Access for everyone? Australia’s ‘streaming wars’ and consumers with disabilities

Abstract

This article is concerned with the recent rise in popularity of video-on-demand services as a form of entertainment in Australia and its premise of offering freedom to watch whatever, whenever. The article investigates how the entry of video-on-demand services into the Australian television market has both enabled and disabled televisual content access, focusing on how people with disability access video-on-demand content and the hardware and software they use to do this. It discusses how a lack of accessibility features, reduced useability and cumulative barriers to accessibility has led to failure of these services to be inclusive of everyone.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN) for providing funding for this research. Preliminary studies were funded by the Australian Research Council (DE130101712). The researchers also thank Scott Hollier who provided vital research assistance and the people with disability who participated in the survey.

Notes

1. Presto closed in January, 2017. The company, partly owned by Foxtel, was ‘merged’ into the existing Foxtel Play subscription service.

2. So called plug and play devices are designed to work perfectly when first connected without any configuration by the user.