Pivoting and Producing: The Early Years of Online TV in Australia

The introduction and diffusion of international subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services in the 2010s represented the most significant disruption of established national broadcast and pay-TV ecologies in their long history. Using an in-depth Australian case-study, this book narrates this profound period of proliferation. It also considers how incumbent commercial networks, pay-TV providers, and public services broadcasters developed into online TV providers, albeit in assorted ways. In so doing, it conceives of the early impact of online TV (2015-2020) more broadly and acknowledges the role of both new and old TV players.

The industry-wide shift towards online TV over this period also impacted existing television drama production cultures. The SVODs provided a fruitful avenue for the distribution of existing archives and slowly began to support the production of new Australian content with an increasingly global focus. However, the formal arrival of online TV certainly did not usher in the boom in original local television drama many anticipated. Pivoting and Producing for Online TV: Australia’s Transition advances the macro-analysis of television production strategies.

This book will be useful to students and researchers interested in media, film and cultural studies.

Alexa Scarlata is Lecturer in Digital Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. She is a scholar of media and cultural industries. Her research considers internet distributed television, content production and national screen policy.