The Internet, TV's Wingman

This week’s really had a lot of “Aha!” moments for me. Sadly, not in the theory aspect, but just in understand the concept of the Internet a little bit better. In Sandvig’s chapter, y thoughts went from, “Oh, that is what buffer means” to “Now I know why sometimes my Netflix looks fuzzy” (233). It also brought up the topic that my fiancé and I constantly discuss, should we get rid of our cable and just stream TV? In that instance it was hard to follow Sandvig’s argument that the Internet is televisions “wingman” (237), but then I realized we have two different concepts of television. For me, television is what you watch on cable, and shows or videos are what you watch on the Internet. So in Sandvig’s terminology I feel, yes Internet is television’s wingman, because through Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc. we now have original shows and the concept of binge watching. So really the Internet isn’t the downfall of television, but maybe the downfall of cable?

I really enjoyed Joe’s description of the Internet infrastructure between Hu and Sandvig’s chapters. I find it interesting that Joe mentioned hybrid when talking about Hu because Sanding also talks about the Internet being a hybrid. “While the existing system is a hybrid, the direction of change has been toward a mass audience” (238).

Lastly, something I want to discuss in class tomorrow. While Aden mentioned neoliberalism in his blog, as well as that being our go to topic this semester, I want to talk about Sandvig’s “corporate liberalism” (235) he brings up. “In a more worrying vein, until Amazon entered the CDN market with its CloudFront offering in 2008, the best CDNs (including Alkamai) refused customers not affiliated with major corporate content producers” (235). Do a lot of CDNs still do this in 2016?