Watching Game of Thrones in India: Notes on programme culture, television and YouTube

Network programme viewing culture, though only three decades old in India, has now evolved to include digital platforms, embracing the revolutionary potential of Internet video and YouTube in particular. Questions of transcience, newness, instantaneity and physical presence lose their centrality in the digitalized domain where all viewing consumption is in the past, and temporal cultures of collective or individual viewing, collective remembering and individual creative production have been radically transformed. This overview of the move from television to Internet and the changing techne of video programming, uses HBO’s Game of Thrones viewership in India as an illustration of urban new media practices.