DVD Time: Temporality, Audience Engagement and the New TV Culture of Digital Video

Abstract

DVD use and the reported purchase of DVD players have grown markedly in recent years, and in 2002 Lyall Johnson claimed this was growing at the rate of 80 per cent annually. As a digital narrative format, it provides a means of viewing televisual products alternative to broadcast traditions and, significantly, beyond the ‘timeshifted’ video cassette in its analogue and serial format. From a perspective which considers the aesthetics of television production and spectatorship through new digital forms of dissemination, DVD has arguably motivated a style of viewing that sponsors the longer narrative arc, provides greater control to the viewer in terms of how the program is watched, its frequency and the sequence in which a series is viewed, and alters the temporality of television viewing in terms of shifting control of the viewing experience away from a centre–periphery broadcast network to the consumer, audience member or user.