Vids are made about—and made out of—a vast range of source material. One of the exciting parts of studying vids is seeing how vidders iterate the form: for example, beyond television, vids are also used to comment on the pleasures and frustrations of films and video games in order to draw the web of paratexts and intertexts that inform contemporary (transmedia) fan experience. However, vidding's origins in television fandoms of the 1980s, continually enabled by the affordances of domestic media technologies (e.g. home video, both videotape and digitally), means that the vid form deserves to be explored through television. Indeed, in the first years of the American vidding convention VividCon, up to ninety percent of vids shown each year were made from television sources. Though this proportion dropped off to around half in the convention's later years, vids remain a supremely televisual form. Television studies offers a complex and hybrid set of ways to think about television technology, texts, and audiences and therefore those of the vid. Therefore, this chapter focuses on vidding's relationship with television through fandom studies’ approaches to television audiences, and through television studies. The subsequent case study chapters adopt a range of frames, in line with my overall purpose to explore the vid form through a range of theoretical approaches.

In this chapter, I discuss the relatively understated place of the vid form in current television scholarship and fan studies literature.