by Cory Barker
Though most of Netflix’s recent successes are related to its role as a producer of television, the company has begun to expand its footprint as a distributor of first-run films as well. Again, a vital component of Netflix’s strategy is borrowed from normal Hollywood practice. The company has become a mainstay at the world’s major film festivals, including at Sundance, where the documentary The Square first debuted in January 2013. An Academy Award nominee in 2014, The Square depicts the Egyptian Revolution beginning with the 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square. James N. Gilmore’s essay considers how the circulation of The Square’s sharply political messages on a digital platform like Netflix speak to the potential power of what Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford call “media spreadability.” In analyzing the film’s do-it-yourself (DIY) production aesthetics and calls to action, Gilmore asserts that The Square is tailor-made for distribution across the web and social media. Netflix, he posits, is equally positioned to circulate political documentaries around the globe, dramatically expanding the civic influence of film.
The final part of the collection, “Netflix as Narrowcaster and as Global Player,” looks at Netflix’s impact on both the small and large scale. The first two essays examine the Netflix-driven trends of binge-watching and algorithmic recommendations through the lens of viewer response. Both essays provide observations from extensive interviews with and journaling from Netflix users who speak to the ways in which the company’s practices have altered their everyday lives. Emil Steiner reports on binge-watching, the phenomenon most associated with Netflix’s rise to prominence. Drawing a line from television’s status as a “boob tube” and “vast wasteland” to the stigmas surrounding binge-viewing, Steiner elucidates how the medium has long been at the center of critiques against popular culture. Participants in Steiner’s study regularly embody and eschew cultural assessments of bingeing, acknowledging how the practice reformulates their viewing habits, attentiveness, and overall relationship with programming. However, as Steiner and his interviewees traverse the touchy subject of how much bingeing is too much, it becomes clear that, as with all viewing practices, there is no unified binge-viewing experience. Netflix users see bingeing as something to celebrate and something to be ashamed of; likewise, they binge-watch to catch up, to veg out, to re-watch, and to share.
While Steiner traces Netflix’s place within historical debates about accepted viewing practices, Alison N. Novak investigates how the company’s data-driven approach compares to previous generations of narrowcasting. Like retail brands, magazine publishers, and cable channels before them, Netflix narrowcasts to its multitudinous user base. And like Amazon and Google, the company relies heavily on data collection and sophisticated algorithms to produce personalized recommendations to different user segments. Narrowcasting, recommendation engines, and algorithms are too often deployed as buzzy signifiers for the emergent digital ecosystem, but Novak’s findings underline how they actually operate in practice. Novak narrowcasts her own research, surveying the millennial response to Netflix’s recommendations. Though the most coveted demographic, Novak displays how millennials are also quite aware of how data collection affects everything they consume. On one hand, participants in Novak’s study underline the gradual banality of personalized recommendations, as most of the millennial respondents express comfort with and appreciation for how Netflix cultivates their taste profiles. On the other hand, these participants affirm that Netflix’s practices are part of a pattern of narrowcasting and technology, one that they are sure will lead to more nefarious forms of artificial intelligence and computer learning.
The remaining essays of this part reflect on Netflix’s mounting influence outside of the United States. Here again, authors position Netflix not as a supreme innovator but instead as a key player within broader technological and industrial trends in the United Kingdom and Mexico. In the UK television industry, for instance, Netflix followed Sky Digital, a groundbreaking interactive satellite digital television service, to the marketplace. Having previously researched consumer response to the rollout of Sky Digital in the mid–2000s, Vivi Theodoropoulou is well equipped to compare how Netflix has mirrored and expanded Sky’s playbook for a new generation. Theodoropoulou juxtaposes past and present interviews to exhibit how habits or phenomena we generally associate with Netflix have existed long before its streaming platform took hold. The interviews also reveal a crucial point of contention with video libraries of all kinds: the availability of content. Sky Digital and Netflix promise users the ability to watch what and when they want, but Theodoropoulou shows how both generations are still restricted by what is available at any given time. For Netflix interviewees, there is a firm understanding, built through experience, that access to content is always the result of negotiations beyond their control. As such, Theodoropoulou argues that it is the content—and not the platform—that will continue to persevere across each new technological development.
The final essay presents a vision of Netflix’s possible futures in its era of global expansion. Before its sprawling growth campaign in 2016, Netflix moved much more cautiously into other territories, including Mexico. Elia Margarita Cornelio-Marí surveys Netflix’s 2011 entry into Mexico with a particular focus on the industrial, regulatory, and cultural challenges that the company faced. Cornelio-Marí shows that, while Netflix identified Mexico as a target for enormous potential revenue, the streaming giant immediately encountered an audience hungry for local content and sympathetic toward piracy. The essay spotlights a Netflix that is quick to adapt its practices to non–American environments, as Cornelio-Marí details the company’s tinkering with pricing, crafting of new marketing strategies, dubbing of foreign content, and cultivating of localized productions. However, Netflix’s arrival in any new location is not just a story about Netflix or its new customers; it is also about the response from local competitors and legislators. To this end, Cornelio-Marí shows how vertically and horizontally integrated corporations have begun to use their vast infrastructural resources and local knowledge to raise the level of competition against Netflix. Ultimately, the Mexico case study demonstrates that for Netflix, worldwide expansion will not be easy. The company must strike a balance between the local and the global—a challenge that only gets harder with each additional expansion.
With a subject like Netflix, the talking points are endless; this collection seeks only to participate in the ongoing discourse about Netflix’s place in contemporary culture. Still, these ten essays establish that to best understand an innovative company like Netflix, we must continue to look backward, toward its antecedents in the technology and media industries. There we are reminded that sweeping changes in industry practice, consumer habits, and policy are rare, and more commonly part of a granular trek toward the future. There we are also reminded that while Netflix appears to have solidified its place—as a disruptor and cultural institution, as a producer and distributor, and as a narrowcaster and global player—the future it faces is still uncertain.
NOTES
1. Nathan McAlone, “Netflix Just Launched in 130 More Countries, and the Stock Is Soaring,” Business Insider, January 6, 2016, accessed January 20, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-just-launched-in-130-countries-more-countries-2016-1.
2. Jeff Dunn, “Netflix Is Booming on the Back of Subscribers Outside of the U.S.,” Business Insider, October 18, 2016, accessed January 20, 2017, http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-subscribers-us-international-chart-2016-10.
3. According to the October 2016 quarterly report, Netflix vowed to spend more than $6 billion on its original series productions in 2017. See Lauren Gensler, “Netflix Is Still Spending Money Like There’s No Tomorrow,” Forbes, October 18, 2016, accessed January 20, 2017, http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2016/10/18/netflix-cash-flow-original-content/#6fdd970a4f52.
4. Cynthia Littleton, “NBC Embraces Binge-Viewing, Releasing All ‘Aquarius’ Episodes Online After Premiere,” Variety, April 29, 2015, accessed Jan
uary 20, 2017, http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/nbc-embraces-binge-viewing-releasing-all-aquarius-episodes-online-after-premiere-1201484383/.
5. “Cutting the Cord,” The Economist, July 16, 2016, accessed January 20, 2017, http://www.economist.com/news/business/21702177-television-last-having-its-digital-revolution-moment-cutting-cord.
6. For more on the progress of cable’s attempts to combat Netflix see Daniel B. Kline, “Can Netflix Save Cable?” The Motley Fool, November 7, 2016, accessed January 20, 2017, https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/11/07/can-netflix-save-cable.aspx and Kenneth Ziffren, “How TV Can Weather the ‘Skinny Bundle’ Storm of Streaming Services,” The Hollywood Reporter, October 13, 2016, accessed January 20, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/how-tv-can-weather-skinny-937142.
7. Derek Kompare, “Past Media, Present Flows,” Flow 21 (2014), https://www.flowjournal.org/2014/09/past-media-present-flows/.
8. Edward Wyatt and Noam Cohen, “Comcast and Netflix Reach Deal on Service,” New York Times, February 23, 2014, accessed January 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/business/media/comcast-and-netflix-reach-a-streaming-agreement.html?_r=0.
9. Julia Alexander, “Netflix’s Chief Has Every Right to Be Worried About Net Neutrality in a Trump Administration,” Polygon, December 1, 2016, accessed January 20, 2017, http://www.polygon.com/2016/12/1/13806052/netflix-streaming-net-neutrality-att.
10. Julia Greenberg, “Netflix’s VPN Ban Isn’t Good for Anyone—Especially Netflix,” Wired, January 16, 2016, accessed January 20, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2016/01/netflixs-vpn-ban-isnt-good-for-anyone-especially-netflix/; Evan Elkins, “The United States of America: Geoblocking in a Privileged Market,” in Geoblocking and Global Video Cultures, ed. Ramon Lobato and James Meese (Amsterdam: Institute of Networked Cultures, 2016), 190–199.
11. Mike McPhate, “California Today: Fretting Over the ‘Netflix Tax,’” New York Times, November 28, 2016, accessed January 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/us/california-today-netflix-tax–video-streaming.html; Roberto Baldwin, “Chicago Kicks in ‘Cloud Tax’ on Streaming Services Like Netflix,” Engadget, July 2, 2015, accessed January 20, 2017, https://www.engadget.com/2015/07/02/chicago-netflix-tax/.
12. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 5.
13. Ibid., 7.
Part One: Netflix as Disruptor and as Cultural Institution
* * *
From Primetime to Anytime
Streaming Video, Temporality and the Future of Communal Television
JUSTIN GRANDINETTI
When television critic Andy Greenwald of the sports and pop culture website Grantland reviewed the first season of the Netflix original series House of Cards (2013–) one month after its release, he remarked, “I finished watching the 13th and final episode of the first season on Sunday night and I have no idea if that makes me ahead of the curve or hopelessly behind.”1 This comment represents the recent conundrum of many entertainment critics, reporters, and bloggers, in that the temporal regularity of television has been thoroughly interrupted by the new Netflix model of releasing an entire season at a time. More importantly, this release model also affects viewers, reshaping the communal television experience amid the digital streaming revolution.
In February 2012, Netflix began its foray into original programming with the Norwegian series Lilyhammer (2012–2014). House of Cards, a political drama starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, debuted a year later. Contrary to the weekly scheduling of linear television, all 13 House of Cards episodes were available to viewers the day of release. Netflix has since distributed a growing number of series in this manner, including the fourth season of the cult classic Arrested Development (2003–2006, 2013) and the popular original series Orange Is the New Black (2013–; referenced onward as OITNB). Although these series have garnered critical acclaim, they simultaneously pose new questions to the continued existence of communal television viewing. Most notably, the Netflix release model creates questions of how both viewers and news organizations adjust to this new reality as well as the ways the reactions of these groups consequently shape future Netflix programming.
In the following essay, I rhetorically analyze articles by publications such as Vulture, The A.V. Club, and Grantland to argue that the binge-watching behavior encouraged by streaming platforms like Netflix fundamentally reshapes the nature of communal television viewing and introduces an antagonism that was absent in earlier iterations of “Web 2.0” audience engagement. More specifically, the interactions between the entertainment correspondents and viewers on these websites provides a space to extend theories of rhetorical vernacular posited by Gerard Hauser, Erin McClellan, and Ralph Cintron, as these online engagements represent new developments of changing temporality and communal experience of television.
Of course, these events do not operate in a purely cause and effect manner. Audience response to Netflix’s all-at-once release strategy will continue to impact future production and distribution strategies, and ultimately guide the discourse among standing and burgeoning online communities. As such, this essay contributes to the interdisciplinary conversations about how interactive electronic environments impact the texture of publics. Furthermore, as Arrested Development and OITNB were among first Netflix original series releases, the reactions analyzed in this essay represent some of the vanguard responses to the disruption of television temporality. Both the critical and viewer response to these series contributed their online ubiquity, and this pervasive dialectic sets these programs apart from the few vanguard Netflix releases that preceded them.
In order to understand audience reactions to this changing temporality of the television experience, it is important to examine theories of the way rhetoric functions in these quotidian spaces. As such, this essay focuses on user commentary in public and communal forums—the most encompassing of which is the Internet. In his work contemporary ethnography, Cintron writes, “The availability of critical inquiry to everyone is a position that is important to take. Quite simply, rhetorical analysis is not just an endeavor of specialists but also an everyday affair.”2 In these colloquial and communal spaces of the Internet comment sections, audiences of Netflix programming create meaning and negotiate this changing television temporality together. Furthermore, the evolving vernacular rhetoric of these spaces follows Hauser’s theories, in that
ordinary people, whether they are neighbors or a class, develop and rely on a vernacular with rhetorical salience. Although not a discourse of power and officialdom, it nonetheless adheres to the fundamental rhetorical demand for propriety … vernacular exchanges indicate bonds of affiliation; they speak a legible and intelligible rhetoric of shared values and solidarity.3
Before continuing, it is also important to briefly define the term “audiences.” Broadly speaking, the audience for these programs is any individual who chooses to watch them. However, when discussing the communal discussion that surrounds Netflix programming, there is a difference between viewers who watch the series at their leisure and entertainment correspondents who write about the programming professionally. This demarcation is critical in this essay, as the power relationship between these two audiences is often unequal. Nevertheless, in the publications I selected for examination, it is clear that all audiences of Netflix programming have the opportunity to contribute to the evolving nature of the communal television experience and communicate with one another using a negotiated vernacular. Furthermore, these
studies of vernacular rhetoric, in all its forms, have the potential to expose sense-making processes in more raw and revealing ways than its official or formal rhetorical counterparts considered alone. It takes rhetorical criticism in an empirical direction, which includes not only audience judgments of “official” rhetoric but the construction of a rhetoric culture of their own.4
Taken together, investigation into the rhetorical strategies of the users of these online discourses provides
a method of understanding the evolution of the communal television experience in a binge-watch paradigm fostered by online platforms such as Netflix.
Evolving Vernacular Rhetoric and the Internet
In the remainder of this essay, I investigate specific examples of the evolving communal television experience through an examination of three publications, Vulture, The A.V. Club, and Grantland. These websites were chosen as they represent the genre of entertainment reviews delivered in electronic environments. Moreover, in each of these spaces, writers and/or critics openly reflect about their decision to impose an order to the chaos created by attempting to review a television series released in its entirety. Both Vulture and The A.V. Club encourage audiences to comment on the site’s reviews, which allows for an inquiry into the evolving communal television experience. The more traditional television release schedule that has dominated the majority of the medium’s existence involves serialized programming. In this familiar paradigm, television series premiere new episodes in what is typically a weekly release schedule. Successful programs run for multiple seasons, in which a number of new episodes are released once a week across a number of months. However, this model’s longevity appears to be in question, as new data points to the preference of audiences to consume content in so-called “binge” sessions.5