. Or at least, some sort of answer…

Does it really matter? Well, as long as advertisers trust “television” in a way that they don’t really trust “video” and will often pay more for what seems (to some) to be essentially the same thing, then it certainly matters at a commercial level. Advertisers money is what funds not just entertainment content but an important portion of our news reporting, our children’s education - basically, a lot of the stuff that shapes what we know (or think we know) about the world outside of our own direct, first-hand experience.1

When television’s measurement system wants to extend to include “TV-like” content, then it matters to the media/media research industry that I work in. So - on a purely personal/professional basis, it matters to me. But I think its a bigger issue.

When online video is likely to be regulated in a similar way to existing television regulation - but only for “TV-like” services, then it matters at a wider level; commercial, cultural, political - essentially, to anyone who either wants to use ‘video’ to communicate, or is going to be exposed to ‘video’ communications. Bear in mind that the Prime Minister of the UK can go on TV in a Party Political Broadcast, and there are strict rules about what they can or can’t say - which has implications for the trust that voters have in them, and how our political system in general functions. On the other hand, the same person can make a YouTube video and say whatever they want - or make a video to be distributed through online platforms (ie an 'advert') and only ever be visible to the people they decide to make it visible to; invisible to anyone else, and therefore impossible to critique, criticise or fact-check.

“TV” - and more recently “video” - is a medium that, culturally speaking, we are swimming in, and the way it works is fundamentally shifting in a way that we might not really notice until after it has changed in a way that is much more difficult to undo than to do.2 So, if there are going to be rules that affect “TV-like” video that don’t affect “non-TV-like video”, then I think those rules need to be very carefully thought out, because the unintended consequences for fundamentally changing what must be the most emotionally powerful medium humanity has ever invented just as its in the middle of a massive transition could be very significant indeed.

So, “what is TV” might seem like an esoteric question, but I do think that its an important one. Fortunately, its not a question I have to answer on a professional basis.3 Which is why I’m pouring myself a large whisky4 , enjoying the fact that my kids are in bed and my wife is out for the night, and thinking around it for a while…

Actually - the easiest way to answer a difficult question is just to find a clever person who can give you a clever answer and just rewrite it until you can pass it off as your own. The problem is, there are some very clever people in the industry who are asking other clever people this very question on a professional basis- which isn't much help to me (at least, until they start publishing their findings), and I’d quite like to “publish” my own answer before they do, before I get tempted to just rewrite their conclusions and convince myself its what I thought all along…

The other kind of 'clever person' is someone who isn't carrying all the baggage that complicates the way you think about what is actually at its heart a relatively simple question; someone who can just look at a hand and see a hand. So, I did ask my 10 year old daughter, figuring that at the very least she’d have a clearer view from outside the media industry and 40-odd years of being immersed in “television” content and culture; she said “its stuff that you watch on the television.”

On further interrogation, that turned out to include anything broadcast on TV channels (whether live, pre-recorded or streamed), or anything streamed on Netflix or Amazon (whether or not it had been broadcast on a TV station), or on YouTube (including TV programmes, clips from TV programmes, and videos made by random American YouTubers)- and if I shoot some video on my phone and then put it onto the living room television screen, then that counts as “television”.

So, that wasn’t much use…

Streams

When Wired magazine published its first UK edition in May 1995, it included a column by Douglas Adams titled “What Have We Got To Lose”.5

The central insight of the article is that revolutionary new ideas often involve spotting a thing that can be taken out, rather than thinking up something new that can be put in. He observed6 that nervous publishers, broadcasters, journalists and filmmakers were trying to understand how the internet was going to affect their chosen profession and desperately hoping that the answer translated roughly into “not very much”;

"People like the smell of books, they like popcorn, they like to see programmes at exactly the same moment as their neighbours, they like at least to have lots of articles that they've no interest in reading," etc. But it's a hard question to answer because it's based on a faulty model. It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo, and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.

In other words, its not about rivers and streams and oceans and rain and showers and baths and bottles and glasses, because all of those classifications aren’t really going to matter for very long. We shouldn't be worrying about the 'containers' of the past; its just about water.

Books, newspapers, magazines, hand-written letters, birthday cards - all have their own unique charms, but when you take out everything you can possibly take out - the feel and smell of paper and ink, the binding, the handwriting, the stuff you can stack on shelves and display to your visitors (or in the background of your Zoom calls) - and distil them to their purest form, they are all just words; streams of letters. Maybe in the future, they will be on Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp, or perhaps some new thing that hasn’t been invented yet that spots something new to take away that we always thought was fundamentally essential to the experience.7

You could say the same of the content of any medium; songs, singles, albums, radio, audiobooks, podcasts, ringtones, Spotify, Apple Music, Audible; just a stream of sounds. Films, television programmes, home movies, Twitch streams, YouTube channels, TikToks, terrestrial broadcasts, cable TV, satellite relays; all are just a stream of sounds and moving pictures. Streams of data.

Its just streams. Its all just water.

Artefacts of an obsolete medium

A few years before that Douglas Adams magazine column was published, in February 1990, a band called the KLF released “Chill Out”; a 44 minutes and 43 seconds long “ambient-style concept album” which the NME described as "a riot of running water, birdsong and electronic womb music", recorded in a single live take. The CD had a single track, with a listing on the sleeve notes8 giving titles to particular passages (eg. 6:13-8:50 is “Dream Time in Lake Jackson”.) Around that time, Jimmy Cauty was a member of both The KLF (with Bill Drummond) and The Orb (with Alex Paterson), but split with Paterson as he didn’t want The Orb to be sidelined as just a KLF side-project.

Later, in 1992, The Orb released the “Blue Room” single. The UK chart rules at the time stated that a “single” could have a total maximum playing time of 25 minutes - or 40 minutes if only one title was listed amongst the single’s tracks; anything longer was classified an album. So, The Orb recorded a 39 minutes and 57 second version of “Blue Room”, which got them the record for the longest single to ever appear on the UK Singles Chart. (Which I think it still holds.)

In 1992, chart positions mattered a lot to the music industry; the charts weren't just a reflection of sales, but also what drove sales (rather than just being an odd reflection of exactly how popular Taylor Swift is); songs in the Top 40 got onto the radio playlists, people listened to the radio and bought the songs they liked, which sent them further up the charts until they got played on television on Thursday night’s Top of the Pops9, where the people who hadn’t heard them on the radio finally heard the songs and bought the records.

Record labels could release different versions of the same single (with different remixes, B-sides etc.), and sales of both versions would count towards their chart positions. So, there were two CD releases of Blue Room; one with the unabridged 39:57 version, and another with a Blue Room (radio 7”) version running at a more radio-friendly 4:09. Despite the implications of the Blue Room (radio 7”) title, there was no 7 inch vinyl single release10; that title on the CD inlay could be considered an artefact of an obsolete medium; in a dying gasp, vinyl album sales had peaked at £147 million in 1987, but by 1992 they were down to just £24 million. 11 Vinyl had become less of a music format and more of a piece of furniture, or a kind of social signalling. (Not entirely unlike the books on my shelf that I’ve never read because I listened to the audiobook version in my car instead.)

The music industry was going through a transition at the time; overall album sales were holding steady, but the format was shifting from analogue vinyl to digital CDs. By 1993, the transition was all but complete; album sales returned to growth (perhaps because everybody had to buy the White Album again)until they hit a peak in 2001 of about £1.3 billion and started dropping again; not-so-coincidentally, the same year that the iPod was released.

I’m rambling a little here, but the point is that there is a one-track album CD by The KLF, and a one-track single CD by The Orb, and this categorical album/single distinction between them only really matters (well, mattered) from two perspectives; the perspective of the UK Chart Company who wouldn’t consider Chill Out eligible for their Singles chart, and from the perspective of the record company/record shops, who would sell them at significantly different price points (and therefore profit margins).

In other words, it mattered commercially, and it mattered to the industry's measurement system. But, price point aside, I don't think it really mattered to the people making the music, or the people listening to it. Its all just noise12 that has been converted to a digital signal13 and stored on a CD. The distinction between “single” and “album” is completely arbitrary; even more so in 2022 when most of the recorded noise that people listen to is streamed through a subscription service like Spotify or Apple Music. I'm not sure if the future of the business of making 'commercial audio' is in getting a few talented artists to spend a lot of time making a great 40-odd minute recording, or getting lots and lots of artists to make lots and lots of short bits of music, figure out which bits can make money (based on the analytics from the streaming services) and then instruct lots and lots of people to make stuff more like that.14 But I don't think thats the future of the art form of 'music'.

Incidentally, neither Chill Out nor the 40 minute version of Blue Room are available to stream today on Spotify or Apple Music; the KLF quit the music business long before streaming services existed, deleted their back catalogue, then apparently decided that wasn’t a big enough gesture and went on to 'use their money to make art' and burnt a million pounds on the island of Jura (famous for its whisky distillery, and also where George Orwell finished 1984, a novel about a dystopian future of mass surveillance through 2-way TV-like screens). The 40 minute version of Blue Room went the same way as too many singles, indie records and bonus CDs and simply didn’t make the transition to the music streaming libraries. (Somewhat ironically, I expect the best place to stream both of those pieces of music today is on YouTube.)

The point is; the CD is a medium for recorded audio, which can be classified as either singles or albums. Commercially, there’s a distinction between making CDs to sell as albums vs. making CDs to sell as singles. (There are still rules about what constitutes a single vs an album...) That distinction affects the way that music is marketed, which in turn affects the way its produced; when Mike Oldfield had the freedom to break all the rules in the studio and do whatever he wanted when he was making Tubular Bells, he still needed to factor in a break for the record to turn over to the other side.

But if you were to find someone too young to remember the electronic music of the early 1990s today and present them with a copy of the Chill Out and Blue Room CDs, I think its safe to say that they wouldn’t be able to give any reason why they should be classified differently. Its just music - or noise - on a CD. And if you can’t stream it, then what’s the point? (Its far too long for a TikTok...)

Which is the content, and which is the container?

The “video” industry is going through a similar technology-influenced transition. I think the definition of "TV" is like the definition of "albums" - not really relevant outside of the marketing and measurement arms of the industry.

Like music, whether you’re creating ‘content’ to be marketed as ‘film’ (to be watched on in a dark room on a massive screen by a paying audience), ’TV’ (to be watched on a big screen in the home) or ‘video’ (probably to be watched on a ‘mobile’ screen) has a massive influence on the art/content you’re creating and the process of how you go about creating it. It seems self-evident that nobody really wants to watch TikTok on a cinema screen - by its nature, TikTok is a personalised stream of short videos; the opposite of “cinema”, and if you’re going to commit a couple of hours to watching a film, you probably don’t really want to watch it on a tiny smartphone.

(But its all "video".)

And in the middle of it all is the TV; small and personal enough for watching YouTube to still be a fairly decent experience, and at the same time large and social enough to be a pretty good way of watching Star Wars with your family. Maybe not the best way to watch a film (depending on the size of your TV/living room), and probably not the best way to watch TikTok - but probably good enough for either. (I don't really watch TikTok, so I might be slightly off here - but I'll fall back on arguing that vertical video on a horizontal screen is a poor match if I'm wrong.)

So... Does that get us any nearer to an answer to the question of What is “television”?

Its a fuzzy word which has unfortunately become overloaded with (I think) 3 different meanings.

  1. Its a particular type of screen - something that, in the 1980s, was probably the only kind of screen in a typical household that you could watch any kind of video on. Now, we have TVs, computers, phones and tablets - and can watch iPlayer or Netflix on any of them. Those different types of screens are pretty easy to categorise though.15
  2. Its a medium; a way of transmitting “moving images and sound” (ie. “video”.) But that medium includes films, and it often includes YouTube, TikTok, home videos and Zoom calls - which you might see as part of the content of TV programmes16 but (unless you're like my daughter) you probably wouldn't otherwise call "TV". Is a film “television” before its been broadcast? I don't think so. Is it “television” if you watch it in the cinema after its been broadcast? Does a home video become “television” if/when it makes it onto an episode of You’ve Been Framed? Is a football match “television” if its broadcast? If there aren’t cameras pointing at the pitch, does that mean it isn’t television? (What if the only cameras recording it are smartphones, but something funny happens and one of the smartphone video goes viral, and ends up being part of a TV programme?
  3. “Television” is also a particular classification of video content, that has arisen out of the constraints of broadcast schedules. Which - generally - means that it’s produced to fit into a particular timeslot on a particular channel, at a particular time on a particular day. But that’s pretty much indistinguishable from a programme made for a streaming service; is The Mandalorian somehow "not television" because the millions of people watching it around the world on a Wednesday when the latest episode is released are watching it over a TCP/IP connection instead of through a cable network? Or is it "not television" because episodes might have more variation between running lengths than it might if it were made-for-broadcast?

I can only conclude that, fundamentally, “television” has become an obsolete classification for 'video content'. It was meaningful a few decades ago, certainly - but worrying about what is and isn’t television is probably no more meaningful today and into the future than the distinction between “singles” and “albums” based on how many tracks were on how many CDs. Its an artefact of a medium that is on one hand in decline (in terms of time spent viewing "broadcaster content") and on the other, part of a new, bigger world that includes video and streaming and algorithms and subscriptions and newsfeeds (because more people are spending more time watching "video"). That doesn’t mean that "TV-like content", whatever that means, is dying - far from it. But I think that trying to figure out which 'containers' from the past are the best fit for the content of the future is a pointless endeavour.

Fundamentally, “TV” isn’t really a meaningful thing, in the same way that "singles", "album tracks" and "songs" (or "albums", "playlists" and "compilations") aren't meaningfully different in an age of streaming. There’s “content that best fits with TV”- but that content might work out to be just as well suited to video platforms. And vice versa.

Why it still matters

What are fundamentally different are TV and Video businesses.

TV businesses work best when there’s content that lots of people like.
Video businesses work best when there’s lots of content that people like.
Its a subtle distinction, but an important one.

For TV, there's a scarcity of bandwidth and the number of channels that can exist, so audiences' attention is most economically valuable when it is concentrated on a limited amount of 'content'. "TV content" costs money to produce, which concentrates the industry's investment into making hits for big audiences.

If they are supported by advertising, then big audiences seeing the same adverts at the same time - something TV does well - creates a particular kind of value. If they are supported by subscriptions, then big audiences talking about the same programme creates value for the subscription (ie. people will invest time/money to see what they are missing.)

Both business models are often (but not always) based around advertising, but TV advertising is most effective/efficient when audiences are large; because while you’re paying for impacts against broad audiences, what you’re really trying to buy is advertising that lots of people see, but not too many times. The client base is generally advertisers with big target audiences who they want to get in front of.

Video advertising has a different client base, and therefore a different business model; you don’t need to spend thousands of pounds to buy video adverts; you can start with as little as you like. Perhaps most people will never have any interest in the thing you’re selling, so you want to limit the audience you’re buying. So instead of a few big audiences, you’ve got thousands of brands with thousands of target audiences they want to buy. You don’t want to hire a sales team to build relationships with them; you want to build a self-serve platform so they can say what they want, and sell to the highest bidder.

But “television” as a word to describe a type of content is just an anachronism; like talking about “taping” music or video when “tape” no longer has anything to do with it.

At the end of the day, “Television” is just whatever it is that you watch on the screen that happens to be in front of the most comfortable chair in your house. So today, that’s (still) mostly content made for a big audience, designed to attract the highest ratings, optimised for the ad spend from the biggest brand advertisers.

And perhaps in the future, the nature of those businesses will change too. Maybe the content that works best on the big screen in the living room will be created by a generative AI, tailored specifically not just for whoever happens to be in front of the screen, but for that particular combination of people. Maybe an algorithm will say that me and my kids should watch a classic 1980s film like The Terminator, but will discreetly edit out the sex scene to avoid anybody feeling uncomfortable. Perhaps it will stitch together a series of short videos that would otherwise happen to appear in any or all of our personalised TikTok feeds, like Max Headroom meets You’ve Been Framed. Or perhaps it will create something entirely unique, like DALL-E on steroids, tailored to all of our tastes. Or maybe it will just do what it does now - hopefully with fewer wires and boxes and a single, simple remote control - and show us all another episode of Bluey, and we’ll all watch it and enjoy each others company, and later on make references to it around the dinner table that make each other laugh, or share memes on the family WhatsApp group, and chat to people at work the next day and discover that they watched it too.

Perhaps if I've learned one thing from this exercise, its that I should be paying more attention to my 10 year old daughter. She seems to know what she’s talking about.

  1. In the UK, a big chunk of that news & educational stuff also comes from the "Television Licence" fee, and its anyone’s guess what might happen to that in the next few years. ↩

  2. For example, it would be much easier to privatise Channel 4 than to re-nationalise it, in the same way that it would be far easier to dismantle the BBC than to create a new national broadcaster, or to dismantle the NHS than to build a new "free at the point of entry" health service. ↩

  3. That is, I don't get paid to come up with an answer and have to do it on a deadline; I have the privilege of doing this on a strictly amateur basis. ↩

  4. A word which happens to be an anglicisation of “uisge” - which, funnily enough, is the Gaelic word for “water”. ↩

  5. As reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt; an online version of it has the slightly different title “What do we have to lose?”. I have no idea which is the canonically correct title- ie. what was printed in the pages of the magazine. ↩

  6. Remember, this was in 1995; for context, that was before the first version of Internet Explorer. ↩

  7. OK - maybe, sometimes, there are pictures too. But pictures can also be stripped away of paper, canvas, inks and paints etc. and reduced to some colours and coordinates; just streams of data. ↩

  8. I have a copy of the CD, but its currently in a box in the attic- but you can see a photo of the back cover here; CD back cover from this great article about it. ↩

  9. At around this time, electronic music was creating a stir in the music scene; Top of the Pops was insisting on live performances, but some of the music didn't really make sense to "perform". The Orb appeared on Top of the Pops playing what looked like a weird version of chess, which caused something of a stir - and turned out to be a massive inspiration to Robbie Williams, who was appearing on the same show with Take That. ↩

  10. Although there was a 12" vinyl version, it had to split the long version into a “part one” and “part two”, because vinyl records couldn’t hold 40 minutes of uninterrupted music without significantly degrading the recording quality; the ‘real’, canonical, uninterrupted not-quite-forty-minute version was on the CD. ↩

  11. Here is a chart with the numbers and a link to the source. ↩

  12. I’d call them both music - good music - but I’m perfectly happy to agree to disagree on that particular classification ↩

  13. This was the early days of samplers, so a lot of the recordings would have been analog sounds, converted to digital samples or recorded to DAT tapes, converted back to an analogue signal for the recording, then being digitally remastered again ↩

  14. Repeat to fade... Or until there’s enough data and content to build a training set for an AI model to take the expensive people-hours out of the equation entirely. ↩

  15. Well... the 32" screen in my son's bedroom is a "TV" that doesn't have an aerial, so can't receive a TV signal, and therefore technically isn't a "TV". I had planned to get a cable box hooked up for it, but I honestly don't think he's even noticed that he can't watch TV broadcasts on it so I haven't bothered yet. ↩

  16. Marshall McLuhan said in the 1960s that the content of any medium is always another medium, so perhaps the issue is that the content of TV is video, but the content of video isn't necessarily TV. ↩

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