Linear TV: A television service that requires the viewer to watch a scheduled TV program at the particular time it’s offered, and on the particular channel it's presented on. Synonyms include time-and-channel based TV, appointment-based TV, and traditional television. (Source: ITV Dictionary.) Non-linear TV comprises on-demand formats as well as programs that don’t emanate from a network channel, also known as web TV and digital media.
Linear TV is a retronym—a “throwback compound” consisting of a noun plus a modifier that specifies the original meaning of the noun. (“Retronym” was coined in 1980 by Frank Mankiewicz, then president of NPR, and popularized by William Safire in his New York Times language column.) Other retronyms include film camera (coined when digital cameras overtook older cameras), skirt suit (to distinguish the garment from pant suit), acoustic guitar (as opposed to electric guitar), and analog clock (once known simply as “clock”). The original term is called a protonym. For more examples, see this Wikipedia list and my Visual Thesaurus column on “classic.”
I first noticed linear TV in April, when the New York Times published a story about Netflix—which has had multiple successes with original series programming such as “House of Cards”—in which the company’s CEO, Reed Hastings, was interviewed:
“We’ve had 80 years of linear TV, and it’s been amazing, and in its day the fax machine was amazing,” he said. “The next 20 years will be this transformation from linear TV to Internet TV.”
It turns out the terms linear television and linear TV have been around for quite a while. Twitter follower Rob Read pointed me to a December 2010 Guardian story that highlighted the newness of the term by putting it between quotation marks:
Among all the excitements about how media are changing, one of the most widespread is the supposed imminent transition from so-called “linear” to “non-linear” television.
I’m not here referring to the idea that people are increasingly watching various types of video on demand, or “VOD”: that's obviously true, if often exaggerated. What I'm talking about is the suggestion that, in the next few years, the main way people watch television will change from (quotes) linear to (quotes) non-linear.
And Our Bold Hero used a clever tool called Topsy to find even earlier usages on Twitter, including this one:
Under six-day deadline pressure for treatment, but cannot solve a central problem of merging participatory web & linear tv story into one.
— Matt Morgan (@mattmorgan1) April 24, 2007
I was able to antedate that mention in old media (or dead-tree media): a January 31, 2006, article by Virginia Heffernan, then a TV critic for the New York Times. Writing about a new broadband network from MTV called mtvU Über (which is still around), Heffernan observed:
Über pipes a version of that channel into your computer, and — as futurists have been promising for more than a decade — it’s interactive programming, the fruit of the much-anticipated convergence between the Internet and old-time television, that relic that some now witheringly call “linear television.”
But by then, the concept had already been simmering for almost a decade, as another Twitter follower, Ron Martinez, reminded me.
@Fritinancy @brianstelter @nytimes Closely related: in 90's coined postlinear. '96 NYT: http://t.co/06vf8PdBfG pic.twitter.com/70EBfJ9IxB
— Ron Martínez (@ronmartinez) May 30, 2015
The article by Denise Caruso that Ron linked to—in the New York Times once again—is dated May 20, 1996, and is about how “interactive media must tell a compelling story to draw people in”:
In these fictional scenarios -- a kind of combination chat room and on-line theme park -- computer-generated characters and human players would be able to play with and talk to each other in ways that are as emotionally engaging as today's video games, but with content much more like real-life relationships.
The founders of one San Francisco-based company call this new view of media “postlinear,” and, accordingly, named their company Postlinear Entertainment. In a postlinear world, according to the company's president, Ron Martinez, an entertainment property starts out simply as a very loose story structure. It is, as Mr. Martinez explained it, “a world populated only with characters and ambient conflicts” -- with no narrative, but plenty of potential to create drama.
So far, though, the earliest mention of linear TV I’ve been able to find—thanks to the researching skill of Twitter follower HugoVK—is a press release dated January 20, 1995, from a Hollywood studio with the excellent name Heller Hiwater Productions. The new medium here was CD-ROMs:
The CD-ROM titles are designed to run on the PC and MAC platforms and are now in pre-production. All have associated linear TV series plus interactive TV specials and are created in the role playing game format with strong emphasis on the kinds of character development conflicts found in traditional drama.
More than two decades later, non-linear TV—from Amazon Prime’s “Transparent” to Vimeo’s “High Maintenance” (which was recently picked up by HBO)—is full if characters, conflicts, drama, and narrative, and the line between broadcast forms has never been less linear.
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