Centered on streaming media platforms, this book explores how digital technologies have fundamentally transformed the way we understand entertainment and the tightening nexus between technology, culture, and capitalism.
Building on a wide-ranging body of interdisciplinary inquiry, extending from media industry studies and critical political economy to media archaeology and film and media studies more generally, this book presents a unique critical approach that moves from macro-level analysis of industry economics to micro-level considerations focusing, for example, on streaming’s impact on changing narrative styles, genre formation, and related text-based aesthetic trends. The book’s core chapters develop in-depth analyses of streaming media’s three most emblematic platforms, Disney+, Netflix, and YouTube, highlighting their specificities while also assessing their place within a larger, shifting ecosystem. In offering a comparative account attentive to the importance of both historicizing and theorizing the changes brought about by streaming, this book lays out a path for renewed critical thinking about the contradictions in contemporary media and their impact on life in the 21st century.
This is essential reading for advanced students and scholars interested in the ever-evolving relationship between technology, media, culture, and economics.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Specter was Haunting…
Chapter 1
Contorted Convergences: From an Accidental SVOD Window to the End of the Streaming Wars
I. At the Dawn of Streaming
II. How the SVOD Window Was Won
III. Over the Digital Sublime and into the Streaming Wars
Chapter 2
Disney Plus Disney: The Double Logic of Digital Enclosures
I. Platform Problems: Technology and Control
II. Marvel’s Superhero Success: From a Cinematic Universe to Streaming’s Second Coming
III. This Is What Dreams Are Made Of
Chapter 3
In Remembering Times Lost: Netflix, Nostalgia, and Intermediation
I. Never Out of Time: Stranger Things or a New Approach to Original Programming
II. As the World Churns: Platform Economics and Technological Exceptionalism
III. Can We All Just Be on the Right Side of History? Making a Murderer, Televisualization and Surplus Content
Chapter 4
Portal Into the Future of Entertainment: YouTube between New Media and Post-Cinema
I. Welcome Home: Technological Wonder and Vestiges of an Unhomely Divide
II. The Rise and Fall of Internet Starlets: Music Videos and Digital Aesthetics
III. Zany Zombies in a Whack New World: Internet Aesthetics and Hollywood Gimmickry
Chapter 5
Coda: All Just a Dream…
Works Cited
Index
About the Author :
Kevin McDonald is a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Cal State Northridge, USA. He is the author of Film Theory: The Basics (revised and expanded 2nd edition, 2022) and coeditor of The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century (2016). His teaching and research focus on film, contemporary popular culture, and the intersections between media, technology, and performance.
