we know it. Seen from this perspective, internet distribution can reasonably be understood as something that is easily assimilated into existing business models. But there are longer-range effects at work here, too, and not all of them can be predicted in advance. Over time, the nonlinear affordance of internet distribution is likely to lead to further specialization and expansion in content production, such that new texts may increasingly be designed for the experiential specificities of internet rather than broadcast or cable distribution. We can already start to see this with the kinds of quality dramas made explicitly for binge viewing, and in the proliferation of short-form web comedies that would not fit well into a traditional schedule, not to mention the vast pool of amateur content on YouTube. This suggests that changes in distribution can have longer-term effects in other areas of the system, including production and reception. While we may still watch TV in familiar ways, in familiar spaces and formats, transformations are taking place that slowly recalibrate the whole system.
The question “is it still TV?” is problematic precisely because its framing invites a reductive “yes” or “no” answer that works to solidify a category (television) that may instead be better deconstructed, or at least reformulated. Cunningham and Silver (2013) argue that instead of asking whether new media has changed old media, and thus lapsing into familiar binaries of technological crisis versus continuity, we should focus instead on how to account for the rate of change, and the particular combinations of change and stasis that exist at any one time in the history of a medium. They reject both the “everything has changed” and “nothing has changed” positions as inadequate responses to the question of media industry transformation. Following this lead, we could also ask what other intellectual resources are available to us for thinking about the relationship between, rather than merely the “impact of,” internet distribution vis-à-vis television.
An excellent model is provided by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, who have worked through this problem in a different context. In their chapter “Digital Cinema and Film Theory—The Body Digital,” they extrapolate Lev Manovich’s idea of the inside-out to advance the argument that digitization can create simultaneous stasis and change, leading to their apparently paradoxical conclusion that, “With digital cinema everything remains the same and everything has changed” (Elsaesser and Hagener 2015, 202). What Elsaesser and Hagener mean by this is that there has been great change within the boundaries of an existing category such that the referent of the category itself is transformed and we are no longer talking about the same thing we thought we were talking about. Hence it is not so much a matter of tracing lines of continuity and change around a fixed axis but rather grappling with the “inside-out” ontological transformation of a medium.
Consider how Elsaesser and Hagener work through this paradox in relation to cinema. Their account insists that the social experience of cinema-going remains popular, durable, and powerful (“stars and genres are still the bait, concessions and merchandise provide additional or even core revenue for the exhibitor, and the audience is still offered a social experience along with a consumerist fantasy,” 202). However, they also claim that the textual form of digitally shot cinema has been reorganized through digital production, such that the relationship between image and representation is now completely recast. Digital cinema now produces the effect of cinematic representation as just one of its potential applications. Hence there is not only a combination of stasis and change but also a series of internal changes that produce the same external appearance. This is change from the “inside out,” such as when a parasite takes over its host, “leaving outer appearances intact but, in the meantime, hollowing out the foundations—technological as well as ontological—on which a certain medium or mode of representation was based” (204–205).
This is a compelling theory of technological change, a reminder that change and stasis not only coexist but can also envelop each other. Elsaesser and Hagener are referring to production techniques in the main. However, there is some parallel to distribution. The inside-out transformation of internet television allows the TV experience (the reception technology, domestic space, textual formats, and so on) to remain consistent with established norms while unfurling a substantive change on the inside—specifically, the inherent nonlinearity and interactivity of the digital video platform. Viewers pick and choose individual items from a database rather than watch what is “on” at any given time. There is no scheduled flow of programming (even though much of the licensed content offered on SVOD services was produced for such a schedule); there are only individual pieces of content within a database of offerings that can be consumed in any order, at any time, and that will often continue to play automatically thanks to the Netflix Post-Play feature (which automatically cues the next episode). Depending on how we evaluate such structural changes in distribution, this aspect of internet television may indeed embody the same inside-out quality that Elsaesser and Hagener identify in digital cinema production.
As we can see from these various arguments, there are benefits and risks to seeing Netflix through the lens of television. Such a perspective opens our eyes to important continuities in the experience, production norms, and domestic context of moving-image entertainment, but it can also produce some analytical traps. This is why it is helpful to take a both/and approach, so we can approach our object from multiple perspectives simultaneously. As we have seen, Netflix may still feel like TV to viewers, and it relies on this familiar pleasure for its success, but its distributional logic is markedly different—technologically, economically, and structurally. It is too early to tell, of course, but we should at least entertain the possibility that the affordance of internet protocol distribution may well prove to be the parasite inside the host—the agent of change that ends up quietly overtaking the organism from the inside out—while still retaining its outward features.
Digital Media Studies and the Platform Perspective
Let us consider a second analytical approach and what it might bring to an understanding of Netflix. This second approach would consider Netflix as a digital media service—a computational, software-based system that can produce a television-like experience as just one of its potential applications. Following this line of thought—which in fact aligns with the historical origins of the company and the way it presents itself to investors and regulators, if not to users—we can start to see how Netflix fits in with a quite different set of debates that have been playing out in fields such as new media studies, internet studies, and platform studies. In this section, I explore some of the arguments relevant to Netflix that have emerged from these debates. This will push our analysis of Netflix in a direction different from where television studies might take us.
This second way of thinking is less concerned with understanding Netflix in relation to television, cinema, or any other form of screen media, however one defines it. In contrast, it sees Netflix as a complex sociotechnical software system. It is more interested in looking sideways to other digital media, rather than backward to television, to assess similarities and differences. There is, then, a fundamental difference between a television studies approach and a digital media approach. The former is inherently historicizing; it sees its object in relation to a particular media technology (television) and its evolution. In contrast, the latter implicitly frames its object as a set of computational technologies tied together into a common user interface while also understanding each digital media service as a kind of communication system in its own right—with unique design, affordances, and limitations. This allows us to think about Netflix alongside a much wider range of digital media, including not only video platforms (YouTube, Youku, Hulu) but also e-commerce and social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, Ebay, Amazon, Weibo) as well as other software artifacts, such as electronic program guides (EPGs), gaming consoles, or desktop operating systems.
The term “platform” requires some explanation. In new media and internet studies, platforms are commonly defined as large-scale online systems premised on user interaction and user-generated content—including Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Snapchat, YouTube, Flickr, Grindr, and others. Platform studies, as it has become known, is a field of critical, empirical, and theoretical research concerned with these new institutions of the internet age and the specific ways in which they have been able to harness user communication and labor. It seeks
