Timeline of Video Streaming

streaming services are able to both experiment with different types of content that would be too risky for movie studios. For example, while anyone can understand a superhero beating up a bad guy, a more complicated story might alienate younger viewers, which makes it a no-go for movie studios, but streaming services can afford to take that risk.

“So when people complain about like, there’s only superhero movies, and where’s my $40 million smart drama? That doesn’t really exist anymore in the marketplace,” Scott says, “There is a space where streaming platforms could be the ones to bring those things back.”

Perren agrees, saying “Most movies that aren’t sort of big budget blockbuster movies can find more opportunity on streaming services than they can in a theatrical release model.”

As does Salomao, who says, “In general, I think streaming has been great for the film and TV industries as it has been a key driver in generating higher quality content with more diversity in general.” Salomao particularly emphasizes the importance of this for international content, saying, “International content has been able to reach consumers at a much faster rate than it did before, even in the US, making consumers more exposed to content from countries that they usually would never have access to,”

Not only do the previously mentioned properties of streaming services allow them to host content from different genres or to subvert common tropes put in place to suit wider

“Part of what the most valuable thing all of these streaming platforms have is data,” - Suzanne Scott

“[Streaming Services] are very often an option for filmmakers that want to be able to make movies that otherwise would not be able to get funded,” Perren says.

Just because streaming services have more freedom in what they show to their viewers doesn’t mean that they can put anything on their service and it’ll explode in popularity, streaming services still cost money to run. There is a way that many streaming services ensure that everything they put on their service will attract more customers, though: data.

“Part of what the most valuable thing all of these streaming platforms have is data,” Scott says, adding that “They have an intense amount

of data on their users. So they know a lot about what people want, and they can use this to then create content.”

Perren goes further, saying “Because they’re reaching directly to individual consumers, they know where you are, they probably have very granular

data of everything about like, the second you started and stopped watching it, all of that sort of stuff, what you were drawn to in terms of the history, they can use that to create models of ‘this is what we want to have or need to have in this movie,’. And customize what they choose to produce or acquire in the first place with that data. Not to mention of course, that the interfaces, what you see on the screen, will look very different depending on what they perceive to be attractive to you as a consumer.”

Because of this massive amount of data they have, they can pull all sorts of tricks in order to further the reach of

the content they put on their platforms. “There’s an interesting work on whether or not you had a kind of name that sort of aligned yourself fairly clearly with a particular gender, they would give you different images to mark the same movie.”Scott said, then listing an example, “So let’s say it’s a horror movie, I get the one romantic, you know, kiss moment in the movie, and my partner who’s a man gets zombies getting murdered,”.

While this approach is effective, it can occasionally backfire. Certain markers that streaming services track are only correlated with the respective preferences of the customer. For example it may be determined that women are more likely to prefer the kiss scene while men prefer the zombie murder scene, but as Scott goes on to mention, this is not an empirical truth, and in her case, for example, she would’ve been more enticed by the zombie scene. The strategy of collecting data and using markers can be very reductive, and loses important information on the way, as it reduces people from people to just a few characteristics: what they’ve watched, their gender, their approximate age, and just a few other factors.

“There has been a shift in strategy in the major media companies to monetize their brands/content by launching their own streaming services,” - Cibele Salomao

This can lead to two problems: a misunderstanding of the audience, which can cause them to dislike content marketed specifically to them, and placing them in a narrow box which they are prevented from getting out of, as once they’ve watched a few of a particular type of thing, they are recommended more and more of it and they’re prevented from finding anything new, which might cause them to become dissatisfied with the platform.

Scott finds this lack of variety particularly frustrating as a Media Studies teacher, saying, “I teach Media Studies. Which means that I watch a lot of stuff for a lot of different reasons that maybe aren’t my personal taste reasons. But I have. So I find this very personally frustrating because I’ll watch something for a class that I’m pulling a clip for, and then my whole feed for days and days and weeks and weeks will just be giving me that same old thing, right?”.