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Chapter 6 relates the history of YouTube, a community video-sharing site that initially, in 2005, presented itself as an alternative to television. Since its takeover by Google, in 2006, the site gradually absorbed more features of television while broadcasting increasingly incorporated aspects of online video-sharing. In 2012, YouTube’s interface looks more like a multi-channel television—a development that not all YouTubers equally appreciated. At the corporate level, Google changed its strategy from fighting its Hollywood foes in court to issuing partnerships, not only to facilitate the integration of professionally generated content with user-generated content on YouTube, but also to advance broadcasters’ further integration in the online ecosystem. The growing interdependence between television and video-sharing platforms simultaneously reflects and constructs the emergent culture of connectivity. The implications of conventional content industries integrating with search engines, measurement and advertising systems become poignantly visible at the governance and business level of the ecosystem, by comparing their various underlying mechanisms

While film itself may vanish, for most audiences, the “films” themselves will remain, and audiences, now adjusted to viewing moving images in a variety of different ways, will still want to see their dreams and desires projected on a large screen for the visceral thrill of the spectacle, as well as the communal aspect inherent in any public performance. Film is indeed disappearing, but movies are not. If anything, they are more robust than ever, and are shot in a multiplicity of formats that boggle the mind; analog video, digital video, conventional film, high definition video, on cell phones and pocket-size hard drive fixed focus, auto exposure cameras, and a host of other platforms now just emerging from the workshop of image making. With more films, videos, television programs, and Internet films being produced now than ever before, and with international image boundaries crumbling thanks to the pervasive influence of the world wide web, we will see in the coming years an explosion of voices from around the globe, in a more democratic process which allows a voice to even the most marginalized factions of society.

This chapter describes the third phase of video's evolution. The third phase involves the advent of the digital age, wherein the materiality and specificity of film and video as media significantly lessened. This phenomenon is due to the phasing out of analog devices, such as cathode ray tube television sets and videocassettes, and replacing them with digital video discs (DVDs), digital video recorders (DVRs), video on demand (VOD), video streaming, and video file downloading. The phasing out of analog devices overcame some of their perceived deficiencies, such as being aesthetically degraded and flawed. From a broader perspective, this trend spurred two monumental effects. Firstly, the trend meant more interactivity—that is, empowering individual users as masters, rather than servants of technology. Secondly, it has fostered convergence between manufacturers and consumers of electronics.

With the switch to streaming video, a whole host or royalty, content, and distribution issues need to be addressed. In addition, there is a plethora of programming designed specifically for the web. Some come and go like mayflies, and die a quick death; others build up a long-term audience, and keep coming back year after year to a cadre of loyal viewers. Web Therapy, for example, has now amassed 46 episodes, with Meryl Streep featured as a recent guest star in a three-episode story arc. Syfy Television (formerly Sci-fi, until the need to copyright the channel’s name forced the somewhat awkward switch to Syfy) has been churning out 10 minute segments of a web serial entitled Riese, with an eye to combining the sections into a two hour TV pilot for the network; and Showtime has oddly created an animated web companion for its hit live action serial killer television show Dexter, entitled Dark Echo, which offers brief (3 to 6 minute) of additional back-story on the series for its numerous devotees.

This chapter examines the rapid and accelerating technological transformations to film that have been happening in the last decade. These transformations make it anachronistic to speak solely of film and require the analysis of a more inclusive moving image. Moreover, these transformations have occurred simultaneously with the developments of globalization and transnationalism. Broadband, streaming video, and networked social relationships have been central to the formation of new communities and new forms of engagement with existing social conditions. The chapter seeks to highlight the interconnection between technology politics and economy by focusing on the question of moving-image experiments and migration. It focuses on the works of filmmakers who have worked in an experimental mode.

This introductory chapter discusses the book's aims which are to combine the surrealist past and the digital present in order to underline the need for figurative juxtapositions of past and present, challenging ordinary rationalizations of what technological change means. It poses the question of how such changes—the transitions from celluloid to television to VHS to DVD to streaming video—mold one's imagination of cinema, desire for cinema, and dreams about the nature and future of cinema. In an effort to develop new vantage points on spectatorship, the book strives to organize strategic confrontations between surrealism and digital media, and in the process provide a different approach to understanding the relationships between surrealism/digital media, cinema/digital media, and cinema/surrealism.

This chapter, written by Martine Beugnet, responds to the common complaint that watching movies on a smartphone is ‘uncinematic’, and investigates precisely the cinematicity particular to such devices. While, for instance, the tiny screen of an iPhone is paradigmatic of spectatorial habits in the digital age, it is equally redolent of the kinetoscope’s peephole apparatus prior to the emergence of the film theatre. Although the very antithesis of the collective viewing practices of cinema audiences, the iPhone as a screening device envelops these practices within a broader and more individuated experience of cinematicity. Beugnet proposes to leave the debate about ‘proper’ ways of screening films to one side, and to concentrate instead on the specific characteristics of watching films on very small screens and with sound-isolating devices. Drawing on haptic theories of visuality as well as on the history and aesthetics of miniature art forms and the curio, the chapter examines issues of mobility, manipulability and distracted-versus-attentive viewing, before focusing on the effect of miniaturization on the film image itself.