In the 1990s, when new technologies and deregulation policies were emerging throughout television practices, the resulting changes were considered to be transitions that would lead to a completely different and enhanced form of television. Back then, everybody anticipated that digital television would evolve as a new, possibly interactive television standard. Today, as profound changes are still taking place, scholars refrain from determining television's future form, focusing instead on the process of its transformation. The features of contemporary television simply seem to undermine a coherent definition of the medium, which seems too complex, too heterogeneous, in constant flux.

Today, many critics proclaim the end of (the classical form of) television and speak of multiple transformations leading to a new era – be it ‘the phase that comes after “TV”’ (Spigel 2004: 2), the ‘Post-Network Era’ (Lotz 2009), the ‘Post-Broadcast Era’ (Turner and Tay 2009), or ‘New Television’ (Moran 2009). Although they focus on different aspects of the ongoing transformation, all distinguish the medium's current heterogeneity from television as it used to be – thereby implying that television once had a stable identity that is now being called into question. Given the ‘multifaceted technologies and uses of television’ (Lotz 2007: 78) it is no longer even sure if television is still a distinct medium. In her book The television will be revolutionized, Amanda Lotz articulates ‘the need to think of the medium not as “Television” but as televisions’ (Lotz 2007: 78) and Michael Curtin describes contemporary television as a ‘flexible and dynamic mode of communication’ that is better defined as a ‘matrix medium’ (Curtin and Shattuc 2009: 175).

However, looking at previous descriptions of television this common presumption of television's former stability and clear identity can be challenged. In the foreword to the 1990 edition of his Tube of Plenty (1975), Erik Barnouw looks back on his historical work, stating that ‘not for one moment, in the intervening years, has the subject sat still for its portrait’ and he predicts that ‘the upheavals [will] continue’ (Barnouw 1990: V). In 1985, the title Television in transition was used for an anthology dealing with ‘new developments – for instance cable and satellite – [that] promise further to revolutionize a still infant medium’ (Drummond and Patterson 1985: VII).