Web Television

Web television is television distributed through the internet. Web television is considered a form of multimodality text in which it incorporates spoken language, moving images and also incorporates music and sound (Walsh, 2006). In addition, a changed from television to web television is considered a genre change. According to Paltridge(2006), when he quoted Martin(1984:25), genre is a staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage as members of our culture.

Today - with the increase internet connection speeds, advances in technology, the increase of total number of people online, and the decrease in connection costs, it has become a culture for people to go online and internet has become an essential need in everyone’s life. In addition, it has become increasingly common to find traditional television content accessible freely and legally over the Internet. In addition to this, new Internet-only television content has appeared which is not distributed via cable, satellite, or terrestrial systems. Internet television utilizes the connections of the Internet to deliver video from a source to a target device. Some of the ways in which Internet delivered television is used include:

• Showing a channel 'live' (like regular TV), or allow the viewer to select a show to watch on demand ("Video-on-Demand" or VOD).
  
• Viewing anything from low budget, home camcorder productions to expensive professional productions
  
• Interactive advertising

Other than that, through web television, viewers get to go from page to page through hyperlink which they will not get by watching television. It is an example of affordance, which is what is made possible by the mode used (Walsh, 2006). Affordances in the website lies in the “communicating” in which readers get to navigate various section through menu bars, windows, frames and links Through hyperlink, readers can get more info because they get to jump from link to link, gaining different information.

As mentioned above, web television allow viewer to select a show to watch on demand. For example, web television website such as Televisioninternet provides variety of shows for viewers to choose based on their preference. They classified their programmes as kids show, special event, home and fashion, sports channel, music tv and more. Youtube also provide drama series such as Korea, Japan and Taiwan drama which allows users to watch anytime they want and also get to choose the episode they want to watch

Japan Drama Series-One Litres of Tears episode 4
Source: youtube

References List:

Paltridge, B 2000, Making Sense of Discourse Analysis: Genre Analysis, Antipodean Educational Enterprise, Gold Coast.

Tan,K,H, 2007, Watching TV on the web, Tech Central, The Star, viewed 29 October 2007,http://startechcentral.com/reviews/story.asp?file=/2007/7/12/prodit/18236970&sec=reviews&new=1&cat=3&rid=1056

Walsh, M 2006, “Textual shift”: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian journal of language and literacy, Vol.29, No.1,pp. 24-37