Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Now TV. The list of buzzword branded streaming platforms could go on for an unforeseeable length of time.
Over the past decade these services have crept their way into our day to day lives. Instead of renting a film from your local Xtra-vision on a Friday, you can log in to the family Netflix account and press play on a wide variety of film and television from their extensive library. The regularity of these services has seen platform-relevant terminology cement itself as part of the modern lexicon. It is not unusual to hear someone say that they are “binge-watching” a television show, the concept of a “Netflix-and-chill” makes perfect sense to most, even if it is debatable whether or not the term has been used seriously ever since it became popular.
Whether you like it or not, streamers have taken their place as a regular part of the lives of many people worldwide (Netflix having about 260M subscribers, to be more precise.)
The accessibility of these services seems like a dream come true for film lovers and casual viewers alike, right? In many ways it is. Being able to access thousands upon thousands of titles at the press of a few buttons certainly caused the pirating habits of most of us to lie dormant for a couple years and, in its prime, Netflix had the best selection of every big franchise and piece of cinema considered seminal to pop culture.
For a brief moment, it was a fantastic mark of progress.
That is of course, where things start to go south. Suddenly, just about every production company had their own streaming platform and any who had already had one were pumping it full of cash. Major titles were pulled from Netflix and spread across about four huge platforms. The point of having a subscription started to become null and void. Netflix, who had started only as a distributor, needed to start producing hits in order to retain their vast audience.
I don’t think I need to say the names for Netflix shows to pop into your head, they’ve had great success. Another thing that Netflix has become known for, though, is funding just about anything, because if you throw enough shit at a wall, some of it will stick.
This is not to say that there is no merit to any of the shows. There are people behind them who put in time, work, effort and passion to create these pieces that get lost in the dredges of a thousand and one other shows that are being released at the same time. There is benefit in the funding, but the art does suffer for it at the same time. Not to mention the fact that people are so inundated with the vast Netflix library that it has opened people up to countless articles and pieces on how the platform educates us on the psychological phenomenon know as “the paradox of choice” and “decision fatigue“.
This paralysing experience was something that never happened to us prior to Netflix. If anything, it was hard to choose what to watch because every channel would be far too boring at certain hours of the day. Though we were all blown away by the “anytime, anywhere” availability of Netflix, it’s hard to say now that the monthly free is worth it anymore.
The scarcity of choice is what made film selection a luxury when it came to rental. Growing up, we had eight channels on the television, only one of which showed kids programmes and only for a limited time. Just recently I had a conversation with a friend in which we chatted about how the only reason we ever saw Australian soap Home and Away was because it would play on a Saturday night after The Simpsons. This is a shared experience that we had in our childhood that is communal and bonding. This sort of community is what’s erased by streaming, and even if it is a very small thing, it becomes a real shame as the disconnect between people grows by just a fraction. We are no longer locked into the same timeframe or familial events. There’s no talk about this week’s X factor on a Monday morning or excitement when the new season of Doctor Who is teased right before the ad break. The immense cultural and social impact of television has been almost completely eradicated and it effects how the invisible boundaries of community are set.
It is true that times change. Someone older than me could probably talk about how the popularity of television was the destructive advancement. This digression aside, this brings me to the impact of more technical practices that I take issue with, carrying us to the present day, where I can talk about one technique for release that absolutely drives me up the wall.
Netflix’s attempt to maintain hype around releases manifested itself in the two-part strategy. Take, for example, one of their biggest shows right now, Bridgerton. Now, don’t get me wrong, who doesn’t love a period romance, there’s a reason why Jane Austen remains so prominent. The new season of Bridgerton stars the wonderful Nicola Coughlan as the lead and has been split into two sets of four episodes, released a month apart.
Though this does add suspense and encourages discussion about the show, it does not serve the same purpose as releasing episodes weekly. People still binge-watch all the episodes in one go. Many people have criticised the first half of the new Bridgerton series for rushing their love story, if released weekly, I doubt this would be as widespread an opinion. Instead of taking four weeks to get to a progression in a character’s relationship, it is taking only four hours to see it change. With this in mind, it is clear to see how their perception of the timing in show is so altered. It also reminds me of how HBO releases their originals, week by week. This is a part of why they have had some of the most popular and memorable TV shows of the past few years. Imagine if the final series of Game of Thrones had been released in one go, as soon as word got out about the finale, countless people would have chosen simply not to watch. The enjoyment would be over in moments. Some may have liked this as it would have saved them time on the disappointment, but it overall had audiences in a chokehold for those months that it was coming out.
There is no longer hype around a series finale, there is no weekly gathering of people around a television to tune in to their shared enjoyed show. Not only do most streaming platforms eradicate the joy and community of viewing, but it also causes the show that creators worked so hard on for so long to be instantly rolled over onto the next. Now, by the time you get home from work to turn on the latest episode of your favourite show, about five pop culture twitter accounts will have tweeted out how the entire show ends and going online becomes a minefield of spoilers. To make it worse, this used to last just one episode, generally no longer than 40-50 minutes. It now can span the entirety of a show, in seconds you can have the ending ruined completely.
To some, this is a tad overdramatic and in fairness to Netflix, they do put a lot of funding into the advertising of this show to keep their audiences interested. But I do think that this is indicative and enabling of one of the biggest issues in the mindset of the current viewers.
The modern audience is a creature of disgusting levels of demand. It gets what it wants as soon as it wants it, and if you cannot meet this need then you are forgotten as ceaseless consumption continues. No one wants to wait more than a year for a season two or a sequel film. Patience is an impossibility; instant gratification is the new way of life.
Short form video has ingrained itself in our brains so much that putting on a movie seems to be too much hassle but binge-watching five episodes of a show, an hour long each, is reasonable. This level of fickle cannot be reasoned with nor predicted. Film and television lose their status as an art form and are instead cast aside into the impossibly expanding, and rather denigrative, genre known simply as “content”.
Both viewer and funder need to be put back in their box. The audience cannot be trusted to know what they want to see, and the funder can never give that to them. We need to start investing and trusting film makers, writers, directors, set designers, prop makers, actors, special effects artists, stunt co-ordinators, costume departments and (especially) lighting and sound departments again.
Why should a writer with a tv script need to beg Netflix to advertise their show between three more seasons of Stranger Things and another crappy Christmas film starring Vanessa Hudgens? Why does a film need to be an instant box office hit to be allowed stay on screen for longer than two weeks? Why do all-star film makers like Francis Ford Coppola have to struggle to find a distributor for their film after having to fund it with their own money? Although he can fully afford it, that’s not the point. The point is, if a director with a reputation for success like Francis Ford Coppola can’t find someone who wants to pay for his latest film, then what chance does a new film maker have?
The people with the money get to pick and choose far too much, down to what goes into our homes and what doesn’t. No matter how big the library of a streaming platform is, there will always be films and shows that never get chosen. This is catastrophic from an archival perspective and completely absurd from an art lover’s perspective. From magazine, Cinéaste, comes a piece called From Disc to Stream: A Critical Symposium on the Changing World of Home Video. In this piece one of the contributors writes this; “But wherever you are on the spectrum of home viewership, know that not every movie will go anywhere. There are many titles that haven’t advanced past VHS, and many more that languish without a release of any kind.”
Part of the difficulty with the digital obsession is that we no longer have the option of physical media. Many films will be lost in the depths of streaming platforms and those that do not succeed in viewership get removed, with no alternate availability in any other medium. Because of this, many incredible pieces slip through the cracks and are lost forever. Even cult classics aren’t safe. You would think a film like 28 Days Later would always be available due to its popularity but after Disney lost rights to it, the film is now out of print in physical form and removed from all streamers. Now, with rights being held hostage, and discs long since becoming a medium that is not catered to in modern tech, 28 Days Later is heading towards being lost media.
We have seen a full cultural shift away from physical media and in 2023 Netflix finally made the decision to halt their film home-delivery programme. According to their own records, this service had had over 40Million subscribers over its 25-year span. But it’s not all bad, big film makers such as Christopher Nolan have shown solid support for the return to DVD manufacturing. This isn’t a case of wanting one or the other, it’s more of a plea for an emphasis on quality and passion when creating film or TV, for it to be removed from the reductive categorising as simple, consumable media. We can have all the pleasures of streaming services, but we should be able to have good quality cinema and television too. So called advancements in technology and entertainment should never be at the expense of accessibility to any calibre of art, whatever medium it may be in.
