comedies) as well as hyperspecific microgenres (fight-the-system documentaries) (Madrigal 2014). This smorgasbord of content is arranged into celluloid-like strips of color that slide off the right-hand side of the page, suggesting an infinite variety of choices. In this way, the viewer is positioned as the sovereign navigator-user of an endless archive of screen content. Such design choices are carefully constructed to create the appearance of textual abundance and conceal limitations in what is a finite Netflix catalog.
Figure 1.2. Netflix desktop interface, as of January 2018. The interface, designed in such a way as to conceal catalog limitations, suggests an endless bounty of content available to the user. Screenshot by the author.
Until 2015, the Netflix desktop interface had a light grey background. Video artwork was formatted in vertical, DVD-style boxes, so that the overall effect was reminiscent of a video store. Now, the background is dark—as in a movie theater—and the DVD covers have been rearranged into a horizontal format suggesting frames on a celluloid filmstrip. This site update seems designed not only to make the service as tablet-friendly as possible, hence the shift to the horizontal format, but also to discursively reposition the site within the pantheon of older media technologies by moving the idea of Netflix away from video-store and DVD culture—surely a fading memory for most of its users—and realigning the service with that most resilient medium, cinema. Interestingly, the iconography of television is nowhere to be found in Netflix’s interface design, despite the abundance of TV series available through Netflix. There are no remote controls, advertisements, or schedules. Even though the idea of television is central to Netflix’s commercial ambitions—recall Hastings’s description of Netflix as “a new global Internet TV network”—the television experience does not seem to be central to how Netflix wishes its users to imagine streaming. Perhaps this is because of the degraded nature of the “idiot box,” and Netflix’s related desire to market itself as a premium service. In any case, it is one of the ironies of internet television that its referent medium, television, is being simultaneously reimagined, integrated, erased, and remediated through the emergence of streaming services.
Toward a Synthesis
This brings us back to Netflix’s relationship to screen media. As we have seen, Netflix is a shape-shifter: it combines elements of diverse media technologies and institutions. This has implications for the analytical frameworks we use in media research. The trick is not to take an either/or approach, trying to shoehorn Netflix into one box or another, but rather to see it as a media object that performatively enacts its association with these media at different times and for different purposes. In its dealings with government, Netflix claims to be a digital media service—certainly not television, which would attract unwelcome regulation. Yet, in its public relations, Netflix constantly refers to television, because of its familiarity to consumers. Its interface design, on the other hand, prefers to evoke the cinema experience. Meanwhile, its subscription business model has echoes of pay-TV, but its algorithmic recommendation system is pure new media. In other words, Netflix is a hybrid technology that remediates a range of earlier media technologies in different aspects of its operation, and this mix of associations is constantly changing.
The good news for television studies is that these issues are already quite familiar to scholars. Television is a hybrid medium that combines and rearranges elements of previous media forms, including radio, cinema, newspapers, and the theater. Equally, television studies—to the extent that it exists as a discrete academic field—has evolved as a historical amalgam of different critical approaches, research methods, and ways of knowing. Television studies is a malleable discipline, and this natural flexibility will be an asset as we enter further into an era of internet-distributed television services, which requires us to keep an open mind as to what exactly television is and how it might be studied. In this respect, Netflix is an important object lesson precisely because it invites us to revisit what we think we know about television and to reconstitute that knowledge anew.
Arguably, what is more important than what we call Netflix is how we think about it. In this chapter, I have argued for a both/and perspective, suggesting that we should acknowledge the specificities of Netflix as a digital media service (such as its mode of interactivity, algorithmic filtering, and regulatory slipperiness) and what this means for its distribution function (its catalog structure, lack of capacity limitations, and nonlinearity) while also appreciating the continuities between Netflix and broadcast media, which are especially noticeable at the level of text, engagement, and experience (the “it’s still TV” argument). It is not enough to treat Netflix just like any other digital platform, because this misses its specificity as a hybrid TV-cinema-digital media distribution system with a unique set of experiential and aesthetic connections to older media. Nor is it enough to wheel out the standard theories of television studies and apply them to Netflix. A better approach would be one that is literate in both screen and digital media studies and can move between these ways of knowing. The need for such an approach will become evident in the next two chapters, when we turn our attention to Netflix’s distribution model and infrastructure.
2
Transnational Television
From Broadcast to Broadband
There are few issues in contemporary television studies that cannot be traced back in some way to the 1974 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form by Raymond Williams. Of particular interest for scholars of internet-distributed television is the book’s final chapter, “Alternative Technology, Alternative Uses,” which offers a richly textured account of new distribution technologies and their sociopolitical implications. Writing in the early 1970s, Williams could not have foretold the rise of Netflix. Nonetheless, his discussion of emerging satellite television services identifies issues that are directly relevant to today’s debates about transnational television in the internet age.
Figure 2.1. Video platforms, including YouTube, operate transnationally but are territorialized through geolocation and personalization. Photo by Kapustin Igor/Shutterstock.
Williams viewed satellite television as a site of structural conflict—between competing institutions, business models, and visions of what television is and should be—as well as being a staging ground for Cold War politics. He was especially interested in the transnational dimension of satellite distribution and what this might mean for global communication. Noting on the one hand that satellite’s “probable” evolutionary trajectory would be to “penetrate or circumvent existing national broadcasting systems, in the name of ‘internationalism’ but in reality in the service of one or two dominant cultures” (Williams 1974, 147), Williams offers a highly ambivalent assessment of the forms of television that may result from satellite distribution:
A world-wide television service, with genuinely open skies, would be an enormous gain to the peoples of the world, as short-wave radio, bypassing national controls, has already clearly been. Against the rhetoric of open skies, which in fact, given the expense and sophistication of satellite technology, would be monopolised by a few large corporations and authoritarian governments, it will sound strange and reactionary to defend national autonomy. But the probable users of the technology are not internationalists, in the sense of any significant mutuality. The national or local components in their services would be matters merely of consent and publicity: tokenism. (149)
In this quote, we can observe several clashing ideas that continue to structure today’s debate about internet-distributed television. On the one hand, there is the utopian vision of a “world-wide television service,” seen here as a potential global agora—a space of free and reciprocal exchange. On the other hand, there is the recognition that this space is likely to be organized around existing forms of industrial and geopolitical power; hence the cosmopolitan space of transnational
