Jannis Kallinikos and José-Carlos Mariátegui
Media industry is undergoing comprehensive change due to the shifting audience and consumption patterns fostered by the diffusion of the Internet. The present paper describes how these changes shape established practices of video production and redefine the cultural categories of video and broadcasting. Drawing on an empirical case study of practices within BBC, we show the production of video content to be increasingly unbundled and broken down into several smaller processes, which make it possible to manage and recompose in a variety of ways that transcend established institutional divisions and cultural perceptions. At the same time and as a means of accommodating multiplatform content delivery, video distribution is acquiring flexible and mutating formats that further destabilize the perception of video as a self-sufficient cultural form. In this context, video metadata rises to be an important coordinative medium, which provides the cognitive resources for identifying and managing video content within and across particular settings and the link through which the operations of media organizations became entangled with the technical landscape of the Internet.