Anthony N. Smith

Challenging industry and scholarly claims of digital disruption, it demonstrates how streaming giants like Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video, alongside public service broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 4, maintain deep continuities with television history, adapting established industry practices online rather than abandoning them.

This book brings genre back to the forefront of the current transmedia trend. Genres are perhaps the most innately transmedial of media constructs, formed as they are from all kinds of industrial, technological and discursive phenomena. Yet, few have considered how genre works in a multiplatform context. This book does precisely that, making a uniquely transmedial contribution to the study of genre in the age of media convergence. The book interrogates how industrial, technological and participatory transformations of digital platforms and emerging technologies reshape workings of genre. The authors consider franchises such as Star Wars, streaming platforms such as Netflix, catch-up services such as ITV Hub, creative technologies such as virtual reality, and beyond. In setting the stage for the revival of genre theory in contemporary transmedia scholarship, this book pushes forward understandings of multiplatform media and the emerging form and function of genre across contemporary culture.

This book shows how the unique characteristics of traditionally differentiated media continue to determine narrative despite the recent digital convergence of media technologies. The author argues that media are now each largely defined by distinctive industrial practices that continue to preserve their identities and condition narrative production. Furthermore, the book demonstrates how a given medium’s variability in institutional and technological contexts influences diverse approaches to storytelling. By connecting US film, television, comic book and video game industries to their popular fictional characters and universes; including Star Wars, Batman, Game of Thrones and Grand Theft Auto; the book identifies how differences in industrial practice between media inform narrative production. This book is a must read for students and scholars interested in transmedia storytelling.

This book shows how the unique characteristics of traditionally differentiated media continue to determine narrative despite the recent digital convergence of media technologies. The author argues that media are now each largely defined by distinctive industrial practices that continue to preserve their identities and condition narrative production. Furthermore, the book demonstrates how a given medium’s variability in institutional and technological contexts influences diverse approaches to storytelling. By connecting US film, television, comic book and video game industries to their popular fictional characters and universes; including Star Wars, Batman, Game of Thrones and Grand Theft Auto; the book identifies how differences in industrial practice between media inform narrative production. This book is a must read for students and scholars interested in transmedia storytelling.