On Streaming-Media Platforms, Their Audiences, and Public Life

Abstract

Over the past decade, streaming-media platforms have emerged as new and natively digital forms of content delivery. For the audience, streaming-media platforms appear as the new way of watching TV or a new kind of film distribution at the outset. Yet they radically transform the spatial and temporal settings of audience activity, introducing an algorithmically modulated logic of programming that we provisionally call microcasting and changing the way we relate to entertainment content in general. This essay critically evaluates how streaming-media platforms restructure the temporal, spatial, and relational dynamics of audience activity and strip off its collective essence. It discusses this new technological form’s actual and potential effects on public life by referring to certain foundational concepts from television, audience, and film studies.

Key Words:

• Algorithmic Regulation
• Audience
• New Media
• Platform Capitalism
• Public Sphere

Notes

1 Weber (1996, 117) describes this as “splitting the unity of place and with it the unity of everything that defines its identity with respect to place: events, bodies, subjects.”

2 In this context, we also have to consider the evident transformation of social time under post-Fordist production regimes and the ways post-Fordist capitalism restructures the temporality of work and labor processes. The detachment of audience activity from social time through streaming-media platforms occurs in tandem with various forms of precarious labor, outsourcing, freelancing, and remote working practices that transgress 9-to-5 working hours and blur the distinction between leisure time and work time. In this respect, it is possible to think that streaming-media platforms fulfill the leisure time of social subjects who no longer conduct their lives according to a generally observed social-time regime.

3 While it is true that anticipation of the release of new seasons of popular serials and shows on streaming-media platforms generates shared excitement among their viewer bases and thus has a temporal effect that points to some form of scheduling/programming, this is still different than the social scheduling/programming of broadcast TV shows and film releases since the actual watching experience happens in solitude, and since full-season releases neither sustain the temporal continuity of weekly episodes nor actually refer to the seasonal structuring of TV programming. The term “season” comes from the TV networks’ fall, spring, and summer programming seasons, which determine the number of weekly episodic installments—i.e., thirteen to sixteen episodes per season.