technology company,
a software system,
a big-data business,
a cultural gatekeeper,
a lifestyle brand,
a mode of spectatorship, or
a ritual.
Clearly, Netflix means different things to different people. Part of the issue here is that there are a number of incompatible interpretive frames in use. Each frame brings with it a set of assumptions and invokes a particular history of industrial and technological evolution. As we move through these various descriptors, Netflix’s location within industry sectors also seems to shift around—between the television, video, technology, internet, digital media, entertainment, and information industries. The conceptual frameworks we use to understand Netflix are important because they shape the kind of thinking we bring to the analysis. Consequently, these frameworks require some critical reflection.
This chapter traces out two different analytical perspectives that can be applied to Netflix and in so doing critically synthesizes two related fields of scholarly literature. The first of these can be found within television studies, in the form of research on TV’s digital and postbroadcast transformations. The second comes from outside television studies, via new media theory, internet studies, and platform studies. As I will argue, it is helpful to move between and across these two ways of knowing so as to avoid the intellectual lock-in effects that result from following one line of thinking too closely. For example, if we study Netflix in terms of its similarities to and differences from television, we can miss its connections to other digital media. Similarly, focusing exclusively on the software dimension obscures Netflix’s structural relationships with established screen industries. We need to be aware of the natural pull of particular ways of thinking and what they reveal and obscure when applied to different kinds of media objects.
Television Studies and the Future-of-TV Debate
Today, the academic field of television studies is in a state of flux as it undergoes another round of self-reflection. In recent years, a rich corpus of postconvergence research and theory has emerged to explore how digital technologies of various kinds have variously transformed, extended, and sustained existing television industries. This literature asks questions such as: What is television now? What might it become? Is what we used to call the “idiot box” dead, dormant, or as dominant as ever? In the age of televisual “expansion and overflow” (Gray 2009, 85, citing Brooker 2001), where do the boundaries around a medium, a distribution system, or an individual text lie?
Questions such as these have been carefully examined by scholars, including William Uricchio, Milly Buonanno, Chuck Tryon, Amanda Lotz, Lynn Spigel, and Graeme Turner, among others. A number of influential anthologies have appeared, including Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Spigel and Olsson 2004), Television Studies after TV (Turner and Tay 2009), Television as Digital Media (Bennett and Strange 2011), and After the Break (de Valck and Teurlings 2013), as well as numerous monographs and trade books. Television studies journals, including Television and New Media, Flow, and View, have played host to vibrant debates about these issues. A wider body of technical and policy literature also exists, much of it authored by telecommunications experts; for example, Columbia University media economist Eli Noam has been writing about internet-distributed television since the 1990s, before it was of mainstream interest to media scholars.
Broadly, this literature maps an ongoing but uneven set of transitions in the history of television that are collectively working to transform it from a mass medium to a niche one through technological and institutional developments that “fragment the previously mass audience of television into a series of personalized choices” (Bennett 2011, 2). Kelsey (2010, 231) writes that, “We don’t just watch TV, we send and receive it, gather and organize it on our personal touch screens, meanwhile interacting with sites to produce, wittingly or not, the consumer feedback that helps broadcasters determine a season’s programming (if TV still even thinks in terms of seasons).” Tryon (2013, 14) argues that “contemporary media platforms actively solicit an individualized, fragmented, and empowered media consumer, one who has greater control over when, where, and how she watches movies and television shows,” warning that “this offer of liberation from the viewing schedule is often accompanied by increased surveillance.” In response to these shifts, alternative periodizations of television technology are also emerging. Some experts now refer to TVI (broadcast only), TVII (cable era), and TVIII (digital distribution), terms that draw our attention to the successive waves of transformation that have swept through television technology and the television industry (Todreas 1999; Pearson 2011; Johnson 2007).
The work of U.S. television scholar Amanda Lotz offers a richly textured account of these transformations. Across a number of books—especially the second edition of The Television Will Be Revolutionized (2014), Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television (2017a), and We Now Disrupt This Broadcast (2017b)—Lotz provides a forensic examination of the changes in the underlying economic models of television when it moves online, and how these models shape programming, production, and circulation. Lotz begins by explaining how the fundamental logic of television has been predicated on linearity: “Almost all the conventions of television—a flow of content, program length, expectations of weekly episodes—derive from practices developed to cope with the necessity of the linear schedule” (Lotz 2017a, 15). In contrast, the on-demand character of internet-distributed television, and its precedents in earlier on-demand services (such as pay-per-view movies delivered by cable), presents a different mode of distribution that has more in common with the record store, bookstore, or library. In this way, internet-distributed television “allow[s] behaviors that were peripheral in an age of analog, physical media such as time shifting, self-curation, and à la carte access to become central and industrialized practices” (17).
Lotz sees Netflix as a central part of this story, not only because the company “disrupted the long acculturated sense that television content should be viewed on a television set” (Lotz 2014, 71) but also because it introduced new kinds of filtering, aggregation, and recommendation systems that have since become widespread. She points to the Netflix Queue (now called a List) as a key site through which users negotiated the shift to nonlinear television, noting that “the queuing that Netflix introduced provided its subscribers with a different paradigm for thinking about and organizing viewing behavior, and one that substantially challenges the long dominant, linear, ‘what’s on’ proposition” (74). In other words, Lotz regards the online distribution of content as highly significant because it marks a transformation in the underlying structure and business models of television by freeing content from a linear schedule and by introducing new pricing models (including all-you-can-stream subscription packages) and audience expectations about the content, novelty, and value of TV services. As she writes, “The affordance of internet protocol technologies to deliver personally-selected content from an industrially curated library is the central difference introduced by this new distribution mechanism” (Lotz 2017a, 4).
Within the various contributions to the future-of-TV debate, we can see different degrees of emphasis on change as opposed to continuity. Lotz foregrounds the transformative dimensions of internet distribution in her work, while other scholars focus on the continuities. In this second category, we often find the work of media historians, who are—by training and temperament—ambivalent about diagnoses of radical change. William Uricchio, for example, stresses that notions of personal TV and interactive TV go back much further than the internet era and can be traced right through the history of the medium, with precursor concepts to be found throughout the twentieth century:
Television offers a striking case where both the technological platform and its deployment protocols have shifted radically and more or less continually since the late 19th Century. We’ve seen the project of the televisual ally itself with platforms such as the telephone, radio, film, and networked computer;
