As this structure suggests, my aim in this book is to use the controversies that have swirled around the Netflix service as a starting point for building a theory about the relationship between global television and internet distribution. In this way, the book develops a series of arguments and analyses that position Netflix within a longer trajectory of debate, reaching back through the history of transnational television. Each chapter begins with a particular analytical problem relating to global media, such as infrastructure, cultural imperialism, or localization; considers how this problem plays out in the case of Netflix; and then finally asks what Netflix can add to our understanding of these concepts. Netflix, in this sense, becomes a resource—or perhaps a platform—for revisiting enduring critical debates in global media studies.
1
What Is Netflix?
In the introduction to their book YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (2009), Jean Burgess and Joshua Green make an important point about the challenges of studying emergent digital media. For Burgess and Green, one of the most interesting and difficult things about writing a book on YouTube was the fact that it was still evolving. Late in the last decade, YouTube had a chameleonic character: it was a “distribution platform that can make the products of commercial media widely popular” while at the same time being “a platform for user-created content where challenges to commercial popular culture might emerge” (Burgess and Green 2009, 6). Its creators, investors, and users—not to mention media academics—had yet to agree on what YouTube actually was, meaning that there was still much uncertainty over what the platform could be used for, how it should be regulated, and how it could be understood in relation to other media. Burgess and Green argue that
because there is not yet a shared understanding of YouTube’s common culture, each scholarly approach to understanding how YouTube works must make different choices among these interpretations, in effect recreating it as a different object each time—at this early stage of research, each study of YouTube gives us a different understanding of what YouTube actually is. (6–7, emphasis in original)
Figure 1.1. Netflix mobile interface, as of January 2018. Screenshot by the author.
This basic ontological problem (what is a digital media service, and how do we interpret and theorize it?) applies to a range of phenomena that exist at the boundaries of television, cinema, and digital media. Scholars studying Netflix must therefore make certain choices about what kind of service it is and what the appropriate frames of analysis should be. These decisions work to re-create the object anew each time by opening up or closing off lines of comparison.
While Netflix is an established global brand with 20 years of history, there is still very little agreement about what Netflix is or how it should be understood by the public, scholars, or media regulators. Netflix—like many disruptive media phenomena before it, including radio and broadcast television—is a boundary object that exists between, and inevitably problematizes, the conceptual categories used to think about media. This definitional tension can be seen in the marketing slogans Netflix uses to describe itself, which reflect evolution in both the company’s distribution model and its discursive positioning in relation to other media. Presently, Netflix defines itself as a “global internet TV network,” but in the past it has preferred terms such as “the world’s largest online DVD rental service” (2002), “the world’s largest online movie rental service” (2009), and “the world’s leading Internet subscription service for enjoying TV shows and movies” (2011).1 Others have referred to Netflix as “a renegade player in the television game” (Farr 2016, 164), “a pioneer straddling the intersection where Big Data and entertainment media intersect” (Leonard 2013), a “monster that’s eating Hollywood” (Flint and Ramachandran 2017), and even “a company that’s trying to take over the world” (FX CEO John Landgraf, cited in Lev-Ram 2016). Other possible responses to the question “what is Netflix?” might include
a video platform,
a distributor,
a television network,
a global media corporation,
a 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