Transmedia Television Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life Comedia Series

The early years of the twenty-first century have seen dramatic changes within the television industry. The development of the internet and mobile phone as platforms for content directly linked to television programming has offered a challenge to the television set?s status as the sole domestic access point to audio-visual dramatic content. Viewers can engage with ?television? without ever turning a television set on.

Whilst there has already been some exploration of these changes, little attention has been paid to the audience and the extent to which these technologies are being integrated into their daily lives. Focusing on a particular period of rapid change and using case studies including Spooks, 24 and Doctor Who, Transmedia Television considers how the television industry has exploited emergent technologies and the extent to which audiences have embraced them. How has television content been transformed by shifts towards multiplatform strategies? What is the appeal of using game formats to lose oneself within a narrative world? How can television, with its ever larger screens and association with domesticity, be reconciled with the small portable, public technology of the mobile phone? What does the shift from television schedules to online downloading mean for our understanding of ?the television audience?? Transmedia Television will consider how the relationship between television and daily life has been altered as a result of the industry?s development of emerging new media technologies, and what ?television? now means for its audiences.

Introduction Part I. Understanding Transmediality 1. Transmedia Texts: Defining Transmedia Storytelling 2. The Transmedia Industry: Distribution and Engagement 3. Transmedia Audiences: The Consequences of Emergence Part II: Audiences for Emergent Transmedia Drama 4. Spooks Internet and Digital Gaming: Immersion and Agency 5. 24: Conspiracy and the Mobile Phone: Immersion and Immediacy 6. Downloading Television: Agency, Immediacy and the Transmedia Audience Conclusion

Elizabeth Jane Evans is lecturer in Film and Television Studies in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. She has previously published in Media, Culture and Society and Participations.