Independent Sports Television in the Networked Era

As the rise of internet distribution has transformed television, precipitating the continued expansion and fracturing of the medium, sports television has not been excluded. In analyzing the effects of internet distribution on sports television, this article specifically examines how internet distribution has fostered the emergence of independent sports television producers and distributors operating outside the traditional sports television system. Using the sport of Ultimate frisbee (Ultimate) as a case study, the article first argues that the new streaming companies that have emerged around that sport have largely modeled their streams on legacy sports television, but have also looked to adapt the conventions of traditional sports television to the specificities of the sport. Second, the article suggests that a particular area of concern for these independent streaming companies has been representation, as these companies have sought to offer a more progressive form of sports television.

Independent Sports Television in the Networked Era

As the rise of internet distribution has transformed television, precipitating the continued expansion and fracturing of the medium, sports television has not been excluded. In analyzing the effects of internet distribution on sports television, this article specifically examines how internet distribution has fostered the emergence of independent sports television producers and distributors operating outside the traditional sports television system. Using the sport of Ultimate frisbee (Ultimate) as a case study, the article first argues that the new streaming companies that have emerged around that sport have largely modeled their streams on legacy sports television, but have also looked to adapt the conventions of traditional sports television to the specificities of the sport. Second, the article suggests that a particular area of concern for these independent streaming companies has been representation, as these companies have sought to offer a more progressive form of sports television.

The Invisible Institution? Reconstructing the History of BAFTA and the 1958 Merger of the British Film Academy with the Guild of Television Producers and Directors

As a cultural institution of national and global significance, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) is notably absent from existing scholarship on the media industries. More importantly, BAFTA's role as an independent arts charity set up by the industry to support and develop new talent is often overlooked. Instead, references to BAFTA made by media and film scholars most frequently take the form of footnotes or digressions that detail particular awards or nominations. Drawing on a range of archival sources, including BAFTA's own records, we address this significant omission within existing scholarship on the British cultural and creative industries. In particular, we examine the period 1947–68, focusing on the 1958 merger of the British Film Academy with the Guild of Television Producers and Directors to form a new institution, known as the Society of Film and Television Arts (SFTA, later renamed BAFTA). This was achieved despite the well-documented tensions existing between the two industries throughout the period, which we identify and analyse within this historical context. We argue that a crucial factor driving the 1958 merger was the desire to develop quality training schemes across both industries. This, in turn, was partly enabled by an egalitarian turn in post-war British society towards the development of greater social equality and mobility. In reconstructing these events, we therefore interrogate and reassess the role played by this key national institution on the development of the creative and cultural industries, offering an expansion and revision of scholarship on media histories of post-war Britain.

Up Close and Personal: Opera and Television Broadcasting in the 1950s

This article examines early pedagogical experiments in opera on television that were meant to attract new audiences in the 1950s. The aesthetics of early television have often been thought to run contrary to opera, particularly in its grander iterations, but I argue that television producers capitalized upon the traits of early television to personalize opera, both on and off screen. Comparing two NBC pedagogical initiatives—a 1958 Omnibus program starring Leonard Bernstein and the 1956–57 visits of the NBC Opera Company to Saint Mary's College (South Bend, Indiana)—I explore how these efforts were meant to approximate the opera fan's experience as well as prepare audience members to enter the opera house. Ultimately, although opera on television failed to secure a strong foothold in the 1950s, it helped to re-envision the ways in which American audiences could relate to the art form and set the terms for the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD broadcasts today.

Visuality Without Form: Video-Mediated Communication and Research Practice Across Disciplinary Contexts

Visuality is a concept that crosses boundaries of practice and meaning, making it an ideal subject for interdisciplinary research. In this article, we discuss visuality using a fragment from a video meeting of television producers at Swedish Television’s group for programming in Swedish Sign Language. This example argues for the importance of recognizing the diversity of analytical and practice-derived visualities and their effect on the ways in which we interpret cultures. These different visualities have consequences for the methods and means with which we present scholarly research. The role of methods, methodology, and analysis of visual practices in an organizational and bilingual setting are key. We explore the challenges of incorporating deaf visualities, hearing visualities, and different paradigms of interdisciplinary research as necessary when visibility, invisibility, and their materialities are of concern. We conclude that in certain contexts, breaking with disciplinary traditions makes visible that which is otherwise invisible.

Television is Not Radio: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival

What makes media “Islamic”? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television producers in Cairo, this article looks at the passionate contention within Egypt’s piety movement over the development of new forms of religious media. I suggest that at stake in these mass-mediated debates over da‘wa (Islamic outreach) are conflicting theologies of mediation that configure the boundaries of the religious and the secular differently. This God-talk matters greatly to Islamic revivalists, who spend more time debunking each other than they do secularists. Attention to these internal critiques foregrounds the competing moral conceptions of human flourishing and divine obligation that animate Egypt’s Islamic Revival. Indeed, focusing on the piety movement’s internal fractures as God-talk allows for an ethnographic engagement with how Muslim adepts critique religious difference—and the difference that religious critique makes—beyond the imperatives of secular power. This focus, in turn, complicates the stakes of anthropological judgment.

Ancient Greece on British Television

Ancient Greece has inspired television producers and captivated viewing audiences in the United Kingdom for over half a century. By examining how and why political, social and cultural narratives of Greece have been constructed through television’s distinctive audiovisual languages, and also in relation to its influential sister-medium radio, this volume explores the nature and function of these public engagements with the written and material remains of the Hellenic past. Through ten case studies drawn from feature programmes, educational broadcasts, children’s animations, theatre play productions, dramatic fiction and documentaries broadcast across the decades, this collection offers wide-ranging insights into the significance of ancient Greece on British television.

Fascism Comes to America

For almost a century, American politicians and social commentator, trailed by novelists, Hollywood movie makers and television producers have agonized about the menace of fascism, and its ability to corrupt the United States’ constitutional republic, supposedly moderate, strong, and firm. Four facets of this huge set of issues are called to the attention of readers: the creation of the understanding of fascism in 1939–1941; the connection between political crises and their renderings in popular culture; the contribution of European scholars to the conventional conceptual framework; and an exploration of the penchant of American scholars for the notion.