Keeping up the Live: Recorded Television as Live Experience

Abstract

Increasingly new media platforms are making claims to liveness. Looking back in television history we also find programmes that were recorded, but kept up the claims of being live. This raises the question as to what accounts for the attraction of the live? Focusing on Ein Platz für Tiere and the Netflix Live spoof of 2017 this article discusses disparate articulations of the live and addresses the need to balance freedom, chaos and control on the part of media producers. For their greatest challenges is that boredom and chaos haunts their output simultaneously. It clarifies also how liveness is not a given property of any technology, but in fact hard work.