Broadcasting, Reloaded. Resurgences, Resistances, and Rearrangements of Mainstream Television and Media

Media Mutations, the international conference on audiovisual media hosted by the Department of the Arts of Università di Bologna, is inaugurating its twelfth edition. The topic will be the strong, somehow unexpected persistence of broadcasting and mainstream TV and media within the digital environment.

In the past few years, not only have streaming services (such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video) become the driving force of a shift in the television and media business, they have also been at the center of seminal research and debates in television and media studies, mainly pointing at the notions of digital revolution and disruption. More recently, the launch of new platforms by other providers (like Apple, Disney, and HBO) has rekindled these debates, which have channeled the OTT promotional rhetoric pointing at the ultimate death of broadcasting, both as a business model and as a cultural form.

However, in these very years, there…