Symposium – Streaming Video as a Cultural Form

Pity the media scholar, forced to reckon with entities, processes, and concepts as imprecise as ‘media’, ‘film’, and ‘television’. Even when terms such as ‘television’ are pinned down to a single sense, say, the technological, they continue to evade precision (analog/digital? Live/recorded? Broadcast/cable/streamed? Emanated/projected? ...). While the relatively constrained technological genealogy of ‘streaming’ might seem to spare it this fate (particularly when tied to the substantive ‘video’), we might press the term, and if it slips, assess what that slippage occludes or reveals. Cultural forms by no means imply stasis; but cultural moments – reified as snapshots of a sort – do.

And so the question: what can we learn from this slippage, about our assumptions as scholars and about the ongoing development of the forms that we study? As Latour observed, for scholars, the demarcation of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and the contours of their tool-bench have determining implications for their findings. The perspectives of television studies and media studies on streaming, in this regard, yield quite different views. And perspective, in turn, determines what developments and which players we are likely to see as relevant to the ongoing transformation of particular cultural forms.  
Perhaps not surprisingly, this talk will embrace slippage as a feature, exploring both what a narrow view occludes and a broad view affords.

Judith Keilbach (Utrecht University) and Markus Stauff (University of Amsterdam)

Due to the radical technical, economic, and aesthetic transformations of television, the key concepts that once played a central role in establishing television studies as a discipline seem to have lost their pertinence. This problem becomes especially apparent in teaching, where the disciplinary desire to discuss canonical texts often conflicts with students’ media-agnostic practices. By comparing how we set-up our introductory television courses in the early 2000s with our current teaching, we aim to trace the changing utility of concepts such as “flow”, “cultural forum”, and “the structured communication of events”.

Do these concepts merely describe a past historical moment which serves as a contrast to accentuate the dramatic changes in the field? Or can they be appropriated and translated to help students understand not only the genealogy but also the key characteristics of contemporary media power? We do not suggest a simple classification of approaches that are more or less outdated. Rather, we argue that insisting on a seemingly obsolete concept can illuminate analytical directions which are urgently needed but not yet fully developed.

Vilde Schanke Sundet (Oslo Metropolitan University)

Young people spend more time on screen entertainment than ever, yet they allocate their time differently across various types of entertainment. A significant concern for domestic media is that youth are shifting from traditional film and television industries to transnational streaming services and social media platforms. This presentation builds on collaborative work with Marika Lüders and the GLOBAL NATIVES project, examining screen entertainment through a combined perspective of industry and youth. It draws from nine interviews with industry professionals and a qualitative study involving 24 teenagers. 

The presentation revisits theories of cultural flows and proximity, exploring what home advantages signify for teenagers in today’s streaming landscape and how domestic media organisations utilise them to attract young audiences. A key argument is that proximity theories remain relevant in media and communication studies but require refinement. Furthermore, we argue that theoretical adjustments must consider not only the abundance of content and choices available but also how ‘home’ is understood, both within the media industry and among teenagers

Karin van Es (Utrecht University)

Streaming platforms like Netflix circulate compelling narratives, or Barthesian myths, about how we watch television today. Ideas such as binge-watching, popular TV, and cultural diversity have shaped how we understand video-on-demand (VoD) services, but often rely on limited evidence due to the platforms' lack of data transparency. While Netflix has begun releasing select viewership figures, these disclosures are largely strategic and offer little meaningful insight. This limits our ability to understand what it means to watch Netflix today.

In this talk, I will present research based on data donations from 126 Netflix users in the Netherlands, analyzing 10,519 viewing sessions from 2023 to examine actual viewing behavior. This study leverages the EU’s GDPR, which allows individuals to access their personal data from data processors like Netflix. Through computational analysis of trace data and reflections on Netflix’s release strategy, business model, and content offerings, we interrogate the myths of binge-watching, popularity, and diversity and contribute to critical discussions on streaming video as a cultural form.

Deborah Castro Mariño (University of Groningen)

By 2020, video-on-demand (VOD) platforms had overtaken traditional linear broadcasters in the premiere of TV drama in Spain, signaling a broader shift in media consumption and industrial priorities. In this context, original drama has become central to the branding strategies and cultural positioning of (some) streaming platforms. In this presentation, I am to bring into discussion the extent to which VOD has transformed the production of domestic Spanish TV drama, attending to the continuities and ruptures in aesthetic and narrative conventions, and considering what is at stake.

Daphne Rena Idiz (University of Toronto, formerly Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis)

How is the “cultural form” (Ellis, 1992) of streaming shaped not only by how it is produced, but how we watch? Drawing from semi-structured interviews with fourteen European screenwriters, showrunners, directors, and producers of Netflix originals, this talk explores how evolving viewer practices—especially distracted or “second-screen” viewing—feed back into production, reshaping the aesthetic and industrial norms of specific series (Idiz, 2024; Idiz, 2025).

Building on John Ellis’s (1992) notion of broadcast TV as a domestic medium structured around segmented flow, and William Uricchio’s (2013) work on television’s interpretive flexibility, I argue that streaming platforms are reviving and reconfiguring the aesthetics of casual viewing once associated with certain genres of broadcast. In contrast to prestige-era “cinematic” TV, many of today’s Netflix originals are built for distraction: shaped by data-driven commissioning, reliant on overly expository dialogue, and scripted to accommodate audiences half-watching while scrolling on their phones. These “second-screen shows” (Idiz, 2024) mark a striking continuity with Ellis’s “segment form” (1992, 122)—now adapted for a mobile, algorithmically-curated, on-demand environment. Yet, as this talk will demonstrate, there are also new implications for creative labor complicated by the data-driven logics and global reach of streaming.

This talk contributes to the symposium’s inquiry into streaming as a cultural form by critically examining the production constraints—focusing particularly on notes given by streaming executives to screenwriters—which shape contemporary storytelling and the aesthetics of streaming content