One of the primary characteristics of television is its liveness, the ways in which the medium constructs a sense of presence and immediacy. McPherson adapts this idea for web environments by calling it “liveness with a difference,” highlighting how the web “structures a sense of causality in relation to liveness, [making it one where] we navigate and move through, often structuring a feeling that our own desire drives the moment” (462). She underlines the “volitional mobility” afforded by the Internet, the ways in which user experiences destabilize the orthodoxy of linearity and narrative that attend the consumption of other moving image media. That said, my experience streaming television feels more like “liveness with a lag.” Not only do I have to wait for clips to load before I can watch anything, but I am almost always watching dated content. And I can’t watch many of the things I want to because they are simply unavailable with the Roku technology—to say nothing of the frequency with which the device “freezes” when moving between channels. I am constantly rebooting it in an effort to get it to work properly and then waiting for the content to restart again.

Using Roku, it becomes clear that the liveness afforded by streaming television is hemmed in by the political economy of the medium. The industry practices that structure the experiences of streaming television are still in a state of “becoming.” Not everything streams, and when it does, it’s often older content re-circulated for this new platform. Moreover, devices that sync existing television sets with the Internet are imperfect technologies. The protocols for streaming television are tremendously in flux and seem to change with every corporate quarterly announcement and marketplace product launch. Nevertheless, the facts remains: there’s simply less contemporary television programming available via this new mode of distribution. In addition, it can involve the tricky enterprise of syncing an analog technology—my old, beloved TV set—with a digital stream. These two entities are not always a perfect match.

The moral of this particular story: be careful what you wish for. I saved money by cord-cutting and using Roku is, in many ways, similar to watching television as I always have. But it is different enough that I want to go back. I recently moved into a new apartment in a new state. Calling the cable company to set up service was at the very top of my “to-do” list. Of course, I need to wait nearly three weeks for installation. This seems especially cruel after a year that often felt like I was watching television on delay.

Mission accomplished? Kind of. This isn’t a story that can be boiled down to dollars and cents, though. Streaming television over the Internet involves many continuities with how I’d consumed TV for decades prior. But it also precipitated important changes in my consumption habits that warrant mention here. These continuities and differences are imbricated in developing industry practices related to the release of television content online, as well as technological developments in the convergence of television and the Internet via digital devices.

I follow Tara McPherson’s lead in “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web” where she describes the experience of consuming media in digital environments. In that essay, McPherson is interested in “exploring the specificity of the experience of using the web, of the web as mediator between human and machine, of the web as a technology of experience” so that she may describe the phenomenology of using the Internet to screen moving image media (460). My focus is on one iteration of the activities she describes: watching television over the Internet via a Roku box. Like McPherson, I am interested in the ways that “new” technology both continue and confound the experience of “old” media: what feels different and what changes, but also what feels similar and what remains the same. More pointedly, I want to use McPherson’s thoughts to explicate the feelings of liveness that attend streaming television online.

Receiving a television signal over the Internet via Roku involves several residual elements of television practice. With a Roku box, the consumer browses from a menu, selecting which services to add: Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Crackle, and so on. This feels similar to picking service packages from a cable company: premium vs. basic, etc. Once these “channels” are chosen, Roku users can browse within them for content. This too is reminiscent of more traditional modes of television viewing; it’s like “zapping” until you find something you like—Roku even provides an “old school” remote. After a program is selected, the television screen goes blank and loads the program like an Internet clip, complete with a “Loading, Please Wait…” message. When this would happen, I felt as though I was waiting for commercials to end and “the real program” to start. Thus, protocols for TV distribution and reception developed in earlier contexts continue to shape viewers’ experiences with the medium in the instance of streaming TV online. Well-established paradigms for television spectatorship—changing channels, browsing for programs, waiting for a narrative to begin—still shape the practice of viewing television with a Roku box.

Yet for all of the continuities with prior modes of consuming television, my viewing experiences changed dramatically upon installing my Roku. By nature, I am a television grazer. I typically turn on the set and “zap” until I find something I like. But with the Roku, such grazing is more difficult. The technology’s design prevents users from simply turning on the television and finding programming already in progress. With Roku, every time you turn on the TV, you need to select content, wait for it to load, and only then can you actually watch anything. McPherson calls this the “scan and search” nature of web environments, the ways in which users can call up content at will. While this is characteristic of the ways that many people consume moving image media on the Internet, it isn’t characteristic of the way that I typically watch television. If “convergence” is often the term used to describe television practice in the contemporary moment, using a Roku box pointed to the divergence in the ways that I consume television vs. the ways I use the Internet. In part two, I will directly address issues related to available content and liveness.