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Theses and Dissertations

Summer 2015

Streaming media: audience and industry shifts in a

networked society
Benjamin Edward Burroughs
University of Iowa

Copyright 2015 Benjamin Edward Burroughs

This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1833

Recommended Citation
Burroughs, Benjamin Edward. "Streaming media: audience and industry shifts in a networked society." PhD (Doctor of Philosophy)
thesis, University of Iowa, 2015.
https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.e9qi86xf

Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd

Part of the Communication Commons

STREAMING MEDIA: AUDIENCE AND INDUSTRY SHIFTS IN A NETWORKED SOCIETY

by

Benjamin Edward Burroughs

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in Communication Studies in the
Graduate College of
The University of Iowa

August 2015

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Kembrew McLeod

 Copyright by

BENJAMIN EDWARD BURROUGHS

2015

All Rights Reserved

 Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

____________________________

PH.D. THESIS

_________________

This is to certify that the PH.D. thesis of

Benjamin Edward Burroughs

has been approved by the Examining Committee for

the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in Communication Studies at the August 2015 graduation.

Thesis Committee: ____________________________________________

Kembrew McLeod, Thesis Supervisor

____________________________________________
Jiyeon Kang

____________________________________________
Trevor Harvey

____________________________________________
Timothy Havens

____________________________________________
John Peters
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is often said that a dissertation becomes a part of your family (like another baby

or something). I’m not so sure about that. I am sure that it took my entire family to make

this dissertation happen. In that spirit, I want to acknowledge my family of co-authors;

Daschle Stryder, Mercer Tahitoe, Wren Kameakamakanaokalani, and especially my wife,

Rayna. Thank you for your patience and love.

You know you have seriously lucked out when one of the coolest people you know is

also your advisor. Thank you, Kembrew, for being incredibly supportive of my quirky

research interests and patient as I have matured as a scholar. I must acknowledge my (bat)

committee: Kembrew McLeod, Trevor Harvey, Timothy Havens, Jiyeon Kang, and John

Peters. I’m truly grateful you encouraged me to pursue streaming as a dissertation topic.

Thank you, Tim, for tolerating all of the hallway conversations. Thank you, Trevor, for the

walks and guidance. Thank you, Jiyeon, for always being available and willing to listen to

my tangents. Thank you, John, for guiding me through this entire process.

I also want to acknowledge a long list of gracious professors who invested an

inordinate amount of time in my scholarship (and in me as a person). At the London School

of Economics and Political Science: Lilie Chouliaraki, Don Slater, and Andy Pratt. At the

University of Southern California: Henry Jenkins, Dmitri Williams, and Patti Riley. At

Brigham Young University-Hawaii: Phillip McArthur, Chad Compton, Tevita Ka’ili, David

and Yifen Beus, Chiung Hwang Chen, Chad Ford, Matt Kester, Dale Robertson, Troy Smith,

Dan Stout and the entire ICS department. At the University of Iowa: Travis Vogan, Leslie

Baxter, Gigi Durham, André Brock, Sonia Ryang, Rita Zajacz and the entire Communication

Studies Department. Special thanks to Wanda Osborn and Troy Fitzpatrick. I must

ii
acknowledge my lunch club cohort who challenged my thinking and tolerated my

classroom antics. Thanks, Adam Rugg and Melissa Zimdars, Michaela Frischerz and Brook

Irving.

Finally, I want to thank my parents and family. Lonia and Jeff have put up with a lot.

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 ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines streaming media both as a technological innovation and

cultural practice that co-configures audience and industry. Strategies and tactics provide a

theoretical framework for understanding streaming media. Streaming is theorized as a

tactic; wherein audiences momentarily buck against the strategic logic of media

conglomerates and copyright regimes. However, streaming, concomitantly, is an audience

tactic and a strategic logic of an emergent streaming industry. This results in the blurring

between first and third party and sanctioned and unsanctioned streaming. In this

dissertation, I parse out what are the nascent streaming logics within this burgeoning

industry and how they constitutively shape and re-shape audiences and traditional

broadcasting logics.

Five typologies of streaming serve as conceptual tools for deepening our

understanding of streaming media and technology. The first is streaming as a recent

technological advancement, divided into software and hardware categories. The second

conceptual framework is a typology of streaming that divides streaming into first and third

party sanctioned and unsanctioned streaming. The third is streaming as an emergent

industry. The fourth is streaming as a discourse, and the final typology divides streaming

based on geography as transnational streaming, national streaming, and diasporic

streaming. All of these classifications lay the groundwork for the further conceptualization

of this important and emergent socio-technical practice.

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 PUBLIC ABSTRACT

Streaming media is an emerging force in the way that we produce, consume, and

distribute media. In this dissertation, I look at the impacts of this recent technological

advancement on audience practices and media industries in a networked society.

Audiences ubiquitously use streaming as a tactic to buck temporarily the strategic power of

corporate conglomerates and governments. However, streaming technology is also used by

media industries to form an emergent streaming media industry. Companies like Netflix are

part of new ideas governing how television and film get made and distributed. The clash

between Internet streaming companies and traditional cable companies raises tensions

about shifting audience practices. Long-form viewing (also known as binging or

marathoning of streaming content), algorithms, and cord-cutters and cord-nevers, those

who have cut off their cable and those who will never get cable, are all examples of

emergent forms of lore and ways that the industry thinks about audiences. Streaming is a

global industry divided into transnational, national, and diasporic streaming. The widely

popular Nollywood streaming site iROKOtv is a case study in diasporic streaming.

Audiences use even newer technologies such as virtual private networks (VPNs) to

continue the legacy of streaming as a tactic, which subverts broadcast’s attempts to lock

down content through geo-fences and other government regulation.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..vii

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………………………………...1

CHAPTER

1. A CULTURAL LINEAGE OF STREAMING………………………………………………………………..24

2. STREAMING TACTICS………………………………………………………………………………………….56

3. HOUSE OF NETFLIX: CORDS, STREAMING LORE, AND THE ALGORITHMIC

AUDIENCE……………………………………………………………………………………………………….....98

4. EXTENDING THE BROADCAST: VPNS, COSMOPOLITANIZING STRATEGIES,

AND THE PROBLEMS OF DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES…………….………………………………...149

EPILOGUE…...……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….199

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 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure
1. Sanctioned and Unsanctioned, First and Third Party Streaming…………………………......7

2. Telephonoscope…………………………………………………………………………………………………26

3. Abandoned “Movie Gallery”…………………………………………………………………………..……..56

4. Sanctioned and Unsanctioned, First and Third Party Streaming…………………………...65

5. Netflix, FCC Filing……………………………………………………………………………………………..138

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 INTRODUCTION

Streaming media is an emergent technological practice that is altering everyday

uses of media, media industry practices, and transnational cultural geography. Streaming,

concomitantly, is an audience tactic and a strategic logic of the industry. Streaming as a

technological process is nominally defined as multimedia continually delivered to a user

(Larsen, 2007). Streaming is increasingly imperative to the smooth functioning of the

Internet because it allows users to experience mediated content without downloading all of

the files or information before usage. With increased network bandwidth in the early

2000’s, streaming has become integral to not only business practices but also to how we

encounter and inhabit mediated culture. Streaming is therefore both a technological

innovation and cultural practice that co-configures both audience and industry.

This dissertation aligns with Havens, Lotz, & Tinic’s (2009) call for a critical media

industry studies. Within their listing of potential theories and methods, they offer Michel de

Certeau’s strategies and tactics as undervalued theoretical tools for media industry

scholars. De Certeau’s (1984) strategies and tactics are a useful conceptual framework for

understanding streaming as a cultural practice that tactically challenges the “propre”

strategies of mass consumer and television culture. This dissertation focuses on how

streaming operates within the specific contexts of audiences and industry. Throughout the

dissertation, streaming is framed as both a tactic for audiences and an emergent strategic

logic by industry. For audiences, streaming works tactically as content that people pull,

moving from the periphery to the core. Networked individuals (Rainie & Wellman, 2012)

have access to seemingly ubiquitous streams of content available through third party

1
indexing and hosting sites online. However, for industry, this same tactical practice is

reincorporated into industry strategies in the form of Netflix and other sanctioned

streaming sites.

This emphasis on strategies and tactics is informed by Rick Altman’s (2004)

conception of “crisis historiography.” Altman argues that every “new” media technology

goes through a process of negotiation where the “definition of a representational

technology is both historically and socially contingent” (emphasis in original, p. 16). The end

uses of technology are completely unknown as “new media, when they first emerge, pass

through a phase of identity crisis, a crisis precipitated at least by the uncertain status of the

given medium in relation to established, known media and their functions” (Pingree &

Gitelman, 2003, p. xii). Streaming is also in the midst of an “identity crisis” with the

negotiation between strategies and tactics. As with all new media innovations, there is the

challenge of balancing discourses of total social transformation with approaches that

emphasize technological continuity or “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” I echo

Cunningham and Silver’s (2012) call for a middle-way (derived from Merton’s (1967)

“middle-range theory”), which doesn’t “over- or under-read” change but does acknowledge

its continuous nature (p. 7).

The dissertation incorporates a broad range of methodological approaches. First, I

historicize streaming and place the recent technological innovation in dialog with research

on the development of telephony and mobile communication. Next I delve into the

ubiquitous streaming of televisual content (movies and television) by audiences through

hosting and indexing sites used for streaming. Streaming is theorized as a tactic as opposed

to a strategy where streamers traverse the geographies of nation-states and the lands of

2
copyright holders throughout the Internet—wandering through the strategic ‘place’ of

copyright. This is followed by a study of media industry responses to streaming, looking

particularly at Netflix as a case study in digital production and emergent forms of “industry

lore” I label “steaming lore.” These nascent articulations of streaming lore include Netflix as

“quality” television, the algorithmic audience, cord-cutters and cord-nevers, and

marathoning/binging. The clash between Internet upstart Netflix and traditional

conglomerate Comcast is considered. Finally, I focus on the reach of streaming globally,

challenges to digital geography, and potential policy and copyright implications. iROKOtv

serves as a case study in cosmopolitanizing strategies and diasporic streaming.

Streaming Typologies and the Politics of Piracy

When streaming gets invoked in both industrial and academic texts, it is almost

always through the lens of piracy (Gantz & Lewis, 2014; Mellis, 2007; Sterne, 2012).

Reducing this cultural practice to nothing more than “streaming theft” fails to deal with the

complexity of streaming as an emergent form of media consumption. If we suspend

judgment and move streaming beyond the sole context of piracy, we might think of

streaming as a tactic. Poaching from Certeau, streamers are “travellers; they move across

lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching across fields they did not write” (p.

174). Just as Certeau proposes “walking” as an ephemeral tactic within the strategic place

of governments and institutions in the city, we might think of streamers traversing the

geographies of nation-states and the global lands of copyright and license holders

3
throughout the Internet. Streaming is the prerogative of the in-between and

deterritorialized poaching.

In this dissertation, I have purposefully incorporated the vocabulary of sanctioned

and unsanctioned rather than the crude binary of legal or illegal because this continues to

be a contested and complex legal terrain. I offer four different categories of streaming:

sanctioned and unsanctioned first party streaming and sanctioned and unsanctioned third-

party streaming. The Motion Picture Association of America (2014), however, already

rejected such nuance and defined streaming as a whole as a sub-category of ‘Content Theft’

labeled ‘Streaming Theft’. The MPAA is well aware of the ubiquity of streaming as a larger

cultural practice, and the organization is trying to fasten theft to streaming as we move

towards further policy decisions on the legality of streaming:

Streaming refers to a form of online content theft that allows users to view
unauthorized copyrighted motion picture and television content on demand, without
downloading the illegal file. Users generally visit illegal websites that either host the
streamed content or provide links to content hosted on other websites. Both hosting
unauthorized content and linking to unauthorized content hosted on other websites
is illegal (para. 14).
Clearly the MPAA is trying to get ahead of the larger discursive struggle over copyright by

tying streaming to earlier MPAA and RIAA battles over music and movie downloading. The

familiar categorization of these practices as theft does the work of placing users in

discursive proximity to lawbreakers, criminals, and pirates.

Jonathan Sterne (2012), in his exploration of the MP3 as a format, pushed us to

think of piracy not as external to the legitimacy of media industries but as an interstitial

force that is better represented as a “subset of media industries” where piracy industries

are an integral part of “media industries that sell blank media, conduits, and connectivity”

(p. 218-219). Sterne displays how piracy is not a small ship separate and siphoning from

4
industry but a part of the boat itself. Adrian Johns (2009) deepens this argument through “a

historical vision” (p. 15) of piracy that shows “piracy is not peculiar to the digital

revolution” (p. 6). What is deemed pirate practices can often be the very groundwork for

future markets and commerce. “The unsanctioned economy of file-sharing has been

immensely valuable and value-generating for several legitimate software and hardware

industries. British pirate radio extended the reach of the for-profit radio industry and a

sector of the recording industry” (Sterne, 2012, p. 219). Allen-Robertson (2013) views

illicit networks as playing an invaluable role in developing the contemporary digital media

industry, “The shift to digital distribution in the contemporary cultural industries was

driven by the conflict between the market of illegitimate distribution networks and the

incumbent rights-holder industries” (p. 187). Piracy is often a progenitor of industry

incorporation. Allen-Robertson goes so far as to state that without “the illicit networks’

innovations and dedication the contemporary digital media market would not exist today”

(p. 187). Unsanctioned streaming stands in conjunction with sanctioned streaming as both

a productive and disruptive media practice.

Five Conceptual Frameworks for Streaming

In the arguments that follow, I offer five conceptual frameworks or typologies for

deepening our understanding of streaming media and technology. The first concept is

streaming as a recent technological instantiation, divided into categories of software and

hardware. The second framework is a typology of streaming that divides streaming into

first and third sanctioned and unsanctioned streaming. The third concept is streaming as

an emergent industry. The fourth is of streaming as a discourse, and the final framework

5
divides streaming based on geography with transnational streaming, national streaming,

and diasporic streaming. All of these frameworks lay the groundwork for the further

conceptualization of this important and emergent socio-technical practice.

Streaming as a recent technological innovation is both software and hardware. On

the software side, streaming consists of browsers, web pages, algorithms, formats, and

compression software in the form of codecs (explored in detail in chapter one), which

facilitate the smooth flow of interoperable content between software and hardware.

Hardware consists of a suite of rapidly evolving technologies, including desktop computers,

laptops, iPads, and mobile phones. Consumer technologies, predominantly Internet-

connected set-top boxes, such as Roku, Chromecast, Amazon FireTV and FireTV Stick,

Slingbox, etc. offer user interfaces that meld traditional hardware (television monitors)

with software. The emergence of “Smart TV’s” with built-in wireless capabilities enhances

the ease of streaming in the home and everyday life.

Secondly, the figure below gives a typology for beginning to unpack different types

of streaming practices. Again, the usage of sanctioned and unsanctioned streaming

attempts to destabilize, if only momentarily, streaming from its piratical associations. The

graph also attempts to show the blurring of these categories as the uses of streaming

technology evolve and adapt to emergent strategies and tactics. For example, Netflix is

placed closer to first party sanctioned streaming than Amazon and Hulu because of their

aggressive push into original programming. Services that rely exclusively on licensing

content are placed towards the bottom. Virtual private networks (VPNs), private networks

that tunnel through public Internet infrastructure, initially are used by businesses and

governments for increased security and encryption when connecting remotely to an

6
institutions internal network. However, VPNs are increasingly operated as tactics, which

permit audiences to disrupt media industry attempts to geographically constrain content.

Live-streaming apps and websites such as Periscope and Twitch.tv increasingly straddle

the line between sanctioned and unsanctioned content (the widespread usage of Periscope

to view HBO’s broadcast of the Pacquiao versus Mayweather boxing fight is the latest

rupture in these boundaries). The description that follows gives a supplementary

explanation of each section of the diagram.

Figure 1. Sanctioned and unsanctioned first and third party streaming.

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 First party sanctioned streaming refers to the rights holder directly streaming their

content to the audience with no intermediary. Examples might include HBOGo or the

websites of the American broadcasting networks. All major American sports leagues (NFL,

MLB, NBA, and NHL) offer first party streaming packages (with various geographic

restrictions). Curiously, the names and logos of these sports streaming services, such as

NFL Sunday Ticket and NHL Center Ice, often emphasize the physical markers of fandom—

stadiums, tickets, ice, courts--but always the best of the playing surface (center ice), turning

your house into the stadium and intertwining geographic connections to the nation within

digitality.

Third party sanctioned streaming is when content providers, which make a great

deal of their money from controlling large libraries of content and the “windowing” or

temporality within which they distribute this content, have licensing agreements with

companies like Netflix, Hulu, or more specialized services like Crunchyroll for anime. Hulu’s

corporate parents Disney, News Corp., and NBCUniversal originated the service as a

challenge to Youtube (Kim, 2012). In a 2012 Fast Company (LaPorte, 2012) article,

however, Hulu is cited as becoming so successful that its parent companies are now fretting

or ‘shivering’ about its disruptive innovation. Hulu’s audience of:

“25 million unique visitors a month…is threatening. Network television viewership

is down 12.5% since Hulu’s launch in 2008, while approximately 3.6 million U.S.
residents have abandoned pay-TV for Internet video over the same period. These
metrics make studio and network people shiver” (LaPorte, 2012).

A company like Hulu or Netflix is a different kind of challenge to the status quo of media

industry practices as sanctioned third party streaming. Netflix does not exist in a legal gray

area but is still reliant on Hollywood and content producers. The company needs to

maintain a symbiotic relationship with Hollywood and first party streamers who ultimately

8
control the vast majority of content libraries. This was the impetus for Netflix to try to

replicate the HBO model by producing original programming to avoid becoming just

another failed distribution technology. For now, third-party streamers offer a lucrative

content window, which benefits both Netflix and content producers.

Third-party unsanctioned streaming is the ubiquitous streaming of content such as

movies and television through third-party hosting websites. These websites are often

divided into two types—those that host the streaming content and indexing sites that

provide links to the hosting websites. This division is done to try and protect each party by

compartmentalizing each step (this raises complicated questions about cloud computing

and copyright, for example). While it is difficult to establish firmly how prevalent “illegal”

streaming has become (the industry doesn’t want the numbers widely known, and the sites

themselves don’t want targeting), MarkMonitor, an Internet research and security firm,

estimates that the top three websites engaged in “digital piracy’ receive ‘more than 21

billion visits per year” (MarkMonitor, 2011) and “traffic to illegal download sites has more

than sextupled since 2009” (Pogue, 2012). In terms of sporting events, you can find pretty

much any game you want, both domestic and international. Our understanding of these

streaming communities is that they are not static entities but dynamic activators. These

bricoleurs (Jenkins, 1992) are thriving because of their manipulation of the flow of media

technology. Unsanctioned third party streaming is a tactical practice that grants the user

the flexibility to navigate and traverse the lexicon of popular culture.

Increasingly, rights holders are putting more of their content online behind

authentication systems that regulate access based on geographic location. While these

systems, called geofences, are successful in preventing out-of-area viewers from watching a

9
program, there are many virtual private network (VPN) services available that allow single

users to easily, and legally, bypass geographic restrictions. Simply put, VPNs are a way in

which private networks can extend over public Internet infrastructure through the use of

encryption and dedicated connections. In doing so, they “change” the location of any user to

the location of the private network. Users can then leverage this ability to bypass

geographic restrictions on content. We classify this ‘legal’ tactic as unsanctioned first party

streaming.

In this way the use of VPNs as legal pathways to content legitimates ‘illegal’

streaming, but streamers are also blazing invisible pathways that legally transcend the

geographic logics of the nation-state and construct deterritorialized space for consumption.

VPNs may soon become vulnerable to intermediary routing services becoming regulated by

territorial governments, but technology has long proven flexible enough to allow users to

stay slightly ahead of copyright restrictions in a cycle of users tactics and institutional

strategies. Streaming invites us to look at the in-between, the spaces and gaps of copyright.

VPNs show how streaming as a cultural practice cannot be active without disruption to the

strategic logic of the law and copyright.

Third, I define streaming as an emergent industry. Streaming is the latest iteration

of what some have labeled a “digital media industry” (Allen-Robertson, 2013,) Streaming is

more than just an audience practice, but also a growing part of media and entertainment

industries. Companies like Netflix represent the growth and maturity of Internet media

companies. These companies are increasingly butting up against the old guard of

Hollywood, broadcast television companies, and cable companies. Netflix’s foray into

original programming shows how streaming companies are more than just distribution

10
platforms but also content creators. The fourth definition is grasping streaming as a

discursive force. For example, when Netflix sold audiences on their flagship House of Cards

they discursively promoted and branded the algorithmic production of the show. Netflix

leveraged the cultural capital associated with algorithms and claimed that their

recommendation algorithms predetermined that the audience would enjoy House of Cards.

Herein, Netflix discursively positions the audience. Streaming is also conceptualized as an

emergent form of lore. Within existing television and industry lore, streaming serves to

fracture established tendencies and practices, which come to the surface during times of

perceived change within the industry.

Lastly, I divide streaming into three categories based on geography. 1)

Transnational streaming companies, such as Netflix, have aggressively pushed into a host of

foreign countries to maintain their primary position and to continue to build their brands.

2) These companies differ from the second category of national streaming, which places

streaming companies within the confines of the nation-state. This distinction has already

blurred substantially since the beginning of my dissertation research project. More

companies are becoming regional by offering their services in neighboring countries. 3)

The third category is diasporic streaming, which covers streaming companies that cater to a

single niche or diasporic network. The fourth chapter investigates the story of iROKOtv

(and its founder Jason Njoku), a highly successful streaming service, which brands itself as

a company offering Nollywood to the Nigerian diaspora. Other diasporic film industries

such as Bollywood are also transitioning into streaming services. All of these definitions

aim to increase our ability to understand the audience and industry shifts that accompany

streaming technology in an era of the networked individual.

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Literature Review

Get With The Flow?

Audiences have always sought to intervene in the mediated cultural flow enabled by

communication technologies. Scholars have argued that the current media environment is

a move from the metaphor of flow to the framework of files (Mittell, 2011). Yet, flow is still

being re-inscribed into this framework of files and mediated life—only now with the

networked individual co-constructively assembling and articulating digital flow. We are in

the midst of a re-calibration between audiences and industry where flow becomes

increasingly channeled through the networked individual. Newman (2012) sees the

emergence of new distribution channels and new modes of distribution as challenges to

our nominal conception of television “as a technology, medium, and set of social practices”

(p. 2). Newman focuses on BitTorrent and file-sharing of content as a result of media

convergence that renews television’s place in the ‘popular imagination’ (Boddy,

2004). This has only been augmented by streaming, which does not require as much

technical knowledge as downloading.

Whereas Raymond Williams (1974) sees the ‘place’ of flow for media industries

through scheduling, commercials and predefined blocks of programming, streaming

emphasizes the placelessness and ubiquity of programming. The television is further

dislodged from its central position in the home as the networked individual encounters

multiple, personalized flows from a variety of platforms and delivery channels. Streaming

extended globally draws further attention to the fissures and ruptures in the strategic

12
‘place’ of nation-states and copyright. Just as Deuze (2012) believes that we live ‘in’ and

not ‘with’ digital media, living within streaming media shifts our orientation regarding

networked flow and access, ownership and materiality, and placelessness.

A strict binary between old and new media is unproductive, especially when

recognizing that much of new media is a recombination or “remediation” (Bolter & Grusin,

1999) of earlier forms of media. Nonetheless, there remain significant distinctions between

the technological capacities and affordances of analog and digital media, which distinguish

streaming media. The contemporary affordances of streaming are an integral part of

everyday mediated life. Analog media are “continuously variable physical properties or

quantities” in their representation of data (Miller, 2011, p. 73). Analog is in sharp contrast

to digital media, which is “discontinuous representation of analog or continuous physical

properties” (p. 73). Computer code employs “discrete binary digitisation: zeros and ones”

in order to “represent and store data and information” (p. 73). Digital data is extremely

malleable and can be stored, shared, and circulated more efficiently than analog media

forms.

Flew (2002) proposes that digital information is advantageous because it is

networkable, compressible, dense, and manipulable. Networkable means that it can be

easily distributed through a network, often simultaneously, without many complications

due to distance or distortion. Compression is the process of reducing redundancy or “noise”

in any bit of information, which diminishes the amount of bandwidth needed to send

packets of discontinuous data through the Internet and networked infrastructure. Density

is the amount of information stored in a given space. Consider how a single smartphone

now contains as much computing power and compressed storage capacity as rooms full of

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supercomputers in the late nineteen eighties or how an MP3 player provides as much

music data as an entire music store full of analog albums.

Streaming as a technological practice was not possible until data could be

compressed and decompressed to allow viewers to buffer and simultaneously consume

content (or very close to simultaneously). Digital information as opposed to analog is

infinitely changeable and adaptable, which includes combining things like sound and text,

for example, to a multimedia website. This affordance allows digital information to be

flexible and manipulable as data crosses multiple mediated platforms and formats. In this

way, streaming exists in-between orality and literacy and refers not to a particular medium

but to the mode of delivery itself. All of these properties and characteristics of digital media

are part of streaming and differentiate digital streaming media from analog media.

Vincent Miller (2011) points to two additional affordances of digital media that can

be applied to streaming. According to Miller, digital media, as opposed to analog media,

can be automated. Automation in digital media means that templates and algorithms

manipulate the numerical composition of digital data without human intervention. The

Netflix recommendation system, for example, automatically filters user inputs and

generates recommendations that reinforce flow within streaming. This directly connects

with Uricchio’s (2004) projection of adaptive agents being automatically “modified or even

created through software and programs instead of…by people” (p.19). The second

technological affordance of digital data is that it can be databased. Databases store, filter,

and retrieve data that users then make meaningful. Streaming makes this process of

retrieval appear so seamless that an orientation towards ownership of content begins to

change. The speed, ubiquity, and ability to retrieve seemingly endless amounts of

14
information from omnipresent automated databases move users away from the materiality

of objects.

Flow to Files to Flow

Media industries are now attempting to intervene and re-articulate audience

streaming practices in the move from flow to files back to flow. We are in the midst of a re-

calibration between audiences and industry where flow becomes increasingly channeled

through the networked individual. Streaming begins as new technological capacity

previously not possible because of bandwidth limitations, which then becomes adopted by

audiences as a social practice and social circulation. This subsequently leads media

industries to begin to adapt and mesh analog viewership with digital streaming. This

movement is not exempt from the challenges, pitfalls, and anxieties of shifting media

landscapes. There is participation in the flow and the antecedents of active audiences but

streaming media rests at the intersection of the networked individual and media

industries’ re-articulation of digital flow.

Wellman (1979, 2002) and Rainie and Wellman (2012) take this distinction a step

further and from a sociological perspective argue that digital media have distinctly changed

community and resulted in the formation of ‘networked individualism’. They point to what

they label as a “triple revolution” in digital media and communication technology. The first

is the “social network revolution,” which gives increased opportunities and stresses as

people reach beyond the world of tightly knit groups. Following a trajectory of scholarship

exemplified by Robert Putnam’s (2000) work in Bowling Alone, Rainie and Wellman (2012)

perceive being embedded in groups as becoming less important—increasingly we are

networked as individuals. The person, then, becomes “the focus: not the family, not the

15
work unit, not the neighborhood, and not the social group” (p. 6). This leads to more

diversity in relationships and social worlds without one “sure-fire ‘home’ community” (p.

12) and partial membership in multiple networks with frequent turnover. More time and

energy is needed to invest in the art of social networking to maintain ties. Networked

individualism is “both socially liberating and socially taxing” (p. 9), as the technology,

which promises to connect people and individuals also threatens to overload them with

extra work. Social networks provide bridges to reach these networks and maneuverability

to operate within the conflicting demands of a multiplicity of these networks (for example,

the ability to keep remote or weaker ties as a viable part of your network).

Second is the “Internet revolution,” which builds off of the social networking

revolution and gives people more communication power and information-gathering

capacities previously unknown. Not only am I a publisher and broadcaster, my Internet

experiences tailor to my individual needs. The contact point with media industries then is

dislodged exclusively from the household or workgroup and can be focused on the

networked individual. Lastly, the third revolution is the mobile revolution, as primarily

mobile and smartphone technologies become body appendages with portable access to

friends and information at will. This leads to the possibility of a “continuous presence and

pervasive awareness of others in the network as physical separation by time and space is

less important” (p. 12). While we want to temper this discourse of pure technological

empowerment and acknowledge that a straight, linear progression from community to

networked individual is messier than this overly simplistic reading, there remains value in

recognizing and reasserting the position of the individual. Streaming media and technology

it is not solely focused on community but rather temporary alliances of networked

16
individuals engaging with multifarious media industry re-articulations of flow and

mediated content. Streaming media is channeled through the networked individual but also

is a space for this emergent re-articulation of industry.

Christian (2015) classifies streaming media into what he labels “web TV networks”

to theorize how “‘networks’ function differently outside the legacy cable system” (para. 2):

“1. Corporate, subscription networks have had the most success in series

development because their revenue stream is independent of brands, which have

been slow to fund native-digital programming.

2. Corporate, ad-supported networks have had the most challenges as they

cannot afford programming slates as large as traditional television networks and

aren’t social media sites like YouTube.

3. Multichannel networks on YouTube have engaged a broad base of producers

and fans but have found it challenging to raise funds from brands, forcing them to

sell their companies to major media conglomerates.

4. Independent networks have innovated new types of stories, showcased a

diverse group of storytellers, and connected with niche audiences but have found

financing hard to come by” (para. 7-10).

This useful framing of emergent forms of “Internet television” provides a method for

thinking about the re-articulated industry through the “network” lens. The usage of the

“network” frame does, unfortunately, do the work of maintaining industry paradigms and

logics to a certain degree. Our usage of first and third party sanctioned, and unsanctioned

17
streaming allows for more of the inevitable blurring of boundaries that accompany

streaming and moments of technological and industrial change. For example, how do we

categorize unsanctioned third-party streaming that is simultaneously corporate (in that it

generates revenue), ad-driven (mostly from annoying pop-ups and banner ads), and

divided into indexing and hosting sites?

Dissertation Structure

Streaming media is an emerging force in the way that we produce, consume, and

distribute media. In this dissertation, I look at the impacts of this recent technological

advancement on audience practices and media industries in a networked society. The first

chapter historicizes streaming as a cultural lineage of compression and interoperability.

This connects to existing literature on audiences intervening in the flow of mediated

communication through technology. The focus is on establishing a lineage where the

ingrained nature of streaming is understood as a practice; moving from early telephony all

the way to Justin.tv and the contemporary moment of streaming. I elucidate a history of

compression through radio broadcasting, video conferencing, and codecs. Chapter 2 of the

dissertation delves into the ubiquitous practice of streaming as a tactic. Unsanctioned third

party streaming is theorized as a liminal space; wherein streamers ephemerally buck the

strategic logic of media industries. The chapter attempts to move theoretically beyond the

stigma of piracy and the MPAA’s labeling of this practice as “streaming theft.” Streamers are

“making do” within the crevices of industry. The chapter incorporates participant

18
observation and self-reflexivity to conceptualize three categories of aesthetic moments;

mobility and materiality, jouissance, and playing the role of the trickster.

Chapter 3 follows the work of Havens and Lotz as a critical media industry analysis

of the emergent streaming industry. In this chapter, the growing body of literature within

media industry studies on industry lore is reviewed, and justification for Netflix as a site of

study is provided. Netflix’s rise from vanquisher of Blockbuster Video as a mail-order DVD

rental company to a streaming service of original programming is charted. Netflix is

understood as a contested terrain of competing discourses and logics. Netflix, the standard

bearer for the streaming industry, clashes with the strategic logics of Hollywood and cable

conglomerates like Comcast and Time Warner. Within this moment of rupture and re-

articulation, I identify emergent forms of “industry lore” within this nascent industry. Four

types of streaming lore are distinguished; “quality” streaming, the algorithmic audience,

industry terms “cord-cutter” (someone who had cable but then decided to use the Internet

and streaming sites as an alternative) and “cord-never” (describing an emerging trend

within the youth demographic to never even purchase a cable subscription), and

marathoning/binging.

Finally, the last chapter relates the story of #NBCFail and how unsatisfactory live

coverage of the Olympics spurred the growth of virtual private networks (VPNs). This

chapter examines the ways that VPN technology, as first party unsanctioned streaming,

extends streaming globally and challenges the mapping of national broadcasting structures

onto digital geographies. With streaming developing into a global industry, the chapter also

looks at the notion of “cosmopolitanizing strategies” as a way to further conceptualize

streaming globally. The strategies of disruption, performance, and hybridization grant

19
streaming the ability to traverse multiple valences of globalization. Lastly, the global

streaming industry is divided into transnational, national, and diasporic streaming.

Nollywood streaming site iROKOtv is offered as a case study in diasporic streaming.

20
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 CHAPTER 1: A CULTURAL LINEAGE OF STREAMING

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

-Woodrow Wilson

No man steps in the same river twice.

-Heraclitus

Introduction

The rise of ‘new’ mediated technologies serve as moments of rupture (or the

possibility of rupture) in existing traditional media industries and structures of power.

Audience innovation and use of technology historically spurs market innovation. Returning

to Altman’s (2004) “crisis historiography,” technologies never reach equilibrium and are

always unsettled. These ruptures are sites of negotiation between audience tactics and

industry strategies. This tension between tactics and strategies always puts the equilibrium

of the technology in jeopardy. In this cultural lineage of streaming, I point to moments

where audience participation in the flow of media and technology act as antecedents to

contemporary streaming. This cultural lineage, then, is by no means exhaustive but

connects with major touch-points in this history of streaming. Sterne (2012) posits that as

“people and institutions have developed new media and new forms of representation; they

have also sought out ways to build efficiencies into channels and to economize

communication in the service of facilitating greater mobility” (p. 5). Sterne continues that

this history of compression takes on a cultural life central to understanding streaming

24
media as a cultural practice. Audiences use streaming compression and interoperability to

nestle within the cleavages of media industries.

‘New’ media technologies can be thought of as “renewable media” (Peters, 2009),

with “old” media always-already a part of any “new” media iteration. As McLuhan (1964)

famously states the “content of any medium is always another medium” (p. 23). Carolyn

Marvin (1988), in her book When Old Technologies Were New, reminds us that each of these

old technologies went through a social and cultural process of transformation as audiences,

industries, and regulatory structures adapted to technological innovations. As Gitelman

(2006) succinctly states, “all media were once new” (p. 1). The goal of this chapter is to map

out some of the precursors of streaming media to build a more robust understanding of

streaming in the contemporary moment. Streaming is often considered to be an entirely

new phenomenon enabled by technological developments in bandwidth capacity, but a

history of streaming can be traced back all the way to the early usage of radio.

This chapter points toward a history of streaming but also a history of audiences

intervention in the flow of media and communication. The term “stream” is nominally

defined as a steady flow or continued progression. To further complicate the definition of

streaming as one monolithic flow, Entwistle and Stern (2005) hold as a truism in migration

studies that “for every stream, there is a counterstream” (p. 22). What may seem to be a

uniform flow may be filled with unseen, divergent currents. Streams, in nature, seem

continuous and almost benign compared to floods, rapids, or currents. Digital streaming

also appears continuous but on a technological level the data is discontinuous—small

packets of data are segmented—as compression enables audiences to experience content

as a stream. The appearance of a steady flow of content reinforces the industry branding of

25
streaming as all-encompassing and omnipresent. Streaming conceptualized as compression

and interoperability points to the complicated history of audience and industry streams

and counterstreams. Vonderau (2014) identifies the word’s history as having its origins in

“mining--the washing or streaming of the earth to obtain tin-ore or gold,” which he relates

to aggregation (for example, Anderson’s theories of “Long Tail” flexible specialization) as

an underlying economic infrastructure. However, streaming is also an emotional or

affective process defined as the exuding of bodily fluid in profuse amounts such as tears

streaming down a face.

Figure 2. Telephonoscope (George du Maurier, 1879)

26
 Figure 2 is a comic drawn by George du Maurier, which depicts an entirely

fabricated Thomas Edison invention du Maurier calls the “telephonoscope.” This electric

camera obscura taps into a social imaginary of wide screens, smartphones (videophones),

and streaming. In 1888, Edward Bellamy’s million-selling novel Looking Backward

portrayed a ‘music room’ where music is transported through phone lines continuously,

seamlessly, and with perfect clarity into every home (as cited in Harvey, 2014). This might

be the beginning of a popular imagination regarding streaming that articulates an ever-

present desire within audiences to intervene in the flow of mediated life. For example,

sports viewership, has always been about liveness and the immediacy of sports drawing

audiences and advertisers. In 1926, newspapers began to feel the encroachment of radio

into the media landscape. After the Royal Typewriter Company had paid $35,000 for

exclusive rights to broadcast the heavily anticipated Dempsey versus Tunney boxing fight,

newspapers attempted to stream boxing matches for audiences themselves:

“Newspapers hoped to overcome the embargo by offering their readers something

radio could not. For days they ran front-page ads announcing plans to stage fight
parties at editorial offices across the country with blow-by-blow coverage relayed
by megaphone and loudspeaker. The purpose was to promote the newspaper as a
sports authority while providing readers with a shared experience. It worked”
(Evensen, 1996, p. 87).
This form of streaming is bypassing the control or copyright that one medium possesses by

allowing audiences to participate in a simultaneous, communal viewing experience.

Borrowing from the world of finance, Elihu Katz (2003) labels this bypassing as

“disintermediation.” For Katz, disintermediation is the idea that “communicators are

continually trying to reach over the heads of intermediaries in order to establish direct

relations with some target audience” (p. 45). Radio’s broadcasting of prizefights served to

legitimate and elevate the medium beyond the level of mere ‘plaything’ in the minds of the

27
American public. Newspapers and radio stations would soon form a symbiotic promotional

machine that sold papers and put a radio in every home. “In Chicago, two thousand fight

fans packed the Auditorium Theater at a dollar apiece for the experience of ‘hearing the

fight while it is being fought’ and thousands more descended on Hartman Auditorium at

Wabash and Adams to hear the fight for free" (p. 90). Americans were beginning to

experience streaming as a geographically removed, yet live and proximal cultural event.

Other examples could include the ticker tape, telegraph, or closed captioning. We now turn

to radio and specifically the practice of DXing as a moment in the history of streaming.

DXing

In the book Listening In, Susan Douglas (1999) describes how Americans used radio

to construct the connectedness that forms a national identity across place/space. The ham

radio practice of DXing or calling distant stations, “antedated the networks: radio

programming, such as it was, was locally produced for local audiences” (p. 75). This is the

beginning of streaming as a cultural process that reaches past the prescribed notions of

industry. Dxing is an example of audiences intervening in the flow of media and

communication despite commercial radio and broadcasting interests. DXing is also an

example of the importance of compression in the discovery of shortwave broadcasting.

This ham radio technology allowed audiences to traverse the ether and sample from

diverse locations across the continental United States and internationally. Douglas

explored how radio transformed the everydayness of daily living and constructed imagined

communities that stretched across the country. Radio allow ed audiences to stream beyond

28
their respective local communities. “Radio provided out-of-body experiences, by which you

could travel through space and time mentally while remaining physically safe and

comfortable in your own house” (p. 75). Richter (2006) notes that radio was not always

regulated. It was not until the Radio Act of 1927 that business interests and corporations

permanently supplanted the drive of independent radio enthusiasts. After a brief period of

Navy control of the radio, relinquished in 1918, there were over 15,000 amateur radio

broadcasters across the country (Goodman & Gring, 2000).

DXing (ham radio code for distance and CQ—literally shorthand for “seek you”)

represented for young boys and men the pursuit of signals in the ether, “depending not on

physical strength or appearance but on how you used your mind and hands” (Douglas,

2004, p. 72). (See Hilmes, 1997, for the countervailing view that women also participated

actively within the space of DXing). This space was still unconquered and not yet subject to

the restraints of over-commercialization. DXing was a challenge for these boys and men

(and women), especially with the movement of the ionosphere continually adding a degree

of difficulty and mystery. As the name implies, the affective practice was all about seeing

how far you could travel and reel in distant signals, “discursively and imaginatively, DXing

was the practice that infused radio with its sense of romance, magic, and potential for

nation building” (Douglas, 2004, p. 73). Those performing transmissions were encouraged

to keep logs and record the call letters and stations they encountered. In fact, the measure

of prowess in DXing was largely gauged by how far you had travelled geographically,

necessitating the further need for documentation and map making of your escapades

through the ether (Berg, 1999). Here the fishing metaphor is found quite prominently in

the popular press. DXers are routinely portrayed as “bringing in” or “landing” stations

29
(Douglas, 2004, p. 73). Other pertinent information such as “weather conditions,

equipment configurations, and geographic coordinates” were recorded and then responded

to (Hilmes, 1997, p. 43). Other than simply recording these big fish landings, which could

become tedious, Hilmes shows how radio started becoming populated with a variety of

content.

“This could get tiresome, and before long many operators were drawing on
components of Fessenden’s first broadcast, of their own accord: playing instruments
or inviting friends in to do so, airing phonograph recordings, and ‘indulging’ in
chatter with various guests on air” (p. 43).
However, this participatory form of amateur, two-way radio was curtailed by

manufacturers who wanted to simplify the process in order to appeal to a more

mainstream public audience—leading to the proliferation of broadcasting in America

(Haring, 2003). This in turn led to a split between passive listening to broadcast radio and

the more technical, participatory form of amateur radio. In the same manner as

unsanctioned third-party streaming, these amateur technicians were “making do” with the

technology afforded to them and blazing pathways through the ether.

Douglas (2004) reminds us that this was not all about the romanticized freedom of

radio to surmount geographic barriers, but also involved a heavy dose of egotism as well.

There was a very tangible feeling of mastery over time and space, “in which one defied

gravity, had the country laid before one’s feet, and, most important, enjoyed a seemingly

unmediated access to other people and other parts of the nation” (p. 75). The sense of

command found within DXing granted a cathartic release from the pressures of

“bureaucratization and routinization” in work and home life in America. DXing instilled an

ethos of “autonomy and privilege” from listening. This feeling of autonomy can be found in

users of streaming technology, deflecting the strategic order of modern media industries.

30
Streamers appreciate the autonomy that comes from their ability to hunt content and defy,

even momentarily, the power of corporate conglomerates. This practice of streaming

rearranges the routinized configuration of television viewing in the home through things

like scheduling.

Just like the currents and countercurrents of streaming, DXing was a site of

“contradictory pleasures” between the cultural unity found in sampling beyond the local

context and cultural diversity from encounters and entanglements with regional specificity,

often marked through dialects. “It affirmed both hopes, that America was some kind of

culturally cohesive whole but one that resembled a jigsaw puzzle of unique, definable

pieces” (p. 76). These “contradictory pleasures” of DXing juxtaposed radio’s cultural

cohesion with regional and ethnic differences. This tension balanced the discomfort of

difference with the exhilaration and excitement of uncovering and seeking difference, all

found within this moment of DXing and amateur radio.

The process of DXing could prove “maddening” for listeners at times, however, as

increased interference caused by the proliferation of radio stations at the beginning of the

1920s pushed DX users and the general public to demand better audio quality (p.

77). Unfortunately, this was the beginning of the shift away from reeling in distant stations

and towards more passive forms of listening to broadcasts with predictable routinized

content programming and scheduling. Audiences who just wanted to listen to the radio

wanted higher fidelity and improved tone quality. Distortion, once part of the journey of

DXing and radio, was perceived with mounting disdain. This moment parallels a

contemporary moment in streaming as unsanctioned third-party streaming, with its

accompanying maneuvering through “interference” in the form of pop-up ads and

31
takedown notices, cedes ground to industry re-articulations of streaming and sanctioned

third party streaming.

Unsanctioned third party streaming requires more work and participation from the

user (although this is less technical knowledge than the use of torrents in P2P technology,

for example), whereas sanctioned third party streaming, such as Netflix, is a much more

smooth process for the user. Netflix is especially proud of its user interface and search

function, which it feels trumps other streaming services in the current streaming market.

Netflix’s positioning is reminiscent of the technical improvements used by radio

manufacturers to position their products in the emerging radio market of the 1920’s.

“Manufacturers large and small wanted to cash in on the boom, and to do so they had to

make receivers that were more user friendly. This meant, first and foremost, making tuning

easier, upgrading the appearance of receivers, and improving sound amplification and

fidelity” (Douglas, 2004, p. 77). Rather than going out and searching through vast

repositories of available content, consumers increasingly rely on algorithms and search

recommendations to provide content. This isn’t the hardened, sedentary routine of the

traditional broadcasting industry and cable television, but this form of streaming

incorporates the technology and the cultural practices developed around streaming back

into the industry as re-articulated third party sanctioned streaming. The same pattern of

industry re-articulation exists yet again. The incorporation of a one-knob tuning system by

the industry molded the medium’s convenience and ease of usage for consumers far

removed from the heritage of DXing.

In analyzing Douglas’ moment of DXing and radio, we can see streaming tactics very

similar to contemporary Internet tactics. These tactics would change as the audience

32
wanted more convenience in its browsing habits. The desire for more predictable listening

can be thought of as analogous to the rise of contemporary streaming outlets such as

Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. The search engines and recommendation algorithms make for

more convenient streaming options, without the hassles or unpredictability of

unsanctioned third party streaming.

Although the development of radio and streaming are alike in many ways, radio is

fundamentally a different technological process than streaming media. “While radio

broadcasts are based on a one-to-many model of transmission, streaming platforms aim to

zero in on the tastes of the individual listener” (Harvey, 2014, para. 4). The radio signal is

continuously broadcast whereas streaming can be both synchronous (following a

traditional broadcast model) and asynchronous (delivering an individualized of

information to users). What Harvey is elucidating, however, is the industry usage of data

and algorithms to individualize the listening experience for users. DXing, like unsanctioned

third-party streaming, served as a precursor to the industry reshaping the media landscape

in the name of convenience. DXing was seen as a kind of "hack" that was not well received

by emerging corporate powers such as CBS and NBC, prompting the eventual creation of

the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and increasing regulation of radio

(complete with vilifying Boy Scouts as the ‘boys in shorts’ who had abused public airwaves)

(Douglas, 2004).

33
ASCAP/BMI

The ASCAP and BMI (excerpt, sung to the tune of “Three Little Fishes”)

Two Musical Societies had a big scrap, One was the BMI, the other was ASCAP; They
couldn’t agree not to disagree. And so they took it out on poor writers like me!

I’m only a writer, a composer of song, To get a break I’ve tried ten years long! But no
matter how I try, there’s something wrong, According to the ASCAP and BMI.

They say they are looking for ideas and songs, The songs that appeal to the
“modern” throngs; But like Stephen Foster I’ll die of these wrongs, Because of the
ASCAP and the BMI!

-c., 1941, author unknown

John Ryan (1985), building from Richard Peterson’s (1982) “production of culture”

perspective on media industries, performs the most comprehensive study on the ASCAP-

BMI controversy in 1940 and 1941. Peterson’s approach to media industry studies

particularly emphasizes “how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems

within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved’’ (Peterson &

Anand, 2004, p. 311). The primary argument, borrowed from economics, is that large firms,

or firms that control large segments of the market, tend to be rather conservative in their

approach. Since, under these circumstances, the consumer doesn’t have a lot of

alternatives; it is okay to aim for the middle of the road. However, this approach gradually

alienates consumers around the margins which cannot find products that appeal to

them. Smaller firms then spring up and gobble up those segments of the audience. If those

small businesses are successful enough the big firms then buy them out and things

gradually return to the status quo.

34
 In the early part of the 20th century, the American Society of Composers, Authors,

and Publishers (ASCAP) enjoyed a monopoly over song publishing and the recording

industry. Founded in 1914, ASCAP became a force in the wake of the Copyright Act of 1909,

which forced “restaurants, hotels, amusement parks, recording companies, piano roll

manufacturers, and others who engaged the public soloists and orchestras to entertain the

public” (Jasen, 2003, p. 18) to pay royalties to songwriters and publishers. At the time,

songwriters received royalties from the sale of sheet music but not when the music was

played in these other settings. ASCAP was designed to enforce the collection of royalties for

its membership, essentially pooling together licenses and extracting profit. During this

period “Tin Pan Alley” songwriters and publishers (named for the geographic location in

New York City where sheet music publishers banged out popular, middle of the road hits

with factory-like precision) joined with ASCAP. The organization really became a force to

be reckoned with in the 1920’s when “radio stations and motion picture houses

contributed the lion’s share of the annual fees paid to the membership” (p. 18).

The decline in sheet music and proliferation of radio boosted ASCAP’s clout. ASCAP,

representing song publishers, collected royalties from the emerging radio broadcasting

industry. This was done in the form of annual blanket licenses, which granted radio

stations and disc jockeys the ability to play copyrighted songs on the radio without needing

to track down individual copyright holders. Since ASCAP enjoyed a monopoly over

copyrighted songs the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), radio’s national

organization, was at the mercy of ASCAP. ASCAP forced the NAB to pay whatever annual

rate they wanted on the blanket license (Streeter, 1996, p. 262). Every year ASCAP’s

cupidity augmented, and the organization kept jacking up the annual rate to the point that

35
things came to a head in 1940. As Jasen (2003) recounts, “In 1940, ASCAP’s greed nearly

ruined the organization. Its contract with over six hundred radio stations was expiring, and

the new contract called for doubling the yearly fees for the following five years” (p. 18).

This floored radio executives who immediately yanked all ASCAP songs from the radio and

played nothing but songs in the public domain. ASCAP’s strategy to divide radio

broadcasters backfired as the industry “closed ranks” and coalesced behind their newly

formed Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) (Garofalo & Waksman, 2014). Since ASCAP

held a monopoly over popular and “Tin Pan Alley” music at the time (with the sole

exception of Tin Pan Alley firm E. B. Marks), BMI identified other avenues to build its

membership and catalogues:

“Taking advantage of ASCAP’S stringent membership requirements, as well as its

relative indifference to the popular and folk music being produced outside of New
York and Hollywood, BMI sought out and acquired its support from the ‘have not’
publishers and writers in the grassroots areas” (Shapiro, 1965, p. 6).
For ten months in 1941 the radio broadcasters boycotted the ASCAP libraries, thus

allowing regional blues and country artists to reach wider audiences unaccustomed to

these musical tastes and styles (Garofalo & Waksman, 2014, p. 60). In addition to musical

taste, the genres of blues and country increased the visibility of issues of race and

socioeconomic status in America. Artists such as Fats Domino, Hank Williams, and Huddie

Leadbetter (Lead Belly) challenged the mainstream dominance of Tin Pan Alley and

Hollywood aesthetics.

ASCAP is akin to contemporary Hollywood, studios, cable companies, and industry

leaders, whereas Netflix and other streaming services are analogous with BMI (especially

with Netflix’s foray into original programming). It seems ASCAP, and their reliance on Tin

Pan Alley, missed the oncoming technological advance of radio and the need to adapt its

36
business model to the context of the new technology. The impending ubiquity of radio and

its role as a gatekeeper moved audiences away from established aesthetics to a diversity of

genres like blues and country. In the same way, streaming technologies have challenged

existing broadcast models of distribution and are in the process of moving audiences

towards a diversity of interoperable media consumption modes that are independent of

network-specified scheduling and the constraints of place.

ASCAP, and later BMI, succeeded in using the courts and the legislative process (as

well as market position) to incorporate each new technology into their payment scheme,

thus making sure their members always got paid despite technological changes (Streeter,

1996, p. 264). They mediated between producers and media outlets. In order to adapt,

broadcast television and cable are faced with the same conundrum and need to leverage

courts and the legislative process to maintain their dominant market position. The

broadcast television industry is clashing with the emergent streaming industry in the same

way song publishers contended with radio broadcasting. Just as was the case for ASCAP

and BMI, existing broadcast distributors are pushed to embrace streaming technologies of

dissemination through innovation or incorporation.

Televisual Flow

Traditional television works through a national infrastructure where terrestrial

borders are largely contained and reliant on place. The industrial framework is national in

design, so its content predominately tethers to that infrastructure. As a result of this

rootedness television only reflects a particular image of the local and the national, without

37
much ability for audiences to intervene in the flow. Of course, there are notable exceptions

to the ability of the industry and nation-state to lockdown content. The practice of “border

blasting” refers to Mexican AM radio stations broadcasting to a large portion of the United

States along the Mexican border throughout the 1940’s up to the 1970’s (Fowler &

Crawford, 2002). Pirate radio stations poke holes in the façade of geographically fixed

content. Despite these ruptures, by the time television took hold in America the restrictive

approach to regulation had largely pushed television broadcasting away from any

streaming potential.

Raymond Williams pioneered this concept of flow in relation to television viewing.

Flow is a theory he conceives watching television in a hotel in Miami, jarred by the sharp

contrast between the ‘Big Three’ channels of the period (and their advertising) and British

television. For Williams televisual flow “is a continuous succession of images which follows

no laws of logic or cause and effect, but which constitutes the cultural experience of

“watching television” (Fiske, 2010). Williams increases the focus on the industry’s planning

and programming of viewership. “In all developed broadcasting systems the characteristic

organization, and therefore the characteristic experience, is one of sequence or flow”

(Williams, 1974, p. 86).

Uricchio (2004) wants to situate Williams’ notion of flow against the “changing

‘regime of representations’ of television offered by expanded broadcast channels, cable

programming, and the VCR” (p. 168). He sees an oscillation between disruption and control

as audiences are introduced to technologies such as the remote control (RCD) and VCR.

Spigel (1992) reminds us that the history of television and popular media is best

38
recognized as a ‘ground for cultural debate’ understood through a myriad of negotiations,

power struggles and social ideals rather than mass ‘consciousness industries’.

“Micheal Lynton CEO Sony Corp. cited the development of the digital video recorder
as something that has caused change that could not have been predicted. “The DVR
radically altered the landscape of scripted drama,” said Lynton. “Nobody could
predict that would happen, that it would create open-ended drama series” (as cited
in Block, 2013).

These technologies move away from a ‘programming-based notion of flow’ to a ‘viewer-

centered’ notion for Uricchio. “RCD gave households a semblance of direct control over

their viewing experience that terrified advertisers and the broadcasting industry”

(Uricchio, 2004, p. 170). Uricchio presciently goes on to foreshadow the rise of streaming

culture and differentiates between analog and streaming media. In the 1970s, satellite

technology is used to intervene in the televisual flow, but as soon as it is possible and

profitable there comes a struggle over network control. Audiences are using the ruptures

formed through technological innovation to intervene in the predominant popular cultural

flow of their era.

He foresees the promise of ‘new’ technology, which scans large amounts of

programming through “metadata programmers and adaptive agent designers” to package

relevant content into a “never-ending stream of custom-tailored pleasure. Never has the

prospect of flow been rendered so effortless for viewers and programmers alike” (p. 178).

What Uricchio is envisioning is this streaming media. Uricchio projects a difference in flow

that follows the pattern of flow to files, back to flow. He describes a shift in the “form of the

viewer-television interface—particularly in the notion of flow—that has slowly

transformed from being centered on programming to active audience to adaptive agent” (p.

39
180). The flow associated with the adaptive agent or streaming media is different from the

earlier analog flow.

Video Conferencing

Returning to the fictitious telephonoscope, the concept of video conferencing (and

by extension video streaming) has long been an aspiration held by the public. The

development of video conferencing and compression technology directly feeds into

contemporary streaming technology and practices. Despite this cultural imagination about

video streaming, the maturation of video conferencing as a viable industry was not without

substantive pitfalls. In the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s, AT&T’s Bell Laboratories pumped $500

million into the development and commercial failure of the Picturephone. While the

Picturephone was a complete commercial disaster, it still deserves to be lauded for the

technological advancements that went into its production.

The date, April 7, 1927, marks the very first one-way videophone transmission

between Secretary of Commerce and amateur radio champion Herbert Hoover in

Washington D.C. and corporate leaders of AT&T in New York City. Soon after in 1930, AT&T

performed a two-way videophone conversation on a closed circuit. These transmissions

were uncompressed and therefore not commercially viable due to the prohibitive cost. By

1956, prototypes were created with the capacity to transmit two seconds of still images

over existing telephone wires (Korn & Ritchie, 1969, p. 160). These advancements would

culminate into the unveiling of the Picturephone at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

Rhetoric surrounding the Picturephone purported that the invention would completely

40
revolutionize the entire communication landscape and become as influential as the

invention of the telephone itself (even making a guest appearance in the movie 2001: A

Space Odyssey).

The general public did not take to the technology, however. Many complained about

the small screen size and futuristic aesthetic, which prompted a redesign and the release of

Picturephone “Mod II” (Model Number Two). The Picturephone technically achieved a

decent degree of compression, transferring images at “1 MHz bandwidth and 6 Mbit/s bit

rate” but the lack of adoption was due to an absence of interoperability.

“Around the launch, the Bell System projected that by 1975 there would be a
hundred thousand Picturephones in the national network. But the huge costs drove
away businesses customers, and by July 1974, the Pittsburgh market had only 5
subscribed Picturephones on the network” (AT&T Archives, 2012, para. 5).

The high cost of installation and exorbitant monthly fees priced out the general public. The

limited number of Picturephone installations meant that there was no real network of

users to connect with. This was coupled with a lack of interoperability with other

videophone systems, which led to the eventual discontinuation of the revolution in 1974. In

1992, AT&T made its last attempt at delivering the Picturephone to the home market. The

AT&T Videophone 2500, featuring “color, motion voice, and simultaneous voice” (Early,

Kuzma & Dorsey, 1993, p. 22), sold for $1500 and was another commercial failure. This

was far from the earlier vision of videophones replacing all telephones and the 90s being

“the video communications decade” (emphasis original, Aldermeshian, Ninke, & Pilc, 1993,

p. 2). The Videophone 2500 did advance compression technology through the use of a high-

speed modem to transmit the digital compression over analog telephone lines (Early,

Kuzman & Dorsey, 1993). It wasn’t until increased bandwidth in the 1990s that Internet

Protocol (IP) based videoconferencing became a possibility.

41
Codecs

The contemporary history of streaming is bound up in the development of codec

technology and compression. While this history is, itself, compressed, the most salient

standards and formats are presented to show the impact of codecs on streaming and the

shaping of digital culture. The Internet and its affordances have been drastically shaped by

codecs and compression capabilities. The Internet goes from being completely text based

(print culture) to supporting compressed Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) images

(photography) and eventually low bandwidth audio (radio). With increased computer

processing power and further advances in compression low resolution, animated gif

images become supported leading to embedded video and finally the video streaming of

today. This is all due to codec technology.

The term “codec” is a truncated term combining coder and decoder. Technically

speaking codecs attempt to eliminate redundancies in data by running manifold algorithms

simultaneously, resulting in a bitrate reduction for optimal storage and transmission of

video images (Schafer & Sikora, 1995). The “minimum set” of redundancies are then

encoded. Rather than a pixel, digital imagery uses square “macroblocks” as the basic

processing unit for video compression. Macroblocks only become visible to the viewer

when breakdowns in the codec and algorithm result in the screen appearing pixelated or

full of blocks. This exposes gaps and fissures in the otherwise seamless infrastructure of

streaming media, a more frequent occurrence with lower bandwidth and slower processing

power.

42
 Digital imagery, through macroblocks, is divided into grids, where the codecs

algorithms predict movement within image frames and between frames. Macroblocks that

don’t require movement don’t need the transferal of data and, thus, can be compressed.

Codecs search for difference within macroblocks and what is repetition. Codecs “scale,

reorder, decompose and reconstitute perceptible images and sounds” (Mackenzie, 2006, p.

141). The identifying of repetition and difference is a central function of the codec.

Repetition in macroblocks repeated from frame to frame does not require an additional

transferal of data and, thus, eliminate redundancy—a process of compression. These

images are “lossy,” balancing file size with image quality (Bylund, 2009). The predictive

work of the algorithm within the codec means that every stream someone watches, despite

being the same content, is fundamentally different at the macroblock level. Technically

speaking, no user streams the same stream twice (to pervert Heraclitus). Every

compressed stream is a differentiated viewing experience. As Mackenzie (2009) notes:

The economic and technical value of codecs can hardly be overstated. DVD, the
transmission formats for satellite and cable digital television (DVB and ATSC), HDTV
as well as many internet streaming formats such as RealMedia and Windows Media,
third generation mobile phones and voice-over-IP (VoIP) all depend on video and
audio codecs. They form a primary technical component of contemporary
audiovisual culture in many of its most global dimensions (p. 141).

Compression through the codec leads to the interoperability of media across platforms and

formats and within digital culture. The history of this “contemporary audiovisual culture,”

constituted through the codec, could begin with the Cinepak codec. To give a snapshot of

the scope, thousands of patents since the 1970s have gone into the development of the

early Cinepak and MPEG codecs. Early Windows Media formats and Quicktime were

powered by the Cinepak format. While a significant advancement (perhaps close to fifty

percent compression and “24 bit video for CD-ROM”), viewing digital files and videos in the

43
90s was a cumbersome task (Ferncase, 2003, p. 66). Pentium processing and dial-up

connection speeds at the time could not keep up with the demands of large data file

compression.

The rise in MPEG standards and compression technology corresponds with the

penetration of broadband in America. In 2009, the Pew Research Center’s Internet &

American Life Project found that the majority of households had a broadband connection

with only 7% claiming to have dial-up Internet connections (Horrigan, 2009). This was a

dramatic upswing from the year 2000 where the majority of homes still used dial-up

Internet connections. Dial-up connections could support audio streaming, facilitating

Napster’s meteoric climb, but larger file sizes needed further advances in codec

compression.

The Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG) format obliterated Cinepak and the earlier

codecs of the 90s by “compressing video streams to as much as 1/30 of the original video

size while still maintaining acceptable picture quality” (Bylund, 2009, para. 6). Sterne

(2012) notes how the MPEG standard merges telecommunication standards, which value

“interconnection” with foreign networks to the central network and computer standards,

which value “interoperability” between operating systems and various protocols. “The

MPEG standard emerged at the intersection of several standards organizations and several

different standards’ interests. It was at once a standard for computers, consumer

electronics, and broadcast, all of which traditionally had very different standards cultures”

(p. 135). While MPEG-1 produces video quality resembling VCR viewing, the MPEG-2

standard is used in “DVD video, many digital broadcasts, and most online video streams”

(Bylund, 2009, para. 6). MPEG-2 quickly caught on as the industry standard, offering ample

44
resolution for television standards. MPEG-2 can even display a 1080p video (high

definition television mode), but it will appear “blocky” as the rate of compression from the

codec breaks down.

The MPEG-4 Part 2 format (regularly known as DivX or XviD codecs) builds on the

MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 formats but drastically improves compression quality. MPEG-4 Part 2

can produce the same picture quality at “half the bandwidth of MPEG-2” (para. 11). This

transition took place in the early 2000’s and coupled with increased storage capacity,

fueled digital file-sharing and storage. The MPEG-4 Part 2 standard, as a form of media

infrastructure, created the conditions whereupon innovative digital video sites like

YouTube started to flourish. However, despite the advances made by MPEG-4 Part 2, the

H.264 compression standard is the most ubiquitous video compression format in use (as of

2015).

H.264 is the standard of Blu-Ray Disc players, which means that every Blu-Ray

player must decode video content using H.264. Major video and streaming services such as

Vimeo, YouTube, and iTunes use H.264, along with software programs like Microsoft’s

Silverlight and Adobe Flash Player. H.264 is actually owned by a patent pool of copyright

holders called MPEG LA (see Faltesek, 2011, p. 123-124). The firm, composed of top

technology companies such as Sony, Apple, and Microsoft, licenses codecs and collects

royalties from “equipment manufacturers,” “software developers,” and “content

developers” (Internet video that is free to end users has thus far been deemed exempt by

MPEG LA—an agreement that will expire December 31, 2016) (Ozer, 2009, para. 3). The

rates of compression from H.264 allow for a level of interoperability between devices, in

HDTV broadcast quality, heretofore not technically possible. Employing this codec, mobile

45
phones, and other portable devices can now stream video in HD and usher in an era of

mobility in media consumption and production.

Contemporary Streaming

YouTube launched in June of 2005 to little notoriety or fanfare. In the most

comprehensive study of the website Burgess and Green (2009) outline the origins of the

space as a participatory culture, “YouTube is not actually in the video business--its

business, rather, is the provision of a convenient platform for online sharing” (emphasis

original, p. 4). Put more bluntly, in the early days of YouTube “the platform was a

salmagundi of out-of-focus lifecasts” (Friend, 2014, para. 1). During this time YouTube

“viral” hits such as “David After Dentist” and “Charlie Bit My Finger--Again!” featured

mobile phone recorded videos and amateur content. The sale of YouTube to corporate

parent and technology giant Google for a mere $1.65 billion dollars (a pittance compared to

valuations of other rising technology companies such as Snapchat) started YouTube down a

different corporate path (Kim, 2012).

In 2007, Viacom waged a long legal battle against YouTube, seeking damages for

profiting off of the viewing of infringing content. The Second Circuit “made it clear that the

512(c) safe harbor in the DMCA requires knowledge or awareness of specific infringing

activity in order to find a party liable for hosting...the district court found that YouTube was

protected by the safe harbor provision” (Palfrey, Zittrain, Albert, & Brem, 2013, p. 9).

However, to bolster their legal positioning and dissuade other lawsuits YouTube started

filtering videos and posting takedown notices. As individual channels grew in popularity on

46
the platform “YouTube Stars” came to dominate the space. These stars became so popular

and profitable that businesses managing “YouTube Star” clients began to spring up. In

2007, Dreamworks was the first major corporate power to buy a YouTube channel.

Dreamworks bought “AwesomenessTV” for $33 million, which set off a feeding frenzy of

corporate buyers such as AT&T, Warner Brothers, and most notably Disney’s purchase of

“Maker Studios” for $500 million with an additional $450 million in “performance

incentives” (Tate, 2014). Today almost all prominent multi-channel networks (MCNs) are

owned by conglomerates (the most notable exception being anonymous, egg opening

“FunToyzCollector”). The path to progress into a “YouTube Star” now means signing with

an MCN, much like a record company, to provide technical support and manage your social

media impact and logistics. MCNs act as gatekeepers and “fodder for corporate media” in

the transition from amateur to professionalization (Morreale, 2013).

We might think of Justin.tv as another pioneering digital streaming site, which was

repurposed and made successful largely by sports fans inhabiting the space. Justin.tv was

originally designed for narrowcasting of original content from a user’s everyday life. This

organizing principle was quickly subverted as audiences began transmitting copyrighted

sports broadcasts. Gary Gertzog, senior vice-president of legal and business affairs for the

NFL, likened shutting down Justin.tv and other copyrighted hosting streams to “a game of

Whac-A-Mole” where “(w)e tell them to stop, they agree to stop. We look later, and they are

back at it” (Stone, 2011). As these sites began to be subject to copyright takedowns, they

were replaced with two types of sites—those that host the streaming content and indexing

sites that provide links to the hosting websites.

47
 Justin.tv waned in popularity solely as a narrowcasting site and was largely replaced

by other sports specific streaming sites. If the next wave of popular sites such as ATDHE.eu

or FirstRowSports (including a .tv, .net, .eu, and .com amongst a myriad of other variations)

were shut down, they would quickly pop up with a new country code and resume

streaming sports. Justin.tv and the multiplicity of streaming sites, then, are both local and

narrowcasting but also national and international. This ability to exist within multiple

registers and valences ties this form of streaming back to the flexibility of radio and the

streaming of prize fights.

48
Conclusion

This chapter traces a cultural lineage of streaming technology and the

accompanying cultural meanings that surround it. By making contact with a number of

points of innovation, it is possible to realize not only a technological genealogy of steaming,

and its antecedents, but an account of accompanying cultural events and practices.

Particular attention is paid to moments of rupture within the control of media and media

industries. The chapter reviews a series of events where audiences intervened in the flow

of media and technology. DXing is reviewed as a tactic that contested strategies of

broadcast radio. The tactics of BMI are considered as the newly formed organization

challenged the established power of ASCAP in a controversy over the rights of songwriters

and their royalties. I examine models of televisual flow, particularly Uricchio’s prescient

work anticipating power struggles between analog and digital streaming media and review

the technological development of video conferencing.

The chapter then turns to software, reviewing the development of codecs as both

tools of technological compression and interoperability. An analysis of contemporary

streaming demonstrates that streaming is a product of both technological development and

a long history of socio-cultural innovation and response. One of the most prominent of

these socio-cultural discourses related to streaming—streaming as MPAA piracy or “rogue

websites” vs. unsanctioned streaming as a tactical, digital cultural practice—is the topic we

now turn to in chapter two.

49
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 CHAPTER 2: STREAMING TACTICS

But for younger people who have grown up with this, the convenience is seen more
as a right than a privilege. If you can hit a button on your remote and be watching
Ferris Bueller's Day Off five seconds later, why can't you do that with a movie that
was just in theaters (or still is)? Expectations have been raised, and they're not
going back down.
-Rheinwald-Jones, 2014

Figure 3. Abandoned “Movie Gallery” (Burroughs, 2015)

August, 2010, London

Recently married, I departed with my wife on a plane from Hawaii to London. In

London, I would start a Master’s program in Global Media in the middle of a recession. Of
course, this would mean a tuition hike of close to fifteen thousand dollars and a young
couple struggling to make do. Once we finally had an apartment, there was no thought of
cable or even a television because of fear of the infamous TV tax and stories of vans

56
roaming British streets with antennas capable of finding and fining perpetrators. While I
didn’t particularly care to miss out on American television and all of the commercials, I did
want to stay connected to my favorite sports team. I kept up with all of the news and
information on websites and blogs, but I needed to actually watch the games themselves to
really feel connected. This was my first foray into the world of streaming. I used a simple
‘Google Search’ of ‘watch Clemson Tigers football now” and then ‘watch Clemson Tigers
football now stream’, which led me to the website Firstrowsports.com. From this site, I was
able to choose from a list of video hosting sites that then allowed me to watch the game.
Seeing the image instantly change from a black screen to the game (after clicking off on a
series of soft-core porn pop-up ads) was a moment of pure elation. I called to my wife
jumping up and down and pointing to the screen that I had found the game. She was
equally intrigued, but not at all a sports fan. When I searched and found some of her
favorite American TV shows, then she was impressed. We now have three kids but have yet
to purchase cable and have no intention to ever do so. The unattached coaxial cord is
forever severed.

1987, 1997, 2007

As a child, I remember building forts out of piles of TV Guide and Readers Digest. My
grandparents would never throw them away, just stacks and stacks on the bookshelf and in
the basement. TV Guide and Readers Digest. My parents grew up on 5 channels, and I grew
up on 13. When my parents would go out on dates, my brothers and I would all crowd
around a small black and white TV and crank the dial until we could find something with
decent reception. I remember the weight of the dial as I tried to turn it from station to
station and the loud sound of static crackling as the dial turned. My brothers and I were
experts at connecting a metal clothes hanger to where an antenna had broken off. Some
nights we got out the tinfoil. As my Dad progressed in academia, we could afford a color TV.
They’d read the weekly newspaper to find what shows they wanted to watch and planned
their viewing. In Hawai’i, I learned how to surf. Channel surf. In a single commercial break, I
could flip through all 50 or so, basic cable channels—driving my parents insane. Flipping

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was my way of consuming everything going on in popular culture. I also would make a
Walmart run on the weekends and pick up a cheap DVD or two from the bargain bin. I
always wanted a TiVo, fast-forwarding through commercials looked magical.
When I cut the cord in 2007, I didn’t have to deal with TV time anymore. I stopped
buying DVDs. No preformed Thursday night line-ups or must-see-TV. My newfound
mobility meant I needed to assemble my own personal media ecosystem, navigating and
cobbling together my own patchwork televisual flow. Just like my parents before, I was
poor. I relished the thrill of content hunting on the cheap. Streaming, like my professional
flipping skills, just seemed to suit me.

October 18th, 2012, Iowa City

William had just let his cable subscription lapse and was without any television but
more importantly on a Sunday he was without the NFL. He still had an Internet connection
since he lived on a college campus, so he searched his Twitter feed for the words Seahawks
and stream. The response generated multiple hits and links to various streaming sites
posted by other users. William clicked on a link and was directed to a live streaming of the
Seahawks vs. 49ers game that he watched without a cable subscription or an individual
subscription to NFL Sunday Ticket. After talking to a few of his tech-savvy friends about his
triumph and reading online about streaming, he realized that he was barely scratching the
surface of what was possible and that through the use of a VPN (virtual private network) he
could actually stream all of the games and all NFL television services for free. Even more
remarkable, this type of streaming practice was entirely legal. He bought a VPN router and
made a secure, encrypted connection to a server in Amsterdam where the NFL is offering
all of its packages for free to promote interest in American football in Europe. William felt
extremely productive.

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Introduction

These stories provide a backdrop for thinking about the ways people are ‘making

do,’ or the ways people are operating within the practice of everyday Internet life through

streaming. In this chapter, we look at the tactics of streaming audiences. Streaming is

identified as a liminal space, which studs daily life with tactical, aesthetic moments. The

chapter seeks to conceptualize streaming as a cultural practice, a style or poetics, which

tactically contests the ‘propre’ strategies of traditional media industries (de Certeau, 1984,

p. 100). This is an agonistic struggle of constant adaptation within the emergent space of

streaming. Unsanctioned third party streaming of content has become a much wider

cultural practice, an everyday practice, which is perceived by consumers as beyond the

control of states and territorial government. These nodes are impermanent and exist as

tactical, ephemeral spaces of digital media. These unsanctioned streaming sites are

temporary alliances—not online communities. Thus, this chapter relies on participant-

observation, textual analysis, and self-reflexivity to study this transient space. In following

Morley’s (1992) view that “questions of methodology” are “ultimately pragmatic ones” (p.

13), I recognize the limitations of my own positioning. However, I am still attending to the

uses of streaming, larger reception practices, discourses, and the aesthetic moments of

unsanctioned streaming despite this ephemerality.

The chapter first looks at the attempts by the MPAA to discursively construe

unsanctioned streaming as deviant or “rogue.” I argue that this ubiquitous practice is

central to the debates surrounding SOPA and PIPA. Next, the analytic distinction between

BitTorrent downloading communities and streaming alliances is proposed, along with an

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explanation of the differences between hosting and indexing sites in unsanctioned

streaming. This form of streaming is then theorized as a tactic, as opposed to a strategy,

which invites users to scrape the surface of popular culture. Finally, streaming is theorized

as discursive and aesthetic enactments of mobility and materiality, jouissance, and playing

the role of the trickster.

On October 26th, 2011 Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced into

Congress bill H.R. 3261, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) (Congress.gov, 2011). In the

press release from the Committee on the Judiciary, Representative Smith stated, “The Stop

Online Piracy Act helps stop the flow of revenue to rogue websites and ensures that the

profits from American innovations go to American innovators” (Committee on the

Judiciary, 2011). The term “rogue websites” became part of the public relations strategy

employed by advocates of the bill who wanted to make Internet companies and Internet

Service Providers (ISPs) liable for the posting of infringing content. SOPA was followed by a

sister piece of legislation the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

Supporters of the bill, most notably the Motion Picture Association of America

(MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), cited the need to

protect intellectual property and the purported billions of dollars lost to piracy from these

so-called “rogue websites.” Writing in Forbes, political analyst and Fox News contributor

Doug Schoen (2012) expressed concern for “IP intensive industries” that he claims

generate “$7.7 trillion to the economy every year” (para. 12). According to Schoen, “the

bill’s staunchest critics had to recognize that illegal “rogue” websites undermine American

intellectual property and threaten economic growth and dynamism” (para. 2). Opponents

of the bill such as Harvard University constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe (2011)

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claimed SOPA would harm emergent technology companies, undermining “the openness

and free exchange of information at the heart of the Internet” (p. 4), which would be a

violation of the First Amendment.

The bill would have granted the United States government the authority to

permanently blacklist foreign infringing websites rather than relying on the DMCA

takedown system. The responsibility for monitoring infringing content would shift from

the copyright holder making a claim to the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), web

browsers, and the Internet companies themselves (this would still not shield the

companies from frivolous infringing claims from rival companies and competitors). Google

and other prominent technology companies called the bill “censorship” as the tech

companies banded together on January 18th, 2012 to “blackout” the Internet as a collective

act of protest. Other prominent participating sites included Twitter, Amazon, Craigslist,

Reddit, Pinterest, Wordpress, Wikipedia, and Mozilla among many more. An estimated 1

billion people saw the blacked out protest messages, with “4 top-10, 13 top-100 US sites,

and 115,000 small and medium sites” participating in the strike (Fight for the Future,

2012).

This is an important moment in the history of unsanctioned third-party streaming

because it shows the extent to which the MPAA and RIAA wanted to stop the ubiquitous

practice of streaming amongst audiences. The majority of media reporting pointed to the

infamous The Pirate Bay BitTorrent site as the quintessential “rogue website” example.

While this website and other torrenting sites were definitely in the crosshairs of the media

industry lobby and the MPAA, the websites which are the site of study for this chapter were

equally—if not more—the target of the industry. In a letter from the MPAA (2011)

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addressed to the Office of the Unites States Trade Representative on the same day the SOPA

bill was introduced, the organization outlines three different “rogue” or “online notorious

markets” who threaten the “livelihoods of the people who give [the motion picture

industry] life” (p. 2). This letter provides keen insight into how the industry understands

and codifies streaming. The MPAA letter provides a brief history of content theft, which

begins with small private networks in the 1990s and moves to more centralized peer-to-

peer (P2P) technologies (Napster) and then de-centered protocols (BitTorrent).

This message from the MPAA permits a glimpse into new and growing industry

concerns that have augmented the purported threat posed by these earlier forms of piracy.

“Today the online market has further fragmented and content thieves are taking advantage

of new online technologies, with streaming sites and infringing download and streaming

hubs representing a growing share of unlawful conduct” (p. 2). The document goes on to

specifically mention “linking sites,” which are the searchable content archives of third party

streaming. “Moreover, a secondary market has arisen in the form of ‘linking sites,’ which

are professional-looking sites that facilitate content theft by indexing stolen movie and

television content hosted on other sites” (p. 2). For example, when I want to watch the

latest releases of BBC television unavailable in the United States, I visit multiple indexing

sites hours after the airing of the show and browse until I find the desired content. When

the BBC produced a new series on Sherlock Holmes starring Benedict Cumberbatch, in

2010, its American affiliate, PBS, delayed the North American release by 3 months. As a

huge Sherlockian, I felt the need to protect my cultural status and fandom. I need to

consume the content before other fans to maintain my cultural capital. I gain satisfaction

and affective pleasure from this form of content hunting (it should be noted that the BBC

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only delayed the showing of Sherlock by a couple of weeks during the 3rd season of

Sherlock in 2014 in response to unsanctioned streaming). Three infringing categories are

identified by the MPAA:

1. Peer-to-Peer Networks and Torrent Portals. The sites listed here are some of the

more famous torrenting sites like Thepiratebay.org (TPB), currently thepiratebay.to,

and Torrentz.eu. These sites allow users to directly download files onto their

computers through torrent technologies that disperse large data files across the

network.

2. Infringing Download and Streaming Hubs. These sites are often referred to as

“cyberlockers” or hosting websites. The MPAA lists Megaupload.com or

Megavideo.com, Putlocker.com, Wupload.com, Simdisk.co.kr, and VKontakte as

some of the most predominant infringing sites. A site like Megavideo received an

estimated 4.6 million unique visitors per month, according to the MPAA. These sites

rarely remain under the same domain name and have changed dramatically since

2011 (if they remain at all). As the MPAA succinctly explains, the “user uploads a file

and the hosting site provides the uploader with a link to that file. Clicking the link

will either initiate a download of the uploaded file, a stream of the uploaded file or

offer both options” (p. 5). What is complicated about hosting sites is that they are

used for infringing and non-infringing purposes. This form of cloud storage is

increasingly important for users and businesses (in fact, this entire chapter was

written using Google Docs on Google Drive--faith placed in the cloud).

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 3. Linking Websites. These websites give hosting sites a degree of plausible deniability.

The sites operate by providing users a rudimentary search function to browse

content (most often just by title, season, and episode). The sites, then, “aggregate,

organize and index links to files stored on other sites” (p. 6). These other sites would

be the hosting sites listed above. Prominent sites listed by the MPAA include

Video2k.tv (a derivative of Kino.to), Letmewatchthis.ch, Movie2k.to,

Seriesyonkis.com, and 3000filmes.com. These sites are in even greater flux than

hosting sites and will be taken down and pop back up under different country codes

frequently.

Again, while The Pirate Bay received the bulk of the media attention and scrutiny, the

MPAA was building its case against hosting websites or cyberlockers. Less than a week

after the introduction of the SOPA bill, the MPAA released a “fact sheet” titled, “It’s All

About the Money: The ‘Business’ Model of Rogue Cyberlockers.” The “rogue websites” are

clearly connected to the practice of unsanctioned third-party streaming. Kevin Suh, the

MPAA's senior vice president of content protection, is quoted in CNET (Sandoval, 2012) as

saying, MegaUpload "was at the very top of the piracy pyramid." Citing an Envisional report

(2011), the MPAA claims, “Estimates show that 73.2% of non-pornographic cyberlocker

site traffic is copyrighted content being downloaded illegally.” Hosting sites are

characterized as a “serious and growing threat” to media industries.

Just a few months later Paramount Pictures released a graphic of the top six file

hosting websites surrounding a globe with Megaupload crossed off. The caption reads, “The

top 5 rogue cyberlockers receive 41 billion page views yearly...that’s over 5 views for every

person on the planet” (TorrentFreak, 2012). Megaupload was crossed off the list because,

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on January 19th, founder Kim Dotcom had been arrested at his residence in New Zealand,

the company shut down, and his assets frozen. The MPAA was looking for more

prosecution and the passage of SOPA to help enable the shutting down of these streaming

websites.

Why all of this industry upheaval and colluding with the FBI and government

officials—just to stop people clicking off on pop-up soft-core porn ads, streaming movies,

and television? All of this depicts an industry acutely aware of streaming media as a larger

cultural practice, a tactic, which momentarily bucks up against the strategic logic of media

industries.

Unsanctioned Third Party Streaming

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 Figure 4. Sanctioned and Unsanctioned first and third party streaming

Streaming for the purposes of this chapter focuses on third party unsanctioned

streaming. Third party unsanctioned streaming is the ubiquitous streaming of content such

as movies and television digitally from third party hosting and indexing sites that do not

have licensing agreements with copyright holders. These websites are often divided into

two separate, yet interrelated types of sites—those that host the streaming content and

indexing sites that provide links to the hosting websites. The two sets of sites work in

tandem. Rarely is it possible to simply type a search query into a search engine and retrieve

a desired streaming video from a cyberlocker. Back in 2008, when I wanted to watch

content, however, I easily logged onto a computer, opened up a browser, and searched on

Google for the name of content with the word streaming, stream, or some similar

derivative. This connected me to indexing sites that then connected to the hosting sites.

Hosting sites don’t have a searchable database, which means that I can’t just go to the

homepage of a cyberlocker like Sockshare.com and find the unsanctioned content. There is

no search function. This is the role of indexing sites. Hosting sites do release a link to

content when someone uploads a file. These are the links that are then posted on indexing

sites that grant direct access to unsanctioned content.

Around 2010, with the vamping up of DMCA takedown notices and increased MPAA

scrutiny, I started to find it harder to use search engines and needed to know the names of

the specific sites. The searching of content expanded to multiple mediated platforms. I used

Twitter to search for links to sports games because some indexing sites such as Vipbox

started their own Twitter accounts, which would tweet out links to games (unfortunately

many of these accounts did not last but frequently you could still find desired content on

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Twitter). Reddit message boards and subreddit’s (such as r/BestOfStreamingVideo and

/r/cordcutters) devoted to specific hosting and indexing sites were another substantial

source of access to content.

Every semester I work streaming into my classroom discussions and always noted

how the names of prominent sites were widely known despite their frequent takedowns

but also how students valued sharing the knowledge of “their” preferred site. Knowing

streaming sites is definitely a form of cultural capital and prestige amongst my students (I

always scored “cool” points for having knowledge of some of the best sites and sites that

students didn’t yet know. I often had students ask me to write some of the names on the

board, and I’m not sure this ever happened again during the semester).

As Lobato and Tang (2014) outline the “cyberlocker constitutes the backend of a

larger infrastructure that includes release logs, bulletin boards and forums, where links to

cyberlocker-hosted content can be found” (p. 426). This means that the indexing sites serve

the search function to get access to the content. “Cyberlockers are the storage workhorses

of this system; intermediary sites are where users navigate the potentially vast content

available” (p. 426). This is done to try and protect each party by compartmentalizing each

step (raising complicated questions about cloud computing and copyright, for example).

Justin.tv.com was an early version of a streaming site (now stripped of all “illegal,”

copyright infringing content), which was replaced with links and third party hosting sites

like Megavideo, Putlocker or Sockshare.

As stated in the introduction, the Motion Picture Association of America (2012)

defines streaming as a sub-category of ‘Content Theft’ labeled ‘Streaming Theft’. The MPAA

anticipates some of the objections to this categorization of streaming as theft (references to

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advertising and subscriptions) and tries to give ‘tips’ to the public on how to avoid fraud

and theft:

“While there are many websites where consumers can legally view streamed
content, there are many illegal streaming sites where operators will solicit users to
provide payment to purchase "subscriptions" or "memberships" or otherwise pay
for illegal content. These sites often feature advertisements for legitimate products
or services alongside illegal streaming of unauthorized movie and television
content. Website operators of such illegal sites purposely use these techniques to
fool consumers into believing that their websites are legal; that’s how they make a
profit. It’s called fraud and theft.”
We are admonished to “watch for titles that are ‘too new to be true,’’ “trust your eyes and

ears” in reference to picture quality, and to avoid websites that don’t disclose their location

in contact information or who promise to be “100% legal.” Consumers are being duped into

paying these websites, but the greater harm is that many start to believe that the

widespread practice is a legitimate part of everyday consumption patterns. From the

industry’s perspective, this kind of unsanctioned streaming should be defined as nothing

more than streaming theft. In my experience, indexing and hosting sites do appear as

legitimate businesses. I have used hosting sites, not just for infringing content, but to send

large data files transnationally. This doesn’t happen “alongside” unsanctioned streaming

but is part of the networked architecture of hosting sites, an example of streaming existing

within the interstices of production and consumption.

These technological advancements run parallel to and are intertwined with, cultural

processes such as the formation of a convergence culture or what some have labeled Web

2.0. Streaming is the latest iteration of users’ subversion of state power. Yet streamers are

not actively resisting or usurping state authority but are engaging in an ephemeral,

momentary bucking of state strategies, which lockdown copyright as timeless. However,

this is an important moment because it marks a potential shift in the cultural imaginary

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(Boddy, 2004) of Internet users as a space for re-contextualizing thinking about ownership

and copyright in a streaming society.

Downloading versus Streaming

Goldsmith and Wu (2005) in their book, Who Controls the Internet, end their

analysis with the onset of BitTorrent and communities of Internet users who are able to

circumvent state control but are isolated from any kind of mainstream cultural

impact. These communities are left in the literature as ostracized, niche groups that subsist

on the fringes of Internet life. This chapter makes a contribution to this literature by

extending the focus to the ubiquitous practice of third party unsanctioned streaming. There

is a great deal of consideration in the popular press and amongst media scholars about P2P

file sharing and BitTorrent, but significantly less scholarly attention placed on streaming.

Substantive debates surrounding intellectual property and file-sharing (Benkler, 2006;

Boyle, 2008; Gillespie, 2007; Lessig, 2002, 2004, 2006; McLeod, 2005; Vaidhyanathan,

2003, 2011) and the economics of piracy and file-sharing (Liebowitz, 2006; Rob &

Waldfogel, 2008; Zentner, 2006) with the rise of networked communication are well

trodden academic ground. Articles from a critical cultural perspective, as opposed to a legal

vantage point, often incorporate ethnographic or quasi-ethnographic approaches that

consider the field of study (Kelty, 2008; Soderberg, 2011). Scholars from a media

anthropology trajectory read the collective community through participation,

embeddedness, and reading message boards (the ‘data’ of choice is the message board post

that succinctly supports the author’s claims).

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 A body of literature focuses on the Swedish context and notorious BitTorrent site

“The Pirate Bay” (Allen-Robertson, 2013; Andersson, 2009; Burkart, 2010, 2014; Schwarz,

2013). De Kosnik (2010) calls “Pirate TV” with torrenting, not streaming, the future of

television. Special issues on “Piracy Cultures” in the International Journal of

Communication(Castells & Cardoso, 2012) and the recent special issue of Popular

Communication on “Piracy and Social Change” (Schwarz & Burkart, 2015) continue this

trajectory of scholarship. This strand of scholarship often recognizes P2P and BitTorrent

sites as communal spaces (Beekhuyzen & von Hellens, 2009; Cenite et. al, 2009; Meulpolder

et. al 2010). Newman (2012) looks at the values and ethics P2P communities share about

downloading television texts.

However, some scholars even challenge the notion that file-sharing constitutes a

“community” (Holmstrom, 2014). Andersson (2011) succinctly describes file-sharing as

“the unrestricted duplication of digitized media content between autonomous end-nodes

on the Internet” (p. 2). Caraway (2012) looks at debates amongst users about the varying

degrees and types of community present in file-sharing. This is in contrast to streaming (or

cyberlocker hosting sites), which according to Lobato and Tang (2014) are not reciprocal

(encouraging both uploading and downloading) or collaborative:

But arguably its most egregious feature, from the perspective of current Web 2.0

discourse, is the fact that the cyberlocker does not foster collaboration or co-

creation; its storage-and-retrieval functionality means there is no possibility of

textual change for the content hosted on its servers.

For the purposes of this research, I draw an analytic distinction between P2P, file-sharing,

and streaming. Streaming alliances scrape the surface of popular culture, whereas

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BitTorrent communities are inconspicuous and require more technological knowledge.

BitTorrent protocols require separate applications for uploading and downloading while

hosting sites just need an Internet connection and browser to access content. Another

marked difference is the seeding process in BitTorrent communities that creates more

social cohesion and reciprocity in torrenting. “P2P communities, by contrast, are subject to

the whim of users' seeding capabilities, that is, making the file available only when the user

wants to spare the bandwidth” (emphasis original, Marx, 2013, para. 14). In contrast,

content on unsanctioned streaming sites is always-already available in the minds of

streamers. Content just needs to be hunted down, but there is no necessary collaboration to

initiate the retrieval, no seeding. A study by Mahanti, Carlsson, and Williamson (2010) finds

that with the decline of P2P file sharing that prominent hosting sites offer faster access to

popular television content, which is spread more widely than P2P counterpart

communities. This is important for the application of participant observation to streaming

networks as “temporary alliances” (Wildeman, 1998) or temporary collectives. In scraping

the surface streaming, as a tactic, acts as a liminal space, which ephemerally studs user’s

everyday lives with encounters of mediated content.

Strategies and Tactics: Reading and Streaming

This section begins by defining streaming within de Certeau’s model of tactics

versus strategies before moving on to further methodological justifications. Streaming is

then placed within an active audience perspective as productive ‘reading’ and as a liminal

space of aesthetic moments and temporary alliances. This is followed by an analysis of

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indexing and hosting websites involved in streaming. Strategies and tactics are a useful

conceptual framework for understanding streaming. “Strategy” is defined as the “calculus

of force-relationships” where the possessor of power exercises the “will and power” over

an environment to assume a place that is sanctioned as proper. Fiske (1988) succinctly

explains place as the “mastery over time, allowing one to hold on to acquired advantages, to

prepare future expansions and to control historical changes to one’s own advantage” (p.

288). Tactics have no sustained place of their own but construct a space within the place of

the powerful. Tactics depend on time, are contextual, and belong to the weak. They cannot

keep what they win and must consistently manipulate “events in order to turn them into

opportunities” (de Certeau, 1984, p. xix). We might think of a park as a strategy by a local

government to wield control over a space and make it appear as if time has been

suspended. Cutting a corner or walking through the grass in the park might be thought of

as a momentary, ephemeral tactic. There is the subversion of authority but not in the way

that we traditionally think of compiling the gains of resistance. This is ‘making do’ as

streaming within the logics of a Western capitalist system of copyright and ownership.

Streamers are not passive users of the Internet but are active producers or

bricoleurs. Michel de Certeau (1984) in his book L’invention du Quotidian emphasizes the

generative creativity of users within the repetition of everydayness. For de Certeau

consumption and production are interstitial processes—consumption as

production. Understanding de Certeau’s concept of ‘reading’ is of seminal importance for

asserting the active role of streamers as bricoleurs. Rather than passively consuming

programmed content, streamers as bricoleurs participate in the recombinatory practice of

collecting popular culture artifacts when and where they want. Thus, our normative

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conception of consumers as passive readers, a view held by many in the Frankfurt school, is

deeply embedded in our relation to a scriptural economy according to de Certeau. Writing

for de Certeau is strategic and the strategy of those in power, like the Church, that

resembles a sender-receiver model where the consumers are “imprinted by and like the

text which is imposed on it. “ In this way, it produces:

“The ideology of consumption-as-a-receptacle…this legend is necessary for the

system that distinguishes and privileges authors, educators, revolutionaries, in a
word, ‘producers,’ in contrast with those who do not consume. By challenging
‘consumption as it is conceived and (of course) confirmed by these ‘authorial’
enterprises, we may be able to discover creative activity where it has been denied
that any exists” (p. 167).
Certeau is flipping the script and inviting scholars to take consumption practices seriously.

This also pushes back against the “author genius” discourse, which dates back to the

dissolution of the guild system and implementation of copyright to protect individual

productions and works of art--further reducing the generative creativity of consumption.

An entire tradition of active audience researchers would follow this novel theory of reading

as production and its decentering of privileged producers (or writers) of knowledge.

Antecedents inspired the ethnographic audience research of Janice Radway (1984)

on romance readers, Ang (1989) on soap opera viewers of Dallas, and Jenkins (1992) on

fandom to not only take popular culture seriously as a site of academic investigation but

also to consider the voices of those participating in the reading. De Certeau understands

reading as a re-combinatory practice of being in-between where:

“The reader takes neither the position of the author nor an author’s position. He
invents in texts something different from what they intended. He detaches them
from their origin. He combines their fragments and creates something unknown in
the space organized by their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of
meanings. Is this reading activity reserved for the literary critic…or can it be
extended to all cultural consumers?” (p. 169).

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This practice of combining fragments of popular culture and detaching content from their

media industry origins makes this form of consumption meaningful, a re-combinatory craft.

Certeau’s theories about popular culture as a site of everyday struggle for the

disempowered served to legitimate fandom as a worthy site of scholarship for early fan

scholars. Following de Certeau, John Fiske (2010) advanced the “active audience” tradition

(a tradition of communication scholarship that can be rooted all the way back to 1940’s

scholars such as Herta Herzog and Robert K. Merton), which inspired the ethnographically

informed fan community research of scholars such as Camille Bacon-Smith (1992) on

female Star Trek fan-fiction and Jenkins’ (1992) canonical Textual Poachers (as well as

noted scholars Roberta Pearson, John Tulloch, and Constance Penley to name a few). Not

only did these scholars take popular culture seriously as a site of academic investigation,

primarily through fan conventions and fanfic/zine writing, but they also considered the

voices of those participating in the reading.

Henry Jenkins (2009), commonly attributed as the progenitor of the term

“participatory culture,” has gone to great lengths to define and then redefine what he sees

as a participatory culture. Participatory culture “is a culture with relatively low barriers to

artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations,

and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along

knowledge to novices” (p. 6). A participatory culture is also marked by contributors feeling

that their “contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one

another” (p. 6). Jenkins’ definition of participatory culture goes through an evolution,

however, with the rise of Web 2.0 companies and business practices. Jenkins is now quick

to distinguish between companies, such as the unsuccessful FanLib (Scott, 2009), which

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tried to monetize fan fiction, and companies like Amazon that are industry attempts to

extract the labor of fans for their bottom-line and grassroots participatory culture.

Streaming can be seen as the latest extension of this tension between consumers and media

industries where media consumers are not:

“Totally autonomous from or totally vulnerable to the culture industries. It would be

naïve to assume that powerful conglomerates will not protect their own interests as
they enter this new media marketplace, but at the same time, audiences are gaining
greater power and autonomy as they enter in the new knowledge culture” (Jenkins,
2006, p. 136).
In chapter three, we show how the industry has taken these audience practices and

reformulated a streaming industry. This chapter, however, shows streaming as this

polysemic practice, which stands in-between--not completely autonomous, but not

completely vulnerable as a tactic.

Morris (1990) critiques this mode of inquiry into the polysemic readings of texts by

audiences and personal depictions of active audiences (which would include my own

personal accounts of streaming), calling it narcissistic. For Morris, the researcher is guided

by a self-executing logic where they will always find what they want when culture is always

located in the selected informant as resistance reader. Morris is concerned with being

fixated on the reading moment and the resistance readings while losing focus on the lived

culture. Nonetheless, this shift towards reading spaces of enunciation and modes of

operation is a dramatic re-contextualization of the academic project. It also means that

streaming needs to be understood through an analysis of intermediaries and the different

layers of technologies and the affordances of platforms in conjunction with users streaming

practices.

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 A return to de Certeau means a “poetics of uses rather than users” and an analysis

“peopled with moments and practices rather than subjects” (p. 156-157), which might

correct for some of the over-fixation on resistant, active audience readings of Madonna and

MTV music videos, proliferant in the nineties. No longer is the overarching imperative to

search for revolution and an alternative to the current capitalist consumer culture,

according to Certeau and Fiske. The knowledge produced by the researcher “may be used

in a number of ways, and it is important to understand here that what is produced is a

knowledge, not the knowledge” (emphasis original, Fiske 1988, p. 305). De Certeau is

beginning from the contextual and as a pragmatist; he wants to deal with culture as lived

experiences in and through capitalism. Streaming operates in the same way as a contingent

practice of “making do” in contemporary consumer culture.

Streaming and Participant Observation

The following section relies heavily on my own personal streaming experiences in

the field of study before turning to key takeaways from participant observation. Certainly

one of the challenges to performing research in digital spaces that have been deemed

‘illegal’ by institutional authorities is that it can often seem like hitting a moving target

(Coleman, 2010). For the past two years, I have conducted participant observation within

the hosting and indexing sites listed in the MPAA report on “rogue sites.” This connects

with my own personal experience of being a cord-never. I have never had a cable

subscription, but, like a good media and television studies scholar, have consumed copious

amounts of television and films. I have been streaming since 2006 and within my own

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family since 2008. Streaming is a momentary ephemeral tactic that is disruptive of the

nominal community framing. Streaming is a site of encounters and ruptures, moments of

friction that scrape just below the surface of popular culture. The three takeaways of

conceptualizing streaming as a tactic are 1) mobility and materiality, 2) jouissance, and 3)

playing the trickster, which are analyzed as aesthetic moments within the liminal space of

streaming. This section attempts to break down more programmatically the various

platforms and affordances involved in streaming, beginning from the user perspective.

On the more cultural, “active audience” spectrum of the streaming equation we

follow Jenkins assertion that we live in a participatory culture where citizens can become

active contributors or bricoleurs that are beginning to shape consumption and production

practices. In Convergence Culture, Jenkins (2006) took his early work on fandom and

textual poaching (1992) by active audiences and presented a theory of how time-space

compression in mediated spaces allows new possibilities for online communities where

consumers can also be producers or prosumers alongside businesses (Bruns, 2008).

Convergence culture is supposed to be both top down and bottom up as lowered

production costs are coupled with an expansion of delivery channels unique to digital

environments. These consumers and fans are “learning how to use these different media

technologies to bring the flow of media more fully under their control and to interact with

other consumers” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 18). Social media and social networking have

augmented processes of circulation (Jenkins, Ford & Green 2013). Digitization has

decreased cultural latency (Yakob, 2009) and increased the speed at which compressed

bits and information circulates. Streamers are no longer bound to the geographies of

copyright (buying physical DVD’s) or the nation-state (hosting websites exist trans-

77
nationally). These streamers are thriving because of their manipulation of the flow of

media technology, and they believe that streaming is such an ingrained practice that it will

never be completely shut down.

Despite the claims of participatory culture within these networks, the user is not as

“free” as this tale of prosumption may indicate. We want to be mindful of vulnerabilities to

this system that might be more susceptible to nation-state strategies and control than the

user alliances acknowledge. The institutional system has already set up a series of filters to

discourage users from streaming. First, unless a user has prior knowledge of a website,

information is needed to know where to gain access to the website (certainly the binary IP

addresses for these sites are not known). This requires the use of search engines to find

streams, content, and websites. Again, these are not communities within the deep or dark

web, which means the information is much easier to access but remains an initial barrier.

In 2006-2007, before the emergence of third-party hosting websites as the dominant form

of streaming tactics, I used GoogleVideo to search for movies to stream. Slowly I began

realizing that I was becoming unable to find many of the sites I had previously watched

videos on. Google was filtering sites like Tudou and Youku and preventing them from

coming up in my search. I needed to rely on websites with slower speeds and in languages

such as Thai and Russian. Search engines are very susceptible to government regulation

and Google predictably acquiesced to pressure to filter results flagged as being in violation

of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The DMCA does, however, shield Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from being held

liable for copyright infringement by those connecting to their services on the

Internet. Recent legislation in the form of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP

78
Act (PIPA) has attempted to make ISPs liable for the actions of individual users, reducing

existing safe harbor provisions. The current “safe harbor” system set in place by the DMCA

is a takedown system where the onus is on the copyright holder to issue a complaint that

another party is infringing on their copyright. This triggers a takedown notice being put in

place of a website or the website being removed from search results. This takedown

system is not sufficient enough for the MPAA lobby because the responsibility for

monitoring and filing complaints is on the copyright holder, and the takedown system

doesn’t serve as a strong deterrent for future copyright violation. Several pieces of

legislation such as the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act

(CBDTPA) would make ISPs as an intermediary responsible for the regulation of streaming.

On the platform or website level, streaming is broken into two separate parts and

parties. The architecture of the Internet where the ‘code is law’ (Lessig, 2008) must be

taken seriously. One set of websites performs the function of indexing content by

providing users with searchable lists of links. These indexing or linking websites

compartmentalize streaming and complicates prosecution because it separates the intent

to distribute. Hosting websites do not want to be responsible for what is uploaded,

preferring a takedown system, because it is in their economic interests to not have to not

deter advertising eyeballs and pay for the regulation themselves. There is also the

complication posed by cloud computing. Severe regulation of hosting services could lead to

Apple, Google, and other prominent storage databases all being responsible for storing

copyrighted materials and content. These same interest groups were able to defeat the

Recording Industry of America Association’s (RIAA) attempts to regulate ISPs in their last

go around with SOPA. There may be some hesitancy from the MPAA to attack hosting

79
websites through direct legislation and suffer the same public reprisal as the RIAA

faced. These hosting and indexing websites are, however, constantly subject to DMCA

takedown notices but are constantly reproducing themselves through slight variations in

web addresses and country suffixes.

Users quickly understand the changes and become adept at finding new resources

for streaming. The other half of the equation is the hosting site’s where users upload the

actual videos for streaming (users also post the links and perform the majority of the

labor). Consider one streamer’s understanding of the variations in a particular website,

“Letmewatchthis is a good site for streaming. But don’t choose the .com site. Choose the

1.ch site. The other one has been flagged by the government. You can watch movies and TV

shows, like Parks and Recreation or Rio or Person of Interest, all within an hour of it being

aired. It’s cool” (Personal communication, 2012). The change from a .com to 1.ch did not

interrupt the viewing patterns for this streamer. This is another example of the pleasure

that users gain from navigating government enforcement of copyright and, if only for a

brief moment, circumventing that state dominance to partake of the forbidden fruit of

content.

These websites do have ratings, limited comments, and log-ins—all attempts to

protect users. The state and businesses do have a history of disturbing the harmony of

these practices. For example, in the case of the early music service Kazaa the community

was not mature enough to handle the onslaught of spam and pornography embedded into

the links of the service, some of which was facilitated by the company itself in order to

monetize the service and make the company profitable. This very quickly proved to be a

very poor business model and alienated Kazaa’s customer base and along with protracted

80
legal battles led to their ultimate demise as a thriving business. Viruses are unwelcome by

users and websites, and there is a collective effort to prevent the flooding of content with

spyware and adware that Kazaa facilitated. There is more policing and a more mature

attempt at stopping sabotage from outside forces such as businesses actively trying to

infect users by embedding content with viruses.

These websites also are different from the early vulnerabilities of Kazaa because

they have a strong Internet advertising revenue stream for income. At the time of Kazaa,

there was no business model for websites to become profitable on their own. Since the

introduction of Google AdWords and AdSense, the market for Internet advertising has

steadily increased. Today online advertising space is bought in bulk through ad network

buys. Companies often don’t know which specific websites their advertisements are

placed. Streaming websites are littered with pop-up ads that users learn to navigate and

often are populated with lower-end advertising that includes pornography and viruses.

Streamers learn where to click on advertisements in order to click off on them. Pop-ups

have become so sophisticated that they use a series of dummy X’s and “click here” signs to

induce more clicking and another round of pop-ups.

This does not mean that many reputable companies’ ads do not find their way onto

these websites through the bulk purchasing. Recently there were ads for Mr. Clean and,

ironically, the latest DVD release on a website called freemovieaddicts, which only serves to

legitimate streaming to a larger public. Remember that the MPAA specifically cites

advertising as something designed to fool the public into believing that streaming websites

are legal and reputable. They understand the power of advertising to change public

opinion. Lastly, the nation-state must be considered when thinking about institutional

81
forces. Streaming is an international phenomenon with hosting and indexing websites

stretching across the globe. As Streeter (1996) points out, since the early eighties the

United States government has attempted to export and enforce its version of copyright

throughout the world. If the United States were to pass more stringent copyright laws on

streaming, it would perceivably impact other countries that currently serve as havens for

suspected infringers. So far, the United States has been unsuccessful in extraditing

streaming copyright violators and making them stand trial physically in the Unites States

but this is an evolving legal struggle.

Mobility and Materiality

Another important way that streaming, as a tactic, challenges the ‘place’ of copyright

and entertainment conglomerates is by contesting the “place and the timing of scheduled

uses” (Fiske, 2010, p. 34) of commercial content that for Fiske (2010) is the strategy of

commerce. This strategy of commerce works through broadcast scheduling that routinized

viewing habits and establishes the place of television programming. Viewers are even

given names for various line-ups of shows to demarcate days of the week and blocks of

times for weekly viewing. Commercials are a part of the established norms of television

watching despite the newness of their number and length. Streaming allows the user to

watch programs according to their own timeframe and schedule. While television

companies and stations are emphasizing live viewing through new technologies such as

Twitter, streaming is a momentary bucking of that strategy of commerce to lock down

82
viewers. This allows streamers to think about television and consumption beyond the

network schedule.

Streamers often describe having entirely different viewing experiences by watching

an entire season of a show in one or two binge viewing sessions (that are commercial

free!). Binging (a colloquially used term that has been adopted by industry and popular

culture) is a tactic because it does nothing to change the official structure of television nor

does it even register within official Nielsen statistics and stockpile its winnings, yet,

unsanctioned streaming is the art of the weak. Fiske describes this tactic as art as

“constantly mobile, seizing possibilities on the wing, deriving from the eternal,

unsuppressed vigilance of the weak but undefeated in spirit” (p. 289). This mobility is part

of the streaming tactic. You cannot only watch when you want but with the portability of

technology—where you want as well. The place of the TV in the home must be rethought

because of the many different devices and configurations for viewing facilitated by

streaming. An annual NPD Group (2012) study reported that 45% of those surveyed use

their television as the ‘primary screen’ for watching free and paid streaming videos, up

from 33% in 2011. The study suggests that this is due to the fact that “home installation of

millions of Internet-connected TVs is changing the way that consumers access and view

streaming video.” So as portability is a force de-centering traditional television, streaming

is becoming a more dominant mode for consuming all mediated content.

Fan studies in the first wave or “fandom is beautiful” stage “constituted a purposeful

political intervention that sided with the tactics of fan audiences in their evasion of

dominant ideologies, and that set out to rigorously defend fan communities against their

ridicule in the mass media and by non-fans” (Gray, Sandvoss, & Harrington, 2007, p.

83
2). Poaching and subverting the preferred meaning of the ‘power bloc’ (Fiske, 1989) was a

communal display of resistance to dominant ideologies. Streaming can be a moment of

active audience resistance and certainly is a moment of ‘reading’ popular culture but this is

increasingly a negotiated space “betwixt and between” (Turner, 1987) audience and

industry. The difference is that streaming is performed by the networked individual while

fandom has more of a communal ethos. Fan communities, as well as many other

participatory cultures, engage in a kind of reclamation project for their valued cultural

artifacts and content. In contrast, streaming culture produces a distinct orientation to

ownership where the networked individual feels less inclined to own the materiality of

content. Returning to the move from flow to files back to flow—even the desire to

download content gives way to the implicit trust or faith that streamers have in the ability

to access content through the network. The materiality of libraries, DVDs, and CD

collections all migrate into a streaming culture.

Jouissance

In an otherwise foundational piece on unsanctioned streaming, Lobato and Tang

(2014) believe the non-reciprocal nature of hosting sites (cyberlockers) makes the

technology beyond romanticizing, “we will watch with interest to see how the remnants of

the industry evolve and how future generations of media scholars will reconstruct the story

of this unloved and unlovely technology” (p. 432). This blanket categorization of streaming

as “unloved and unlovely” is far from my observed experiences within these spaces.

84
 It is true that hosting and indexing sites do not elicit the same kinds of responses

from free culture advocates as Bittorrent communities like The Pirate Bay, but from the

context of the user experience streaming is not unloved. On the contrary, unsanctioned

third-party streaming permits users to indulge in a cathartic, liminal release from the

everydayness of modernity. As will be discussed in further detail in chapter three, this

ubiquitous form of unsanctioned streaming gives rise to the re-articulation of streaming as

an emergent industry. Companies such as Netflix and Amazon are direct benefactors from

piracy and the informal media economy (Lobato & Thomas, 2012) (once again, proving

Sterne is correct that pirate practices quickly become incorporated into business practices)

and should not go “unloved” by the emergent streaming industry.

De Certeau (1984) examined the distinction between revolutions and lived

contextual resistance, which can be applied to streaming. Certeau believes that those using

tactics “must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the

surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It

can be where it is least expected” (p. 37). Modernity routinizes commodity and leisure as

leisure is reinforced and constituted through capitalism (think of a cell phone issued by a

business to stay in constant contact or emails from students on the weekends). The

technological continuation of the commodification of leisure results in the inability to

escape work as you are constantly connected (the double-edged sword of connectivity).

Certeau’s view of culture perceives cracks and fissures in modernity that allow for the

fleeting promise of everyday life to puncture modernity’s absence with the presence and

pleasure of jouissance. This could be a worker quickly checking a Facebook profile or

85
streaming a video to feel that fleeting sense of jouissance studding modern life (Silverstone,

1994).

Far from seeing streaming as harmful, lonely, and depressing (see Sung, Kang, and

Lee, 2015, for an example of media effects scholarship on the negative impacts of binging),

streamers within the context of third party unsanctioned streaming find jouissance within

the fissures of modernity and copyright. Here we see de Certeau as a slight continuation of

Lefebvre (2002), however, revolution implies a return to an authentic cultural state that

ignores differences (Langbauer, 1992) and cuts short contingent, agonistic struggle. De

Certeau (1984) invites researchers to rethink the project of revolution. “Revolution itself,

that ‘modern’ idea, represents that scriptural project at the level of an entire society

seeking to constitute itself as a blank page with respect to the past, to write itself by itself

(that is, to produce itself as its own system) and to produce a new history on the model of

what it fabricates (and this will be ‘progress’)” (p. 135). The focus of this chapter then is not

on how streaming is ‘revolutionizing’ the strategic logic of media industries but

interrogating streaming as a meaningful tactic, which becomes an interstitial part of

everyday media life.

Trickster

Movie2k.to is back as Movie4k! Nobody should have the power to suppress somebody just
because of money! This site is the result of the need of many Human Beings. Everyone
wants Movie2k.to/Movie4k.to back. We, the Citizens, have to make clear that a "copyright
infringement" cannot be compared to a violent crime. How come bootlegger get five years
of jail time while child abuser are free on a 22-month probation? That is because money is
way more important than an uniqü (sic) human life. You cannot suppress the will of the
People! One website gös (sic), the next day five new appear. Did not the time come to
overthink your marketing concepts and accept the new media?
-Movies2k.to, 2014
86
 The above quote is from one of the MPAA listed indexing sites. This is a rare

occasion when the site administrators make any kind of public announcement to users of

the site. This message is addressed to both government institutions and users of the site at

the same time. Related to jouissance, the message exemplifies the role of the trickster being

played by streamers. Klapp (1954) defines tricksters as the “clever hero,” whereas Turner

(1969) describes tricksters as liminal personalities. Horvath and Thomassen (2008, p. 13)

extend this conception of liminal trickster—adding that tricksters are without home

(place), outsiders, and lack existential commitments. Tricksters, like streamers, are

“ambivalent characters. They have no respect for boundaries or for neat and tidy

categories” (McArthur, 2000, p. 85). For some streamers, as they dip into the liminal space

of streaming, they enact the role of the trickster--subverting the boundaries of popular

culture and copyright. This is an affective rush of momentarily breaking established norms.

However, it is not the case for all streamers. There are many who may not feel, at all like

they are blurring boundaries or engaged in anything nefarious. However, as the above

quote shows, those who do perform this role wear the banner of the trickster. They enact

this aesthetic moment by dipping into the shallow trough of streaming media, rolling

around in the content--only to freely exit back into everyday life.

With my own young family, I have noticed a migration away from unsanctioned

streaming as my dominant and preferred method of consuming content. I succumb to the

convenience of search algorithms rather than the jouissance of treasure hunting. Yet, even

as I assimilate into the rearticulated flow of an emergent streaming industry, I still play the

trickster. I watch Netflix from my wife’s sister’s account, Amazon Prime from my parents,

87
XFinity by using my brother’s cable login and Hulu Plus from a free promotion. I continue

to push back and “make do” by scavenging for passwords, manipulating technology, and

leveraging my network connections (I am still in search of an elusive HBOGo or HBO Now

password).

The entertainment industry makes a great deal of their money from controlling

large libraries of content. The business model is to sell that library back to the consumer in

as many forms as possible (for example only ‘owning’ a song as a licensed rental on one

playing device such as an iPod that is legally non-transferable to another device) so control

over content is paramount. Companies want to lock down consumers in a timeless place

that naturalizes copyright law so that it seems like it has existed forever and will continue

to exist forever. This strategic logic is a relatively new assertion that works of art should

belong to companies beyond the life of the author or creator but thanks to the panoptic

practice of the Sonny Bono law (Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act but the colloquially

known Sonny Bono law serves to put a happy, clean, eternal/dead face to its existence) the

life of copyright has been extended and effectively has frozen in place the public

domain. Streaming allows the user to journey through popular culture and cut corners

through retrofitting content to the contours of their own cultural imaginaries. The user

does not own the fragments of popular culture; they are streamed, and so the user exists

in-between with no definitive place. Despite this placelessness, there is the capacity for a

multiplicity of readings and combinations of programming. This is the surprise and

productivity of poaching and reading within popular culture through streaming.

Sites for streaming are constantly in flux. Streamers are negotiating pop-ups, dead

links, and seizing the ephemeral moments of watching a particular program. These sites

88
are not built to last, and takedowns are often the order of the day, so the fleeting pleasure

in the pursuit and momentary viewing are part of the undefeated spirit of streaming. Here

we could go so far as to say that within the history of streaming, from Napster to Kazaa to

our current moment of streaming, we could possibly point to a ‘metis’ or internal logic that

permeates those who have grown up downloading and streaming content (this history

could be extended to VHS swapping or other forms of participatory culture). While the use

of torrent technology is still very specialized and not as accessible as unsanctioned

streaming there is an internalization to streaming as a practice that drives me to ‘make do’

and find the content as if it is a part of a game between me and the content controlling

industry. I feel I am playing the role of the trickster.

89
Conclusion

This chapter is an analysis of third-party unsanctioned streaming and the forces that

impinge on this practice. On one hand, streaming is presented by the MPAA as piracy and

the spaces involved branded as “rogue websites.” On the other, unsanctioned streaming is

conceptualized as a tactical practice, divided into linking and hosting sites, which both

satisfies user needs and is a source of cultural and economic innovation. Efforts by

institutions, such as the MPAA, and scholars to raise these competing discourses to

ascendancy are chronicled. The process of investigating these spaces requires an approach

informed by participant observation, self-reflexivity, and attention to larger reception

practices and discourses. I document my mobile methodological approach in the chapter

and justify the use of a nontraditional participant observation. The multi-sited, mobile

participant observation has yielded a series of insights: streaming has had dramatic impact

on the mobility and materiality of media flow; streaming is a process that leads to aesthetic

experiences (jouissance); and streamers both assume and are cast in the role of the

trickster. These activities of unsanctioned third-party streamers have informed industry

approaches to streaming technology, leading to emergent industry logics and the growth of

a streaming industry. I turn now to these industry discourses and practices in chapter

three.

90
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 CHAPTER 3: HOUSE OF NETFLIX: CORDS, STREAMING LORE, AND THE ALGORITHMIC
AUDIENCE

It is, to me right now, at the tip of this convergence between what is the best of the
South [Hollywood] and the best of the North [Silicon Valley]. I think you’re starting
to see something very new, very original budding out of it. There is something great
going on there...Right now, to me, it is the wild, wild west.
-DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, 2013

Because we have a direct relationship with consumers, we know what people like to
watch and that helps us understand how big the interest is going to be for a given
show. It gave us some confidence that we could find an audience for a show like
House of Cards.
-Jonathan Friedland, Netflix CCO

Who would have believed that anybody was going to get over a million dollars an
hour from Netflix? Of course, it could be argued that they have already bankrupted
themselves. Maybe the streaming deals aren’t worth that much and they’re
overpaying. Who knows? The one thing that’s still true about entertainment is
nobody knows nothing.
-Dick Wolf, Executive Producer, Writer, Law & Order

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to parse out the emergent 'streaming logics' within

this burgeoning streaming industry and how they constitutively shape and re-shape

traditional broadcasting logics as "contested discourses" (Havens, 2013). Streaming

companies have come to embody the strategic power of Internet companies (the audience

tactic re-articulated as a strategy), which are butting heads with other regimes of corporate

power. Cable and telecommunication companies such as Comcast and Time-Warner Cable

are dealing with the loss of subscribers and anxieties about "cord-cutters" and "cord-

nevers" amplified by the growth, popularity, and cultural salience of streaming services

such as Netflix. In this chapter, the growing body of literature within media industry

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studies on “industry lore” is reviewed, and justification for Netflix as a site of study is

provided. The chapter then proposes four categories of emergent streaming lore and

analyzes their relation to an emergent streaming industry. These categories are (1) Netflix

as 'quality' streams, (2) the algorithmic audience, (3) cord-cutters and cord-nevers, and,

finally, (4) marathoning/binging.

In the year 2000 the fledgling company Netflix would make several offers to video

rental giant Blockbuster Video and Entertainment Company to purchase Netflix for a mere

50 million dollars. Around this time, the Viacom-owned Blockbuster IPO was valued at

close to 4.8 billion dollars. Ten years later the company would file for bankruptcy, valued at

only 24 million dollars. This was not; however, a slow, inevitable march toward

obsolescence, but a rapid descent as Blockbuster was unable to navigate the shifting

cultural terrain brought about with the rise of streaming technology. In 2009, Blockbuster

was still generating 4 billion dollars in revenue. However, Blockbuster’s brick and mortar

stores, a staple and symbol of modern suburban Americana, would soon shutter their

doors. The contemporary experience of driving to a local Blockbuster Video, browsing the

rows of empty boxes, and inevitably paying late fees would no longer constitute our

relation to media, movies and television. This rupture in the institutional order signaled a

shift toward a digital moment in the distribution of media and communication and a

change in our bond with the materiality of media. The existing gatekeepers were deposed

as streaming media ushered in a new strategic logic in an era of networked communication

practices.

This chapter attempts to delineate, with the rise of streaming technology, an

emergent streaming industry. In the last chapter, we looked at unsanctioned third-party

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streaming as giving rise to alternative attitudes about consumption and mobility within

networked audiences. The attitudes are on full display in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

debates. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is extremely fearful of the

“rogue websites” explored in the previous chapter and is attempting to use government

intervention to curtail this ubiquitous practice. In this way, streaming as a digital

imaginary, a space of perceived endless consumption without owning or downloading has

an impact on media industries. In 2011, rogue streaming technology was seen as a threat to

control and corporate bottom-lines. Today, with re-articulated streaming through the

industry in the form of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and a myriad of planned and

competing streaming services, there is less of a perceived threat of audiences going content

hunting as major streaming companies gain more and more subscribers.

With sanctioned third party streaming the same questions about control and

monetization remain, but now the television and movie industries must grapple with

changes in distribution, digitality, and Internet companies. For example, a report generated

by a recent Aspen Institute Conference on Communications Policy emphasized, “online

television is the new player with the potential to upend the market for TV viewing”

(Horrigan, 2014, p. 3). This anxiety produces a concomitant shift in industry lore as an

emergent form of streaming lore participates in the re-articulation of media industries,

media content, and consumption/distribution. This movement in attitude and distribution

has implications not only for audiences and media industries but also for policy debates

and digital rights struggles, which are the focus of Chapter four.

Turow (1992) believed that an “important step toward understanding the structure

of an industry and its function in society lies in assessing the events that have caused

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various relationships to evolve” (p. 49). Streaming companies have come to embody the

strategic power of Internet companies (the audience tactic re-articulated as a strategy),

which are butting heads with other regimes of corporate power. Cable and

telecommunication companies such as Comcast and Time-Warner Cable are dealing with

the loss of subscribers and anxieties about “cord-cutters” and “cord-nevers” amplified by

the growth, popularity, and cultural salience of streaming services such as Netflix. While

this chapter looks at the emergent third-party (and sometimes first party) streaming

services as a whole, Netflix provides a seminal and representative example of emergent

industry streaming. Their entry into original programming and pioneering in the field

allows us to see the ruptures in the existing regimes of power from television and cable

companies. One of those telling moments of rupture is found in the contract negotiations

between Netflix and other content providers. We begin with an overview of the

Starz/Netflix negotiation followed by a literature review of “industry lore” and existing

scholarship on Netflix.

Shooting Starz

In 2008, Netflix purchased the entire Starz library of 2,500 titles for 30 million

dollars a year from 2008 until 2011 (Emerson, 2012). This news made a big splash in the

industry at the time and signaled that Netflix was going to be a serious player in the media

and entertainment industries. The ability to land a major programmer like Starz elevated

Netflix’s catalog and launched the company fully into the streaming space. Up until this

point the legal loophole that allowed Netflix to mail DVD’s to subscribers without having to

pay heavy licensing fees had buoyed the organization but the acquisition of Starz content

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would see the burgeoning growth of the streaming side of their business, which would

ultimately take over the revenue model for the entire company.

The evidence of Netflix’s growth in stature within the market is displayed by the

price of the Starz library of content after the initial contract expired. When that contract

expired in 2011 the same Starz titles were said to be worth upwards of 250 million dollars

but Starz didn’t even accept an offer reportedly worth north of 300 million dollars (Fritz,

Flint & Chmielewski, 2011). That figure is ten times the rate that Netflix was originally

paying. The negotiations hit a more telling snag, however when Starz insisted on Netflix

adding a tiered system of payment, which would have required subscribers to pay an

additional fee for watching Starz titles. This would have aligned Netflix with standard

industry practices of satellite and cable companies. This decision by Starz to not give its

content to Netflix at such a high price point also speaks to the fears of the industry over

cord-cutters and cord-nevers. Starz initial decision to place its content on Netflix was not

seen favorably by its partner companies in the satellite and cable industries. In fact,

protecting these very same “relationships with multiplatform video programming

distributors (MVPDs) like DirecTV and Time Warner Cable is critical to Starz” (para. 4).

Starz was willing to forfeit hundreds of millions of dollars in residual profits,

demonstrating the influence of the cable and satellite companies but also the anxiety

surrounding traditional regimes of power losing ground and customers to streaming

services like Netflix. Netflix, as a forerunner and banner carrier for Internet and streaming

media, will ultimately clash with cable giant Comcast in 2014, but the seeds of discontent

among these emergent regimes have begun to be sewn.

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 This is a pivotal moment where Netflix announces itself as a player in the television

and movie industries but is left with the need for content to remain a viable force. As

Stilling (1995) demonstrates in his historiographic study of Spanish language television in

the United States, content and copyright are king. Stilling’s reading of the Azcarraga

family’s investment strategy is that they pursue “investment in program production and

copyright, not in hardware and licenses, unless no outlet for the programming exists in a

target market” (emphasis in original, p. 232). Netflix’s move towards original

programming, partially attributed to these negotiations with Starz, will vault Netflix into

the limelight of streaming media, distribution, and popular culture.

This chapter follows Havens, Lotz & Tinic’s (2009) formation of a critical media

industry studies. Strategies for Havens, Lotz & Tinic, are defined as “the larger economic

goals and logics of large-scale cultural industries” (p. 247). In this same spirit, this chapter

identifies four categories of industry logic or lore that come out of streaming technology.

The research is grounded in an analysis of interview transcripts from the book Distribution

Revolution (Curtin, Holt, & Sanson, 2014), wherein top industry executives and

professionals from studios, technology upstarts and “creatives” articulate assumptions and

anxieties about changes in the industry. Streaming takes a center stage within these

conversations. This resource is supplemented by my own interviews of those close to

streaming technologies. A review of FastCompany articles from the years 2012-2015 and

trade journal articles and publications provide additional support and documentation for

my arguments. I have also reviewed numerous conference talks and industry events to

examine ways that industry professionals talk to themselves about emerging lore. The

chapter defines third party sanctioned streaming before giving an overview of existing

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literature on third party streaming services and the growing body of literature within

media industry studies on industry lore and Netflix. The chapter then proposes four

categories of emergent streaming lore; Netflix as ‘quality’ streams, the algorithmic

audience, cord-cutters and cord-nevers, and, finally, marathoning/binging. The chapter

ends with a discussion of the Netflix and Comcast legal battle over bandwidth and

‘throttling’ and the importance of net neutrality going forward.

Defining Third Party Sanctioned Streaming

To briefly refresh some of our definitions for streaming, with sanctioned first party

streaming there is no intermediary and the content provider directly streams content to

audiences without the need for licensing. This is because the content provider is also the

one doing the streaming. Examples might include the Major League Baseball Network or

HBOGo. Third party sanctioned streaming is when content providers have licensing

agreements with companies like Netflix, Hulu, or more specialized services like Crunchyroll

for anime. As Christian (2015) noted, third party sanctioned streaming can be divided into

subscription based services and those supported by paid advertising. Even within these

straightforward definitions there exists blurring within and between the categories. Some

subscription services charge a monthly or yearly flat rate for viewing while others have a

tiered system where subscribers pay for premium content. Amazon Prime uses

micropayments and limited advertising while offering the majority of the content for ‘free’

as part of a bundling with Amazon’s larger corporate offerings, straddling between those

categories. Netflix is a different kind of challenge to the status quo of media industry

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practices as sanctioned third party streaming. Netflix does not exist in a legal gray area but

is reliant on content producers. This was the impetus for Netflix to try to replicate the HBO

model with its own original content or perish as just another failed technology. In its

development as a corporation (from DVD distribution to streaming and content producer),

Netflix blurs the distinction between third party and first party streaming.

Literature Review: Industry Lore

Television studies scholars have long studied the centrality of television in media

and society (Gray & Lotz, 2012). However, with the rise of digital technologies there has

been much debate about the role and future of television. While the hyperbole in the mid-

2000’s surrounding the ‘death of television’ was, indeed, overstated, there remained a

sense of imminent upheaval to traditional television business models. Lotz (2007) argues

that the history of television can be mapped in three distinct phases, the ‘network era’,

‘multi-channel transition’, and the ‘post-network era’. Pearson’s periodization of US

television labels the post-network era as “TVIII” starting at the beginning of the nineties

(Pearson, 2011). Lotz’s analysis ends with DVR, VOD, and TiVo technologies of the post-

network era beginning to take root in consumption patterns among audiences.

However, Lotz (2007) tempers her bold claim of ‘post-network’ television, stating

that it is a process not fully in place, and it won’t fully be in place until “choice is no longer

limited to program schedules and the majority of viewers use the opportunities new

technologies and industrial practices make available” (p. 19). With this recognition among

media industries of the importance of digital media, the role of distribution and

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distribution technologies has received a renewed interest among media scholars (Braun,

2013). Lotz (2007) is presciently anticipating an era of streaming media where viewers can

“choose among programs produced in any decade, by amateurs and professionals, and

watch this programming on demand and for viewing on main “living room” sets, computer

screens, and portable devices” (p. 19). What no one saw at the time is that streaming media

and an obscure mail-order DVD rental company would be the harbinger of seismic changes

in the distribution of media properties.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment. The chairman of the Academy of

Television Arts and Sciences, Bruce Rosenblum, speaks for many when he says whether it

is on a tablet, mobile phone or flat screen television, “It’s all television” (Levin, 2013).

Rosenblum is not incorrect in his assertion, but he might not be entirely right. Netflix has

taken to branding itself with the tagline “the world’s leading Internet television network”

with company executives often referring to the company as a leader in “Internet

television.” This is not without purpose. Certainly Netflix is commanding the attention of

the major studios, cable companies, and the media industry as a whole with these kinds of

bombastic declarations. More precisely the term “Internet television” points to differing

affordances and emergent industry logics--it is all television, but Netflix and streaming

services want to be your television.

Timothy Havens (2008) develops his theory of “industry lore,” which he defines as

“the conventional knowledge among industry insiders about what kinds of media culture

are and are not possible, and what audiences that culture will and will not attract.” Industry

lore is a contested discursive force that is difficult to study because it is embedded in the

everyday business practices and unspoken professional life of media industry workers.

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This is similar to Caldwell’s (2008) conception of “trade stories” and the “constructed

audience” (Ang, 1991; Havens & Lotz, 2012), where the audience is imagined in specific

ways that become ingrained discursively over time in the form of stories and lore.

Havens builds his theory on the work of Todd Gitlin (1983) in his book Inside Prime

Time. Gitlin almost inadvertently describes how the television executives and producers

rely on “scuttlebutt” or “lore” in their decision-making. Lotz (2007) identifies this same

deviation from conventional wisdom during the rise of the post-network era. Havens

(2014a) states that one of the primary takeaways from Gitlin’s work is the finding that

“uncertainty among programmers, especially in times of change such as the introduction of

cable television, can create the conditions for television programming that is more

challenging and progressive than conventional fare” (p. 42). As Gitlin (1983) argues,

“Uncertainty is the permanent condition of show business” (p. 14). In times of uncertainty

and disruption for the institutional order, there are possibilities for emergent forms of lore

due to technological innovations. Streaming creates a moment of disjuncture wherein

possibilities for re-articulating industry lore are necessary and required.

Santo (2015) applies this conception of industry lore to the licensing of the Lone

Ranger and provides a listing of spaces where industry lore may develop. Building from

Havens (2008), Santo asserts that industry lore can be read in “trade press interviews and

self-serving biographies, circulating at industry parties, trade shows, and closed-door

meetings, and even finding their way into merchandising guides and licensing agreements”

(Santo, 2015, p. 14). In a similar thread of scholarship Draper (2014) introduces the

concept of “discerned savvy,” which aids in understanding “how creative workers’ agency

may be subtly circumscribed in ways that maintain the hegemony of particular textual

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forms and ideologies in cultural industries even in the absence of formal policy and directly

articulated expectations regarding creativity.” Draper is looking primarily at workers

within media production who informally make creative decisions based on perceived,

unspoken preferences of bosses and superiors in the industry.

Lotz (2015) finds the concepts of “industry lore” and “discerned savvy” to be

valuable tools in the media industries scholar’s toolkit, figuring that they might prove

“useful across media contexts” (para. 7). Echoing this call, this research attempts to expand

this concept of industry lore beyond the closed-door meeting. Industry lore can also be

read more broadly during times of rupture and transition for media industries. Streaming

lore is a re-articulation of industry lore that is continually made and re-made as those

competing discourses are continually reformulated. Contemporary streaming acts as a site

of rupture, which makes visible industry discourses.

Havens (2014b) reminds us that it is not the scarcity of information in the move

towards digital technology and streaming but its overabundance that media industries

must learn to cope with:

“At minimum, one major change that has taken place for media industry workers at
all levels is a shift from an era of scarcity of audience data to an era of
overabundance. Because of earlier research in the media industries, we have some
information regarding how executives and creators managed a paucity of data,
including a reliance on gut instincts, industry lore, and complicated power plays
among creators and gatekeepers that often deployed different conceptualizations of
the audience” (para. 13).

Industry lore does not dissipate with increased data points, but new formations of lore are

reimagined in order to make sense of this “distribution revolution.” Gary Newman,

chairman of 20th Century Fox Television, articulates this growing complexity wrought by

streaming:

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 “There is a level of complexity to our business that simply didn’t exist when I
started. I know it sounds simplistic, but twenty years ago all we cared about was the
network and its needs. Almost everything went from network to syndication and
that was pretty much it...So every decision we make about digital options we put
through the prism of: Is it going to cannibalize another business? If the answer is
yes, we might ask: Are we getting compensated for it in a way that makes that risk
appropriate?” (as cited in Curtin, Holt, & Sanson, p. 30).

Industry lore must respond to technological and economic incentives that arise. Havens’

(2014a) analysis of the distinctly Maori and Polynesian animated show bro’Town concludes

that cable and satellite programmers produced distinct enactments of lore, separate from

broadcasting. Socio-technical configurations and affordances lend themselves to specific

iterations, in this case streaming lore, under the umbrella of industry lore as an organizing

theory. The disruptive “cultural journey” of minority television within the global circulation

of television was not a dominant form of industry lore but an important emergent

articulation. In this same way, streaming lore is not dominant over entrenched

broadcasting logic but remains emergent and highly visible within the slippery mediated

terrain of post-network television and digital distribution. We might think of streaming as a

force that is fracturing existing industry lore and pushing these nascent discourses to the

surface. During these times of technologically mediated fragmentation and rupture,

emergent streaming lore is dawning.

Literature Review: Netflix

Netflix has largely been neglected in the study of popular culture despite its

emergence as a cultural force with the advent and rise of streaming technology. Netflix

does not receive serious academic reflection until the company transitions from a DVD

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business to a streaming distribution model. Even as a substantive form of distribution

there is little academic ink spilt until Netflix transitions, yet again, into the production

sphere. This gap in media studies scholarship is beginning to be filled, especially as Netflix

made this pivotal turn towards original programming, which included alluring titles for

study such as House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. Curtin (2009) talks about how

the writers’ strike of 2007-2008 acted as a “tipping point” in the industry where television

viewing remained high but flowed through less traditional circuits, including Netflix. Curtin

believes this is the beginning of “the matrix era” of television, which discards linear modes

of thinking about television in favor of a model with multiple sites for interactivity and

digital production.

Journalist Gina Keating (2012) gives a coming-of-age story of Netflix’s rise to

prominence in her book Netflixed. In 2006-2009, Netflix offered a prize to anyone who

could improve upon their algorithm, Cinemax, by 10 percent (Koren, 2009). The ‘Netflix

Prize’ went to the BellKor Pragmatic Chaos team in October of 2009, and shortly thereafter

Netflix announced it would be developing its own programming content. The cultural as

well as technical ramifications of the “Netflix Prize” lend to Hallin and Striphas’s (2014)

conception of “algorithmic culture.” Havens (2014b) critically analyzes the efficacy of

Netflix’s “recommendation algorithm,” calling into question the predictive power of

Netflix’s algorithm and “Big Data” more broadly. Matrix (2014) looks at the “Netflix effect”

and the impact on “viewers’ expectations concerning what, how, and when they watch TV”

(para. 2). A strand of cinema studies literature focuses on the change in digital distribution

of movies through Netflix and streaming technology (Silver & Cunningham 2012). Chuck

Tryon (2013) calls this “on demand culture.”

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 Not only have media scholars turned towards Netflix but the industry itself has

attempted to mimic the success of video-on-demand (VOD) companies (wherein Netflix is

the category leader). This industry consternation resulted in the “TV Everywhere” initiative

of Time Warner and Comcast in 2009, which allowed authenticated cable subscribers to

have access to a large library of content on a range of devices. In 2013, Comcast had

developed a more sophisticated interface that was branded as Xfinity.com, which was

followed by the Xfinity TV GO app that allows subscribers to stream 70 live television

channels. Xfinity.com, as of February 2015, now offers 466,000 titles for streaming, which

is up from 270,000 in 2013. The majority of the titles, however, are available to rent for

$5.99 or purchase at $15.99 (Gonzalez, 2015).

Despite this transition towards streaming among cable companies, industry analyst

Bill Niemeyer was quoted in a 2012 piece in Variety stating that the cable industry had

badly bumbled its entry into VOD. “Online services are now generating impressive

consumer viewing, subscription revenue, advertiser spend, and network mindshare that

well could belong to operator VOD if only they had prepared for the inevitable: competition

from the Internet” (Wallenstein, 2012, para. 5). Niemeyer estimated that cable companies

had missed out on a “$6 billion business.” He attributes cable company hesitancy to invest

in VOD and their problems entering the space to a shoddy user interface, inadequate

“measurement techniques,” and lack of capital investment when the return on investment

strategy wasn’t abundantly clear. The latter contributed to Comcast and cable companies

pushing their TV Everywhere initiatives over VOD/streaming technologies. This paved “the

way for the emergence of over-the-top alternatives like Netflix” (para. 1). This is an

acknowledgment by cable industry insiders about the increasing importance of Netflix. The

111
labeling of these streaming services as over-the-top (OTT) technologies is also telling.

Netflix is being put in its place as a third-party streaming distribution technology and not

the content creating studio/company operating as a first-party streamer and competitor in

the marketplace.

Netflix Surge

Netflix is also worthy of study because the company continually defies expectations

and prognostications. Lotz (2014) in the second edition of her book The Television Will Be

Revolutionized continues this narrative, despite acknowledging Netflix’s role in the

emergence of post-network television. She labels the period starting in 2010 as the “Netflix

Surge” (a period I would start earlier in 2008-2009, with the initial Starz titles licensing).

Her view is that the “Surge” is untenable, a “disruptive--though short-lived--model for

broadband-distributed, nonlinear television” (p. 70). She continues:

“It should be clear to anyone with a background in television economics and

distribution that between the cost of renegotiating their content with the expanded
subscriber base and the unlikely ability circa 2010 Internet infrastructure to
accommodate growth of Netflix beyond a niche, the Netflix Surge would flame out
quickly” (p. 71).
The quenching of the Netflix flame has not been so easy for traditional industry powers. In

Lotz’s defense, she is merely perpetuating the conventional wisdom in 2010-2013 about

Netflix, describing them as a “quintessential middleman.” Netflix at this point was licensing

all of its content and dealing with cable companies and ISP’s trying to charge premium

rates for broadband speeds to stream to subscribers homes and devices. However, with

Netflix original programming, the service continues to grow its subscriber base while

remaining profitable. This consistent cycle of doubt about Netflix is part of a larger doubt in

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digital media and digital distribution. Kelly Summers, former Vice President at Walt Disney

Studios, talks about a specific piece of ‘insider’ industry lore that is encapsulated as a joke:

“When you’re sitting on the inside, you’re always going to be looking at the
financials. The joke has often been made: Are you going to trade your cable dollars
for digital pennies? There just wasn’t the same kind of energy around digital on the
inside, because traditional revenue streams are significant” (as cited in Curtin, Holt,
and Sanson, p. 48).
The Netflix Surge is just another recapitulation of the anxiety amongst traditional media

industry ‘insiders’ surrounding the transition to digital media. Netflix continues to push

traditional media industry pretenses, ‘jokes’ and conservative logics. Netflix advances

unabated.

The earnings reports for the fourth quarter of 2014 show Netflix with a subscriber

base of 54.5 million (Peterson, 2015). This number was “better than expected” and one of

the most crucial data points for the company going forward because the math and

negotiation over licensing deals with streaming services weighs the subscriber base heavily

into the equation. Netflix continues to invest money in overseas growth (90% of the money

generated from international subscribers is pumped back into international expansion

efforts) while the U.S. domestic subscriber base continues incremental, steady growth.

Domestic subscribers generated $917.4 million in revenue, up 24 % from the previous

year. Overall, Netflix made 1.48 billion dollars in revenue in the 4th quarter alone, “a 26%

increase compared to the prior year, to meet analysts' estimates. And the company booked

a $83.4 million profit” (para. 10). Netflix believes they will be in over 200 countries in 2017,

up from 50 in 2015 while remaining profitable. In Netflix’s own “Quarter Four” letter to

shareholders of the company they drop this bombshell, “But there is one real shocker; last

year our original content overall was some of our most efficient content. Our originals

cost us less money, relative to our viewing metrics, than most of our licensed content, much
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of which is well known and created by the top studios” (emphasis in original, Netflix

Shareholder Letter, p. 3). Netflix brand identity also continues to grow. Netflix placed third

overall in the United States according to YouGov’s annual Best Brand Index (YouGov,

2014). Netflix is emerging as more than just a footnote to the contemporary media

landscape. Netflix is more than just a distribution channel, delivery system or technological

platform but is a site for interrogating the struggle between competing industries in digital

space. Streaming is concomitantly technology, cultural practice, and institutional logic.

Netflix concomitantly affirms traditional industry logics while expanding emergent

digital lore. This tension between competing strategic logics augmented with Netflix’s foray

into content creation heralded by their flagship production House of Cards. Netflix

maintains a love/hate relationship with the rest of the media industries. The industry loves

Netflix and other third party streaming sites because they make good money off of selling

their content libraries into a new streaming “window.” However, the relationship is

complicated because Netflix can be a disruptive business model, even if this is just a

discursive disruption borne of nothing more than industry talk.

Netflix is constructing transnational television time, which contests the nominal

push versus pull model of the television industry. They are challenging the temporality or

windowing of televisual content and challenging different industrial models of distribution.

This is substantial because the exclusive streaming of a series has not only shifted industry

logics and practices but has also resulted in different textual programming and audience

reception practices. Netflix is trying to replicate the HBO model of creating ‘quality’

television but through a digital streaming distribution model. This is significant as

audiences adapt to the portability of streaming technologies like Netflix but also the shifts

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in attitudes towards ownership. No longer are consumers as closely connected to the

materiality of popular culture and consumption in this emergent streaming culture.

This marks an important shift for Netflix as they move from being solely a

distribution technology to a content creator. Other streaming companies are quickly

following suit. Netflix had been mired in the aftermath of the Quickster debacle, a failed

and misguided attempt to rename and separate the DVD portion of the business from the

streaming, with Netflix’s stock price taking a dramatic tumble from $298.73 all the way

down to $58.80. However, this entrance into content creation by Netflix marks an

important shift for all of the media industries. Certainly the terrain of digital streaming and

distribution is an increasingly contested terrain, evidenced by the latest purge of the Netflix

catalogue and content offerings. Traditional television and movie industries are attempting

to re-vamp their own technological capacity and enter the streaming business.

The industry has been moving in this direction since the formation of Hulu and Hulu

Plus, but now we are seeing first-party streaming from companies such as Time Warner

Instant Archive, AMC, and CBS. These companies are launching their own respective

streaming services—a trend that will undoubtedly continue. Most recently HBO and Dish

have put together more “à la carte” offerings that allow consumers to pay for programming

directly from the companies without going through cable or satellite middlemen (although

Dish decided to cap the number of à la carte offerings because of anxiety about increased

cord-cutting). This is a move from third party sanctioned streaming to first party

sanctioned streaming, which has the potential for seismic slippage in industry frames and

logics.

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 Despite this industry consternation, Netflix stock did not take a hit from the massive

removal of titles from its library like it had in the past (1,794 titles in what the media and

industry labeled ‘Streamaggedon’ (Warren, 2013), part of a pervasive narrative about the

death of Netflix in particular and streaming as an industry in general). In fact, in the first

quarter of 2013 Netflix surpassed Wall Street expectations for the company. Although

Netflix doesn’t release official statistics of viewers of shows, not even to show creators or

actors, there is an industry-wide assumption that the gamble on original programming is

paying off for now and there has been a boost in subscriptions. In the first three months of

2013 more than four billion hours of programming were watched on Netflix, which media

analyst Rich Greenfield believes would equate to being the most watched network on cable

television today (Kafka, 2013). And while there may be gaps in the front Netflix is putting

forward (how many of the boost in subscriptions were renewed after the free trial period

in 2013, for example), there does seem to be substantive buzz that Netflix is moving in the

right direction as a company, even if this is just industry lore springing up around these

developments. Redbox Instant (a joint venture with Verizon and Redbox) was the latest

major joint venture to enter the cultural forum of streaming, but the company shuttered its

digital windows on October 7, 2014. This shows the tightening grip that Netflix, Amazon,

and Hulu have on the growing industry.

There is an uneasiness about the potentiality of Netflix to be disruptive. This

disruption is largely discursive; Netflix is disruptive as part of the discourses about digital

industry practices in what might be labeled a digital streaming lore developing within the

industry. The sections that follow offer four categories of emergent streaming lore. These

four categories are (1) Netflix positioned as ‘quality’ television, (2) the usage of algorithms

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to discursively situate the audience, (3) cord-cutters and cord-nevers, and (4)

marathoning/binging. This is certainly not an exhaustive list but provides a starting point

for looking at these nascent forms of lore as they appear in this moment of rupture and

transition.

Netflix as ‘Quality’ Streams

According to Netflix’s Chief Creative Officer (CCO) Ted Sarandos, Netflix Emmy

nominations represent “a leveling moment. Change comes very slow, but Emmy voters

recognized that great television is great television, and they didn't pay attention to how it

got there. It really validates Internet television as a viable form of the highest-quality

entertainment” (Levin, 2013). Notice the purposeful usage of the term Internet television

and the elevating of Netflix’s brand as level with competitors. Golden Globe awards for

Amazon’s Transparent and Netflix’s House of Cards continue to fuel these claims of “quality”

television.

Netflix is mutually disrupting/reaffirming traditional media industry logics and best

practices through the introduction of their own original streaming content—the House of

Cards series. Netflix’s flagship production House of Cards is based closely on the BBC award

winning miniseries of the same name--House of Cards. Netflix is paying close to five million

dollars for each episode of House of Cards and over one hundred million dollars for two

pre-ordered seasons of the series (Greenfield, 2013). However most remarkably, Netflix

paid for twenty-six episodes upfront before any film had even been shot. This was

certainly a bold move and a great deal of money to spend for a company still bleeding from

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past miscalculations and needing to boost its overall subscription base to remain

profitable. House of Cards has a large ensemble cast and is a scripted drama. The show

boasts Academy Award winning Kevin Spacey as the main actor and renowned director

David Fincher as the most prominent names. This is substantial because the exclusive

streaming of a series has not only shifted industry logics and practices but has also resulted

in different textual programming and audience reception practices. Netflix is trying to

replicate the HBO model of creating ‘quality’ television but through a digital streaming

distribution model.

The strategy of constructing quality television helped HBO increase subscriptions as

a pay TV channel. Netflix is unique as a successful subscription-based streaming service.

Netflix differs from a company like Hulu or even Hulu Plus, which generates revenue

through advertising and tiers the availability of content. If you want more content or less

advertising, you need to pay a higher price. Amazon Prime (formerly Amazon Instant

Video) is a mixture of subscriptions and micro-payments for its services. HBO moved from

merely recycling Hollywood movies to producing its own content. The subscription model

means that Netflix and HBO aren’t subject to the wants, desires, or whims of advertisers or

boardrooms and are supposedly freer to produce more edgy, complex, ‘quality’

narratives. This content was free from the restrictions placed on network and cable

television because of the subscription model and so shows like Sex and the City, The

Sopranos, and The Wire were free to push artistic boundaries for audiences (often in

language, sexual content, violence) (McCabe & Akass, 2008). These programs also pushed

narrative conventions by creating serialized dramas resulting in the construction of ‘quality

television’ (Feuer, 2007).

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 There is some dispute as to whether or not these HBO shows are really more

aesthetically or narratively complex but the important point for this chapter is that HBO

acquired the cultural capital that came with the ‘quality’ moniker that allowed HBO to

distance itself discursively from other networks and stations. Netflix chief content officer

Ted Sarandos stated, "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us" (Hass,

2013). Just like HBO reconfigured much of the television ‘industry lore’ (Havens 2013), the

Netflix original production of the House of Cards built a new ‘digital lore’ out of pre-existing

industrial logics. Netflix is relying on big name actors like Academy Award winners Kevin

Spacey and Robin Wright, as well as high production values and cinematography to mimic

formalistic conventions of quality programming in movies and post-network television like

HBO. Netflix has continued this desire for ‘quality’ production with the release of Marco

Polo. In the announcement of the series Netflix’s CCO Sarandos touts the shows “deft

storytelling and cinematic ambition” and even uses the phrase “cinematic quality” for good

measure (Press Release, 2014). This is, yet, another attempt to craft ‘quality’ streaming

content that further legitimates and distances Netflix from other streaming service

competitors.

Jenner (2014) analyzed Netflix’s release of season four of Arrested Development.

Like all Netflix original releases, season four was released in its entirety. Jenner argues this

was done to help brand the re-booting of the show and teach the audience how to watch

Netflix differently than broadcast television. She finds that Netflix leverages the ‘cult’ or

‘quality’ status of Arrested Development (scoring points with devoted fans for resuscitating

the program after its network cancellation), which promotes long-form viewing to identify

the myriad intertextual linkages built into the consumption of the show. This is part of a

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larger push to demarcate Netflix as a space for complex narratives under the moniker of

‘complex’ or ‘quality’ television.

Netflix, however, differs from HBO quality programming because of temporality and

scheduling. The two main ways this differentiation takes place is first in the releasing of

the entire season at one time and secondly in shifting audience expectations. Media

industries control the depth of your viewing experience, when you are scheduled to watch,

and to which platforms content can be consumed. The movie industry sells the same

content at different times from the movie theater to the DVD and into global television

syndication. Digitization makes this traditional windowing much harder to secure and

begins to resemble more of Chris Anderson’s (2001) ideas about long tail distribution and

the inherent advantages to media aggregators who pay little for digital storage and flexible

specialization.

There are also some tangible decisions made by executives, which results in some

aesthetic changes and changes to the narrative structure. House of Cards does not use

recaps, redundancy, or ‘tells’ within the text or narrative (again mimicking the ‘quality’

conventions of HBO). This point is substantiated by Will Arnett’s recent public declaration

that streaming on Netflix allows him to do a more complicated and ‘quality’ show than he

would have otherwise been able to produce on broadcast television. Arnett is positioning

the audience through this rhetoric of quality television while continuing to condition and

prod the audience into consuming Netflix and streaming content differently than broadcast

television. The audience should expect ‘complex’ television, replete with intertextual jokes

and the rewarding of a particular type of fandom. Sarandos confirms this and goes even

further, connecting ‘quality’ with delivering fan engagement and niche audiences:

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 “We invest in a lot of content for really small audiences too, because it’s still valuable
for subscribers who are really engaged fans of a particular program, and, therefore,
it’s a valuable investment for us. We’re fortunate because we have unlimited
inventory space. It allows us to value content in more ways than just mass numbers”
(as cited in Curtin, Holt, & Sanson, p. 136).

Sarandos is connecting quality with the digital affordances and storage capacity of

streaming. He is positioning Netflix as a company that can engage with fans tastes in ways

that the traditional industry cannot. The early alliance between Netflix and Arrested

Development, then, was not an accident but a move by the company to position the

audience. What this really tells us is that the industry has already begun to construct the

audience as ‘complex,’ in this case through the Internet.

In an interview with screenwriter Matt Kester, he relayed the difference in his

experience between writing for network television and developing content for streaming

services. Normally with network television he would be asked to write five or six acts with

scenes of no more than a page or a page and a half. He viewed writing for streaming to be

more like writing a screenplay for a movie. Network scripts, according to Kester, are

written with a fear of audiences changing the channel. They need to “pop” in order to keep

the audience’s attention. Writing for streaming isn’t as reliant on these conventions and

encourages a narrative not tethered to cliffhangers. These scenes can be written to stretch

out for three pages or more. Kester believed that streaming provided more space to explore

characters and develop their attributes in greater depth. This is all substantive because it

shows how this aura of “quality” and “complex” television is being perpetuated not only by

streaming executives but by writers and producers who continually propagate and

reproduce this emergent streaming lore.

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 Expectations about the life cycle of content are arbitrarily set by the industry. There

is no inherent reason other than economics to have seasons, mid-seasons, or even to

release a single episode weekly. Netflix flouts this life cycle by releasing an entire season at

one time to be consumed without commercial interruption or a weeklong delay in

programming. Scheduling, as a communicative, cultural force, produces its own identity

formations (Ellis, 2000; Havens, 2007). Williams (1974) conception of flow reminds us that

scheduling is “the defining characteristic of broadcasting” (p. 86). Media industries use

scheduling as a tool to lock down audiences through patterns, repetition, and marketing.

Traditional media industries utilize scheduling to keep audiences from imagining

alternatives to the nominal corporate, advertising driven cable and broadcasting system.

Ellis believes that scheduling performs the work of connecting content to the nation-state,

battling against globalizing tendencies.

Streaming works against this scheduling that is tethered exclusively to the nation-

state. While Hulu and Hulu Plus try to reinstate the logic of advertising through scheduling,

the Netflix subscription based system allows the company to circumnavigate these

nationalistic ties. This becomes increasingly important for Netflix in order to avoid the

label of being an American company with their upcoming, aggressive international push.

Netflix is not without its own scheduling formations. As stated in the Arrested

Development example, the decision to release an entire season of content all at once

conditions the audience to consume in specific ways that elevate the status of the show to

‘complex’. The concept of “liveness” is also important in a discussion of scheduling.

Scheduling reinforces live viewing of television so that fans and audiences can engage,

often through second screens, with each other in real-time. The delivery of eyeballs for live

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events such as award shows and sporting matches means big advertising revenues for

cable and broadcast networks alike. Releasing an entire binge-worthy season all at once

through streaming services also reinforces live viewing. Not only do you need to watch one

episode, you need to watch an entire season to be conversant across social networks about

the show. Quality and complexity become intertwined with long-form viewing and

scheduling.

Algorithmic Audience

Algorithms drive our entire website—there isn’t an inch of uncalculated, editorial space.
-Ted Sarandos

Netflix was listed as the thirtieth most innovative company in the March, 2015 issue

by the technology/business magazine FastCompany (an annual listing of the top 50 most

innovative companies in the world). The reason this is noteworthy, beyond the

acknowledgment by industry tastemakers, is the caption FastCompany used to explain

Netflix’s innovation. The line reads, “For making stuff we’re guaranteed to love” (p. 110),

followed by a short explanatory paragraph about Netflix commissioning four Adam Sandler

movies because they stream well in Latin America. Despite being flops domestically with

Hollywood, data says Sandler films are a wise investment. Again, this is not to dispute the

validity of incorporating big data flows into production choices but here the audience is

being positioned by the caption. The audience is being told that algorithms “guarantee” that

they will love Netflix programming. This discursively situates the audience through the

promise of the black-boxed algorithm. Netflix is also positioned as being smarter about

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production choices than Hollywood because they can catch the global appeal and value of

Adam Sandler. Sandler is an undervalued prospect (akin to underpriced ‘Moneyball’

baseball players) whose value is only recognized through the algorithm.

This section proposes that Netflix’s usage of algorithms works in two distinct ways.

On the one hand, the Netflix algorithm is positioned as the solution to the complications of

fragmentation for media industries in an era of globalization. Algorithms that Netflix

employs are thought to impact directly audience participation. While this may, in fact, be

the case, this chapter claims that algorithms also work discursively to position the

audience. This discursive positioning of the audience through the algorithm we label the

“algorithmic audience.” The algorithmic audience is propelled through Netflix’s rhetorical

usage of the algorithm to sell it's flagship production House of Cards.

Algorithms are a growing area of academic interest and inquiry. The term has taken

various shapes in recent scholarship and industry discourse ranging from the “addressable

audience” to “algorithmic identity” (Cheney-Lippold, 2011). The study of algorithms and

accompanying “algorithmic culture” (Hallinan & Striphas, 2014) is devoted to

understanding the role that algorithms play in shaping digital life. Gillespie (2014) states,

“we are now turning to algorithms to identify what we need to know is as momentous as

having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of

God” (p. 168). Much faith is placed on the validity and legitimacy of algorithms to, in fact,

impact decision-making of audiences and consumers. Scholars speak of “power through the

algorithm” (Lash, 2007; Beer, 2009), especially through recommendation algorithms and

social networking sites. “Algorithms play an increasingly important role in selecting what

information is considered most relevant to us, a crucial feature of our participation in

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public life” (Gillespie, 2014). Algorithms are socio-technical processes, which, at their most

basic level, are a formula or code that solves an unambiguously assigned problem. In an era

of ‘Big Data,’ algorithms become seminal to search functions and organizing data.

"Together, data structures and algorithms are two halves of the ontology of the world

according to a computer" (Manovich, 1999, 84). However, algorithms are increasingly

reliant on human actors guiding computing processes. "The archive, by remembering all

and only a certain set of facts/discoveries/observations, consistently and actively engages

in the forgetting of other sets” (Bowker, 2005, 12). What is forgotten or filtered through the

algorithm is also important for Netflix’s recommendations and what is made visible to

audiences.

C.W. Anderson (2011) connects algorithms to the development of computational

journalism. Anderson is concerned with the ways that algorithms are employed to mediate

between “journalists, audiences, newsrooms, and media products” (p. 530). As Anderson

shows, algorithmic journalism, using “algorithmic intelligence,” decides what is

newsworthy. What is important for Anderson is the ways in which journalists envision or

“imagine” the audience as a public through algorithms, the “algorithmic audience,” and the

ramifications of this vision on democracy. My usage of Anderson’s term extends this idea

that algorithms are tools for imagining audiences, adding that corporations like Netflix and

other streaming services use algorithms to discursively position their audience as

consumers.

Algorithmic culture can then be contextualized as a particular form of market

research. Recently Netflix and Facebook reached an agreement so that you can see two

rows of content that are your Facebook friend’s selections. These recommendations and

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suggestions come from the networked individual and social networking infrastructure,

which feed into the algorithm. The heart of the industry has always been predicting

audiences and their viewing habits. In the broadcast era this type of guesswork was much

less difficult with only three channels but in the post-network era with intense

fragmentation and too many digital trails, the algorithm is a method to justify what Gitlin

(1983), in the book Inside Prime Time, described as industry leaders relying on their guts

and ultimately cherry-picking data to make decisions. The algorithm becomes the latest

tool for executives to justify their industrial lore (Havens, 2014b).

Despite knowing the mechanics of algorithms, the specific ways that the Netflix

algorithm is leveraged in making programming decisions is black-boxed. What we get are

small tidbits that are directed at and discursively constitute the audience:

“Here is what the data from our DVD business tells us: we know what we shipped to
you, and we know when you returned it. I have no idea if you watched it. I have no
idea if you watched it 20 times.
With streaming, we have insight into every second of the viewing experience. I know
what you have tried and what you have turned off. I know at what point you turned
it off. It’s very sophisticated. If there’s a glitch in the soundtrack or something wrong
in the code, the data is so refined that it can detect mass quantities of people
stopping at the same point and signal a red flag within hours of the content going
live. That’s a much more efficient quality assurance process. We don’t have to wait
for someone to complain. We don’t have to go back to the file and watch every
second of it to find and correct the problem” (Sarandos as cited in Curtin, Holt, and
Sanson, 136).
This results in the positioning of a distinct ‘algorithmic audience’. The audience is

positioned by the discursive claims of streaming companies that algorithms are just

delivering to audiences what they have already told the algorithm that they want to

consume. While there is an algorithmic culture that is using big data to process suggestions,

genres, and likes—we must remember that at the same time the algorithm also operates at

a discursive level. ‘Big Data’ is used to situate the audience. Whenever you stop, rewind, or

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re-watch any part of a streaming piece of content, Netflix logs this activity as what is called

an ‘event.’ An event is presented as much more reliable a metric of audience engagement

with the text than something like Nielsen ratings that only recently have adapted and

incorporated delayed watching into their metrics. This data from events, however, is

constantly being compiled and analyzed as the algorithmic culture makes inferences based

on the events produced. With the massive saturation of data that Netflix compiles, they

claim to have an understanding of particular audiences. Netflix feels that they ‘know’ that

people like to watch through their analysis of data compiled through every part of their

user interface.

As mentioned before, Netflix doesn’t release any data on the numbers of actual

viewers of a show. This insulation almost makes it so that no Netflix show can fail. The

show is the imagined product of the algorithm, which once is deemed a success, then

becomes a staple of digital lore and the future basis of self-perpetuating algorithmic

producing. If you liked the British mini-series of House of Cards, then you also like political

dramas and movies with the actor Kevin Spacey. Those who liked political dramas and

Kevin Spacey also enjoyed movies directed by David Fincher. As Havens (2014b) details,

Netflix utilized content algorithms for the selection of these three data points, suggesting,

“that the depth of use of content-based algorithms has not increased substantially with

regard to television and film in recent years” (para. 9). The Netflix producers use a

content-based algorithm, not the “collaborative filtering” algorithm that uses ratings and

browser history, to select these three overlapping and intertwined data points. As Havens

notes, it was still the “interpretations” of Netflix executives that ultimately influenced the

programming decisions, just the same as in the analog era of television. What is distinct is

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the way Netflix producers talk about the algorithm and how the algorithm formulates

Netflix’s addressable audience for the show—the algorithmic audience.

“Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos has said that all that data means that
Netflix has a very ‘addressable audience.’ Unlike the traditional broadcast networks
or cable companies, Netflix doesn’t have to rely on shoveling content out into the
wild and finding out after the fact what audiences want or don’t want. They believe
they already know” (Leonard, 2013).

The “addressable audience” is told by Netflix that they will like House of Cards because the

algorithm says that the audience already likes House of Cards. Here algorithms and data

points operate on a discursive level, which Netflix will constantly invoke to promote its

brand and streaming as a form of consumption.

This reliance on the algorithm and recommendation system is what Netflix publicly

states differentiates itself from other streaming companies. Indeed, Amazon is trying to

build a competing model for its own venture into original programming. As these nascent

algorithmic practices continue to unfold, we may begin look at this moment as the

introduction of algorithmic targeting, which leads to a broader form of algorithmic

production practices. In 2014, Amazon produced six new series but invited audiences to

help decide which to renew and continue in an elimination process. This is a

crowdsourcing model rather than relying on the data from the events that people produce

from their own browsing. Despite Amazon’s claims of allowing votes and data to drive

decision-making, opening up and democratizing the production process (including

statements purporting that every show has the chance to be made), Amazon’s head of

original programming concedes that much of the ultimate decision making happens in an

office room behind closed doors. This is far from the libertine open platform and more of

guttural industry logic. What is different about this form of streaming logic is that the

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specific affordances of streaming are leveraged; pilot viewing, “crowdsource” voting, open

submissions, to discursively position and sell the content back to the audience.

Cord-cutters/Cord-Nevers

The metaphor of the cord is replete with potent symbolic applications to modern

media and technology. The cord metonymically stands in for the cable industry. Most

notably the coaxial cord running through a wall denotes cable’s centrality and intrusion

into everyday life. Cutting the cord conjures up visceral images of audiences and consumers

literally cutting themselves off from the lifeblood of entertainment companies--cutting the

umbilical cord. The metaphor of the cord, thus, portrays the traditional cable industry as an

old placental to be discarded, a maternal influence to be jettisoned. The audience is reborn,

freed from cable television’s institutional shackles. Similarly Kurt Sutter (2014) tweets (as

part of the foreword to the book Distribution Revolution), “Digital delivery of film and

television, like most hasty births, has been clumsy, painful and at times bloody...But once

the schmutz is wiped off, the cord cut, and the baby’s mouth wrapped around a teat, one

can appreciate and marvel at the new life.”

These terms, reinvented by the industry, represent the growing anxiety the cable

and television industries have over consumers shift to streaming media. “Cord cutters, of

course, are consumers who used to buy pay-TV services, but who opted for Internet-based

video streaming at some point in the near past. Cord-nevers, on the other hand, have never

seen pay TV as an option” (Bookman, 2014, para. 3). Cords have long been the center of

economic livelihood. Streaming services are threatening because they run contrary to the

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extremely lucrative bundling logic of media industries. Still worse, the transition from cord-

cutters to the younger generation of cord-nevers signals a potential wholesale change in

attitudes towards the necessity of cable channels and television for the long haul.

Cable’s current position is still stable and extremely profitable. Comcast has

aggressively expanded through mergers and acquisition. Comcast is now the largest cable

and Internet service provider, owns NBCUniversal, and is attempting to merge with Time

Warner Cable. Even during the economic downturn cable and satellite companies

continued to acquire new subscribers for their services. In the first quarter of 2010,

677,000 new “pay-TV” customers were added for these companies. However, since 2010

pay-TV customers have stagnated to the point of slight decline with rising anxiety centered

on streaming competitors. But, again, a company like Comcast that is becoming vertically

integrated is still in an excellent position overall. Comcast continues to grow its high-speed

Internet business and subscriber base as more homes switch away from slower DSL

connections. In the fourth quarter of 2014, Comcast added 375,000 new high-speed

Internet subscribers and their broadband service generated $2.9 billion dollars in revenue,

up ten percent from 2013 (Trefis, 2015). Comcast’s fourth quarter numbers were stronger

than expected because Comcast is now “triple play bundling,” packaging high-speed

Internet, cable and telephone or voice all together for a lower price. The failed Time

Warner Cable and Comcast merger would have served to further solidify Comcast’s

dominant position in the market. The merger would have allowed both companies to

leverage corporate synergies such as increased control over content owners and carriage

fees with a larger percentage of the pay-TV subscriber base.

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 The debate surrounding cord-cutters and cord-nevers gets at the underlying logics

and assumptions being made about the audience. In Convergence Culture, Jenkins (2006)

speaks of the tangled, pent-up frustration of modern cords. “The perpetual tangle of cords

that stands between me and my “home entertainment” center reflects the degree of

incompatibility and dysfunction that exist between the various media technologies” (p. 15).

Beyond incompatibility, the tangle of the cords comes to stand for the general disdain of

cable companies amongst consumers. Cable companies routinely receive some the worst

customer satisfaction and approval ratings. In 2014, the American Customer Satisfaction

Index (ACSI) annual benchmarks rated Time Warner dead last, followed by Comcast and

Charter Communications (ACSI, 2015). Previously airline companies had been one of the

most disliked market segments but cable companies and their ISPs extensions are now the

most disliked. “As cable gets more expensive with more channels, customers increasingly

want to pay only for what they want to watch. Netflix is an affordable option, and as more

households gain devices to deliver streaming media to the family, the more the company

secures its long-term profitability” (Magee, 2011).

Marathoning/Binging

Joe Lewis (head of original programming, Amazon): When the platform changes the
product changes as well…

Andrew Wallenstein (editor-in-chief, digital, Variety): At first blush, what you’re doing is
taking TV series and just putting them on a new platform. How has the product changed as
a result of being on Amazon? How would these shows be different if they were on TV as
opposed to Amazon?

Joe Lewis: It’s something that we’re figuring out. I think that is sort of one of the exciting
things about what we are doing. You know television has been done the same way for a

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long time...If you can binge them, if you can watch a bunch of them all in a row it allows you
to tell just longer stories, and that fundamentally changes the way that you are watching...I
don’t know the answer...I think the exciting part about the platform--if there are any
writers, directors, or creators out there--I always challenge people, come up with the new
way to tell the stories, come up with the new product...the answer is we have some
notions...but exactly what the form that they’ll take, I don’t know what that is. (edited
Transcript from “Transforming Hollywood” conference)

Audience and industry are adapting to the digital aesthetics of streaming. This

section looks at the desire produced in the audience, in conjunction with the rise of

streaming technologies, to engage in more ‘long-form’ viewing of television shows and

seasons. The practice colloquially known as binging (often called marathoning amongst

executives) connotes a particular mode of viewership audiences are expected to perform--

experiencing digital television differently than broadcast or cable television. Just as DVDs

became ways for audiences to re-animate old television series and play within them in new

ways that promoted a complex reading of culture (Mittell, 2010), streaming can perform

the same cultural function. The affordances of streaming permit audiences to view at the

pace and ordering that they desire. However, binging is more than just an audience

reception practice. It is an integral part of an emergent streaming industry.

Binging operates at a discursive level and as a model of viewership. Binging is an

emergent industry logic that stands in for all audience consumption practices. Screenwriter

Matt Kester, reflecting on his own method of writing, felt there was a difference between

writing for network television and writing for streaming companies because he envisions

the audience binging what he is writing. Katz and Popescu (2004) label this priming of

reception practices as “supplementation” (building from Lazarsfeld & Merton’s general use

of the category). They argue, “a message has a better chance of diffusion and acceptance if it

enlists others to carry it forward and/or if the receivers are appropriately situated and

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primed” (p. 20). The logic of binging influences how shows get conceptualized and how

writers foresee audience reception practices.

Streaming changes the traditional “windowing” of content the media industries have

always been intent on maintaining and protecting. Although Netflix and similar streaming

services are their own lucrative content window, there is no reliance on advertising and the

need to draw advertisers during peak or prime time hours. This is in direct contradiction

with current industry desire to push for increased live broadcasting through social media

live-tweeting, reality competition shows with live voting, awards shows, and sporting

events. Liveness draws advertising revenues because of the perceived value of engaged

audiences. The subscription model of Netflix allows for the aforementioned construction of

digital ‘quality’ programming that is not subjected to the whims and pressures of

advertisers. Without the need to directly satiate advertisers, Netflix releases entire seasons

at a time, thus promoting long-form viewing as the dominant mode of audience

consumption. Many viewers wait until an entire season of broadcast television ends before

deciding to watch because they don’t want to invest in a show that might be canceled mid-

season.

Binging and Netflix become enmeshed, a relationship reinforced by Netflix but also

popular culture and popular discourse pertaining to streaming. Just as “liveness” for

broadcast television reinforces an engaged, connected form of viewing (especially if one

wants to avoid spoilers), the release of entire season on Netflix constitutes another form of

“liveness” where the audience is expected to binge and consume the season as soon as it is

released and as quickly as possible (again, if just to avoid spoilers). Not everyone consumes

Netflix content through binging, but the cultural practice comes to stand in for all audience

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consumption, transitioning into a form of streaming lore. Audiences negotiate these

changes that come from releasing an entire season at one time through deliberating over

proper Twitter protocol for spoilers and live-tweeting the watching of time dispersed

streaming content like House of Cards. Some expect that others will ‘binge’/watch quickly,

so the show should be free to tweet openly about, causing anxiety in those who have yet to

watch the show, thus enforcing ‘binging’ as a new form of liveness.

Binging also produces other forms of anxiety within popular culture. With every

major ‘new’ media recapitulation, there is often an accompanying moral panic. Books were

burned for destroying imagination, radio was seen as a bridge to unseemly programming

and cultural blending, television made everyone into ‘couch potatoes’, and binging is one of

the latest moral or media panics. The debates about the efficacy of media within

communication scholarship come largely from the media effects camp, closely aligned with

media psychology and media sociology perspectives. According to these scholars, society

should be wary of the effects of binge watching on public health. Some of the same fears

about social media negatively impacting relationships are recycled and applied to long-

form viewing.

In a conference presentation titled “A Bad Habit for Your Health? An Exploration of

Psychological Factors for Binge-Watching Behavior,” authors Sung, Kang, and Lee (2015)

attempt to correlate binging with loneliness and depression. “When binge-watching

becomes rampant, viewers may start to neglect their work and their relationships with

others,” explained Sung. “Even though people know they should not, they have difficulty

resisting the desire to watch episodes continuously. Our research is a step toward

exploring binge-watching as an important media and social phenomenon” (quoted in

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Brouwer, 2015). When investigating ‘new’ iterations of media and technology, it is

important to recall this narrative of moral and media panic. Just like the term viral (Jenkins,

Ford & Green, 2013) conjures up negative connotations about digital media practices,

binging implies that audiences are acting like drunken college students consuming

excessive amounts of alcohol—unable to control the gorging of content. Binging makes this

long-form of televisual participation sound like a negative culture practice we might better

label long-form or affable viewing.

Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Corp. of America and Sony Pictures Entertainment,

voices the concern of many executives when thinking about the audience and long-form

modes of content consumption in the digital age. Lynton notes:

“a big change is the way people interact with content...People are getting over the
idea of ownership. It’s more about access to content. People are breaking the
emotional hold of ‘I have to have own it if I consume it.’ Once it shifts, a lot changes
and it is happening pretty quickly" (Block 2013).
Interestingly, long-form viewing cuts both ways. It frees consumers from the shackles of

broadcast scheduling and promotes viewing across multiple mediated platforms, but the

digital aesthetic also enforces a re-articulated version of flow back within the audience.

Many scholars believe there is a broad shift from televisual flow to ‘files’ as the

dominant metaphor for consumption in the digital age, which has led to increased

autonomy and participation in audiences (Newman, 2012). This is not incorrect but

doesn’t account for the usage of algorithms and affordances built-in to the user experience

by streaming services like Netflix to monitor and surveil channel viewing. The term techno-

flow refers to this re-inscription of flow back onto this algorithmically constituted

audience. The practice of ‘queuing’ is an example of techno-flow where the streaming

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industry attempts to reinscribe flow in audiences. Rather than flipping through a TV Guide

or scrolling through a channel of television listings, Netflix used the queue.

“Netflix acculturated its subscribers to construct a ranked list--or in its terms, a

queue...the queuing that Netflix introduced provided its subscribers with a different
paradigm for thinking about and organizing viewing behavior, and one that
substantially challenges the long dominant, linear, ‘what’s on’ proposition” (Lotz,
2014, p. 74).
Queuing compliments binging as the affordances of streaming are used to further cement

binging as an emergent form of audience consumption.

Discussion: Comcast vs. Netflix, Selling the Streams

The Netflix versus Comcast struggle over bandwidth harkens back to the early days

of radio and Marconi’s “exclusivity policy.” Marconi’s place in the history of streaming

applies to this moment of transition and competing institutional logics. Streeter (1996) in

his book Selling the Air shows how Marconi differed from his contemporary radio

entrepreneurs because Marconi envisioned radio as a bounded system where the radio

spectrum could be “conquered and cordoned off.” Marconi’s policy aimed to “extract profit,

not by manufacturing devices for sale, but by regulating access to a communications

system, which meant controlling access to the radio spectrum that made it possible” (p.

223). The other major realization that Marconi made was the need to enlist territorial

government, policy makers, and lawyers to entrench that exclusivity.

With the rise of streaming Comcast is trying to maintain its position as the boss of

media distribution as both a cable company and ISP (among many other things) under the

same corporate umbrella. Just as Marconi did with the introduction of radio, Comcast is

trying to create a “bounded” Internet system that can be cordoned off through ownership
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of infrastructure (meet the new boss, same as the old boss). As a vertically integrated

conglomerate, Comcast is not only a cable company but also an Internet service provider

and content producer with NBCUniversal. To maintain its strategic place in the market and

generate new revenue streams, Comcast engaged in what Netflix called “extortion.” In an

FCC filing protesting the impending Time Warner, Comcast merger Netflix claimed, “(i)t is

extortion when Comcast fails to provide its own customers the broadband speed they’ve

paid for unless Netflix also pays a ransom” (Spangler, 2014, para. 2).

In late 2013 and 2014 Comcast engaged in a practice known as throttling broadband

connection speeds for Netflix subscribers. Throttling is when an ISP deliberately slows

connections speeds in order to regulate or diminish network congestion. Comcast

attempted to “meter” Internet traffic coming from Netflix subscribers using Comcast

broadband:

“In December 2013 and January 2014, however, congestion on routes into
Comcast’s network reached a critical threshold and Comcast’s and Netflix’s mutual
customers were significantly harmed. Comcast subscribers went from viewing
Netflix content at 720p on average (i.e., HD quality) to viewing content at nearly VHS
quality. For many subscribers, the bitrate was so poor that Netflix’s streaming video
service became unusable” (Netflix FCC claim, p. 57).

Ultimately Netflix acquiesced to Comcast’s demands and started paying a direct fee to the

corporate behemoth. This is the first instance of a “peering strategy” implemented by an

ISP, essentially creating the possibility for a tiered system that extracts fees for broadband

speeds.

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 Figure 5. Netflix FCC filing (p. 59)

As the above graph shows, Netflix connectivity speed was sapped until they agreed

to pay Comcast and a dramatic rise in speed happens after the deal is signed. While it is

true that Comcast does need capital to constantly build and run its network, the response

from Comcast was to blame Netflix’s business plan for “shifting costs that it has always

borne to all users of the Internet and not just to Netflix customers” (Edwards, 2014, para.

3). However, this has set a precedent for “arbitrary” fees and peering. “Since agreeing to

pay Comcast, Netflix also has agreed to pay TWC, AT&T and Verizon for interconnection”

(Netflix FCC, p. 59).

The battle between Comcast and Netflix is indicative of the period of rupture and

cleavages, wherein we find these emergent streaming logics and shifting industrial lore. As

we have seen, Netflix is a spry, plucky technology upstart that has defied industrial logics,

138
surges and tackled its own corporate giants. Comcast, however, is intending to maintain its

strategic position through further incorporation and acquisition or generating new revenue

streams. Streaming does constitute a new strategic logic coming out of the technology

industry, which is butting up against the television and cable industries own institutional

authority. The strategic logic of newly minted Internet startups pitted against the stalwarts

of broadcasting.

Five years ago the idea that a cable conglomerate would ever be challenged was

rightly roundly dismissed. However, at the most recent Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau

(CAB) meeting, leading industry executives had a “frank talk” about the future of cable

networks and advertising revenue. CAB estimated “about 40% of third and fourth quarter

TV ratings declines can be attributed to such subscription online video services” (as

reported in Vranica & Ramachandran, 2015, para. 3). This echoes a recent report in the

same Wall Street Journal article from Sanford C. Bernstein media analyst Todd

Juenger, “We believe the U.S. television industry is entering a period of prolonged

structural decline, caused by a migration of viewers from ad-supported platforms to non-

ad-supported or less-ad-supported platforms” (para. 6). This is the same investment and

research company who just five years earlier had called cord-cutting “perhaps the most

overhyped and overanticipated phenomenon in tech history” (Richtel & Stelter, 2010).

Regardless of the future of cable, this clash of competing strategies is an important space

and time for scholars of media industries to study not only economic and institutional

changes but also the accompanying discourses and logics made visible with streaming.

Streaming, then, is a site of rupture, wherein scholars can snip the sutured pockets of

industry lore.

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Conclusion

This chapter focuses on the emergence of streaming as an industry. I have focused

on a conceptualization of television industry discourse termed “industry lore.” This

window into the development of industry discourses (in this context digital streaming

lore), elucidates ways television and media industries cope with streaming

technology. Four categories of emergent streaming lore include the positioning of Netflix

as a content producer, specifically a producer of ‘quality’ television. Second, the application

of algorithms is analyzed in the distribution of content to consumers and in discursively

situating and constituting the audience. In addition, substantial lore has developed around

individuals who have chosen to sever their ties with traditional broadcast television and to

instead rely on other viewing options (cord-cutters) and those who have never subscribed

to broadcast television (cord-nevers). Finally, lore has developed around the fragmenting

of the televisual scheduling window with the development of marathoning and binging

patterns of viewership. The clash of competing strategies is exemplified by the corporate

controversy between Netflix and Comcast. The continued emergence of streaming as a

global industry and disruptive social practice are presented in chapter four.

140
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 CHAPTER 4: EXTENDING THE BROADCAST: VPNS, COSMOPOLITANIZING STRATEGIES,
AND THE PROBLEMS OF DIGITAL GEOGRAPHIES

Introduction

This chapter considers streaming media within a global context. The first half of the

chapter examines streaming as an audience tactic while the latter half charts the

emergence of global streaming industry. The chapter examines the recent move by

television sports broadcasters of streaming digital content behind geographically restricted

“geofences.” Despite the increasing use of this distribution method, I argue that Internet

users are tactically bypassing geofences that center consumption within a nationalized

television broadcasting framework through the use of VPN (virtual private network)

technologies. Importantly, the geographic fluidity of the Internet often allows users to do

this legally—producing meaningful ruptures in the logic that seeks to replicate the

structures of mediation central to the television broadcast model within the space of the

Internet. I argue that the streaming of sports content, then, should be understood and

analyzed as an enforcement of corporate media strategies and reflection of

telecommunication policy, as well as a cultural practice and tactic. Large transnational

media corporations, typically the holders of popular sporting rights, attempt to bend digital

content consumption to the broadcast models that they have historically employed. Yet,

amidst this emerging model of digital broadcasting lie the problems of digital geography

and the cultural practice of streaming media within the conditions of post-convergence.

This practice often rejects the restrictions and stipulations of digital broadcasting in favor

of a globetrotting, station-hopping exercise of content hunting.

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VPNs and #NBCFail

During the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, much criticism was levied against

NBC’s decision to tape delay its coverage of the competition. This was certainly not the first

time that audiences expressed disdain for NBC’s “plausibly live” Olympic coverage. During

the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, NBC posted record-breaking ratings despite tape delaying

coverage of the opening ceremonies by 10 hours (Jicha, 1992). In 2012, audiences were not

so constrained by the strategic logic of national broadcasting. The hashtag #NBCFail

trended across America, and many news outlets ran articles about mounting viewer angst.

Time Magazine TV critic James Poniewozik summed up much of the public sentiment when

he tweeted, “NBC tape delay coverage is like the airlines: its interest is in giving you the

least satisfactory service you will still come back for” (De Moraes, 2012). The response to

NBC’s coverage was a bit ironic, considering that the network paid large sums of money (to

the point of losing money on previous games) to be the exclusive broadcaster of the

Olympics in part because it allowed the network to market itself as a “national channel,” a

unifier. NBC hoped to leverage the Olympics’ unique status as “one of the last spaces in

which the ‘nation’ remains a prominent figure in an increasingly fragmented, narrowcasted

environment” (McNutt, 2013).

Yet rather than unify viewers, NBC’s coverage polarized them, with a number of

viewers participating in an unexpected phenomenon: using VPN (virtual private network)

services to change the “address” of their computer from America to the United Kingdom,

allowing American viewers to circumvent NBC’s coverage and access the live (and more

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comprehensive) Internet streaming coverage of the BBC. Soon, how-to-guides were being

spread widely across the Internet (including popular mainstream websites such as

Lifehacker). While the news coverage continued to center mainly on NBC’s production

choices and the anger they inspired in viewers, it was the audience’s ability to access the

BBC’s coverage at all that was the real story. These acts of protest evinced significant shifts

in the underlying relationship between Internet and television broadcasting models, media

corporations and mediated sporting rights.

The story of #NBCFail, Lifehacker, and VPNs is illustrative of the ways in which

online sports streaming has destabilized what Rowe and Hutchins (2010) have called the

“historically naturalized relationships among broadcast television networks, commercial

media, and professional spectator sports.” In recent years this relationship has risen to the

center of the global television marketplace, with television rights for premium sports

programming dramatically increasing each year (up to $22.98 billion worldwide in 2013;

Owen, 2014). Concomitant with this rise the leagues’ best athletes now become worldwide

celebrities and many popular teams enjoy world fanbases. Despite this, however, domestic

sporting leagues, international sporting competitions, and the television networks that

carry them continue to embrace and produce the rhetoric of shared identity at the national

level (Bairner, 2001; Billings, 2008; Rowe, 2003). These discourses have long reflected the

ways in which broadcast rights for various sporting leagues and events around the world

are sold and marketed. Like most television programming, sports rights are primarily sold

on a nation-by-nation basis.

As leagues and events have increasingly begun to bundle online streaming rights

with their television broadcast rights, the geographically bounded conceptions of televised

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sport consumption have increasingly been mapped onto Internet-based sports viewing

through the use of geofences, or virtual perimeters that regulate access to content by

geographic location. In this article, however, we argue that Internet users are increasingly

bypassing these geofences that center sports consumption within a nationalized television

broadcasting framework. Importantly, the geographic fluidity of the Internet often allows

users to do this legally—producing meaningful ruptures in the logic that seeks to replicate

the structures of mediation of the television broadcast model within the space of the

Internet. Importantly, by focusing on the legal subversion of these frameworks, we can

better address the ruptures taking place in the digital media environment without having

to attend to the stigma of piracy.

In order to accomplish this, I incorporate a variety of academic disciplines, including

sports studies, media studies, and geography. In so doing, I hope to avoid a simplified

analysis that would merely foreground a single aspect of our object and instead construct a

more complex representation of the ways a variety of nodes, histories, and relationships

have produced the contemporary moment. As technology and mediation increasingly

penetrate more aspects of life, a varied and dynamic methodological approach will be

increasingly necessary to understand the cultural repercussions of networked streaming.

This chapter begins with a brief overview of contemporary broadcasting rights and

television infrastructure and presents a challenge to the nominal categorization of

streaming as piracy or simply ‘streaming theft’ (in both industrial and academic texts). We

then consider streaming as a long-standing cultural practice used to extend the reach of

media (oftentimes disrupting territorial and institutional logics). Finally, we present the

use of VPNs to bypass geofences as a contemporary manifestation of this cultural lineage.

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The transition from broadcasting to digital technology opens a space for the re-

contextualization of streaming as both a cultural and technological practice. The chapter

then shifts to a legal contextualization of main court cases currently involved with

streaming, both within the domestic US context and some important cases internationally.

The chapter also looks at the notion of “cosmopolitanizing strategies” as a way to further

conceptualize streaming globally. The strategies of disruption, performance, and

hybridization grant streaming the ability to negotiate multiple levels of globalization: local,

regional, and global. The chapter ends by offering another organizational tool for thinking

about streaming by categorizing different streaming services as transnational, national, and

diasporic streaming. The case study of iROKOtv is presented as an example of diasporic

streaming, which is beginning to alter distribution methods and monetization in

Nollywood.

In this first half of the chapter, I pay particular attention to unsanctioned first-party

streaming (primarily the usage of VPNs to access geographically-restricted content) as an

emergent reconstitution of broadcasting in the digital age. The current industrial model for

the conceptualization of sports (from league structure to its meditation) is done within a

geographic framework that centers on the nation-state. However, the Internet, and

streaming culture, in particular, has subverted that framework and pushed all aspects of

sport, from fandom to consumption, from a geographically-centered practice to a

temporally-centered practice.

The streaming of content, then, should be understood and analyzed as an

enforcement of corporate media strategies and a reflection of telecommunication policy.

Large transnational media corporations, typically the holders of popular sporting rights,

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attempt to bend digital sports content consumption to the broadcast models that they have

historically employed (Hutchins & Rowe, 2012). Yet, amidst this emerging model of digital

broadcasting lies the cultural practice of streaming and the problematics of digital

geography, which often rejects the restrictions and stipulations of digital broadcasting in

favor of a globe-trotting, station-hopping exercise of content hunting.

Global Television; National Infrastructure

The past few decades have seen the globalization of television industries across the

world and the ensuing web of global media networks they have spawned. However, despite

the growth and increasing prominence of the largest members of these networks,

corporations such as Time Warner, Disney, and News Corp., the global television system is

not dictated by these most visible and sprawling of transnational corporations. As Amelia

Arsenault and Manuel Castells (2008) have explained, “‘global media’ organizations are not

truly global, as local media organizations are not truly local. What is global is the

networked organization of media companies” (p. 711). I would add that the global

networked organization of media companies, however, is increasingly channeled through

the networked individual as a focal point in the transnational streaming industry.

Indeed, the global media system is one of countless players, a byzantine web of

international, national, and local media corporations, stations, and government bodies. The

volatility and unpredictability of these infrastructures generally resist any sort of easy

imposition of the will of eager transnational media corporations onto national and pan-

national media systems. As Toby Miller, Geoffrey Lawrence, Jim McKay and David Rowe

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(2001) have reminded, the terms “local” and “global” are too often “binarized” and made

all-encompassing, creating analysis where “the plentitude of one becomes the lack of the

other and vice-versa: a graceless zero-sum game between national and international, public

and commercial” (p. 22).

Thus, despite the presence of multinational conglomerates, a coagulating network of

pan-national infrastructures, and a sustained relationship between local operators and the

international market, television still faces the consumer as a national enterprise. TV

channels, viewing packages, cable and satellite systems, and program rights are often

constructed and operated under the guise of the nation state. While the ownership of

channels and the content on them are reflective of a globalized industry, the performance

of television, as well as the parameters of its consumption, often remains rigidly national.

Where the globalization of the television industries has its most impact, then, is on

the back end in the production, procurement, and distribution of television content. As

Silvio Waisbord (2004) has argued, globalization has unsettled the “past linkages” between

the nation-state, flows of capital, geographic units, and the mechanics of content creation

and distribution. No longer, he argues, do conflicts settle easily into the “national versus

foreign” mold. Rather, as Arsenault and Castells further illustrated:

Global companies are leveraging partnerships and cross-investments with national,

regional, and local companies to facilitate market expansion and vice versa. Regional
players are actively importing global content and localizing it; and global media
organizations are pursuing local partners in order to deliver customized content to
audiences. Processes of localization and globalization work hand in hand to expand
a global network of production and distribution. (p. 722)

This intricate network of media companies operating under similar practices and business

models as well as the need for content that suits dominant national cultures has led to the

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rise of the television “format” as a lucrative model of television production. As Waisbord

argued, formats, which are shows that can be easily repurposed for different cultures

(think of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Big Brother, or the Idol franchise) are “convenient

instruments to leap over cultural boundaries” while also utilizing the dynamic media

networks that span the globe. At the same time, the rise of television formats holds in it the

perils and promise of globalization. It can allow for the performance and celebration of

distinct cultures within a global system and demonstrate the “resilience of national

cultures.” However, it can just as well amount to no more than “local camouflaging,” on

shows that fundamentally espouse the capitalist ideologies of the transnational

corporations that traffic them (Selznick, 2008). For example, sports programming, which is

an easily cross-cultural transferable product (when coming from afar) and an easy

activator of localized meanings (when coming domestically) has emerged as a coveted and

lucrative prize for national television operators within this system of television formatting.

Within this system, then, it makes sense that all major sporting television rights are

still sold on a nation-by-nation basis. The World Cup, the Olympics, The major European

soccer leagues, and all the American domestic leagues (of which three have Canadian

teams) sell their television rights at the national level. Streaming rights are also typically

distributed at the national level and are often bundled along with the TV rights. When this

is the case, streaming on a device is often marketed as a “supplement” to the experience of

watching on a television set. In practice, rather than replicating the television model,

streaming has often acted in subservience to it, either for use as a second screen, or as an

acceptable reprieve for when the viewer is away from their television. As the popularity of

streaming content has increased (along with its disruptive potential), many rights holders

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have sought to prevent a rush of consumers replacing cable subscriptions with streaming

subscriptions by moving toward an “authentication” model that allows for streaming once

the viewer verifies their cable or satellite subscription. The NCAA College Basketball

tournament is most indicative of this trend, gathering acclaim in 2012 for its decision to

offer streaming access in America for $3.99 only to reverse course and require cable

authentication in 2013 (Laird, 2013; NCAA, 2014).

Even within league-offered streaming services, such as MLB.tv, NBA League Pass,

and NFL Sunday Ticket, television continues to stand supreme. Most explicitly, television

blackouts are not only reproduced but intensified. Home games within designated local

markets are often blacked out as a concession to regional television sports networks. In

areas located near multiple teams, this can often mean the blacking out multiple teams.

Nationally broadcast games are also frequently blacked out, as a concession to national

television right holders (DirectTV, n.d.; MLB, n.d.; NBA, n.d.). In this state, streaming

becomes even more restricted by geography than television viewing. Streaming services

such as Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Netflix all have digital boundaries that are set up based

on rights agreements made with individual countries. Even then, the available titles in the

streaming catalog will fluctuate greatly depending upon your location. A Netflix

subscription in the United States, for example, gives subscribers thousands of more titles

than Netflix subscribers in Canada and Australia (as we will see, this also becomes the

impetus for the usage of VPNs). In Canada, you get roughly half of the titles that you can get

in the United States. In Australia, by Netflix’s own admission, 200,000 of its subscribers

utilize VPNs and other forms of IP masking to access Netflix in the United States (Reilly,

2015). Streaming services emphasizing national boundaries and restrictions actual push

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consumers to experiment with workarounds and play within digital space. This also shows

that knowledge about VPNs is not just held by those with a great degree of technical

knowledge. Netflix is so aware of VPN usage that it has started selectively blocking VPN

users through their Android app by “forcing Google DNS lookup” after a software update

(Reilly, 2015). This means that the VPN users would receive an error message instead of

being able to access Netflix (never fear, however, a quick skim of the comments section of

the article and you will find another workaround to Netflix’s blockade by adjusting your

router’s default gateway!).

Most league-offered streaming services will offer a full replay of a blacked out game

within twenty-four hours of the event’s initial airing. However, for those who wish to watch

the game without knowing the end result, this is hardly a comforting notion. Social media

such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as the general timeliness of most Internet content,

make avoiding results or spoilers of major live events an extremely difficult task for

dedicated fans (networks now regularly joke about “spoiler alerts” during Olympic

coverage and other major sporting events). The Internet, and social media in particular,

have replaced the temporal insularity of television with an omnipresent display of the

current moment, allowing notable live events to escape out of the media industries’

dominance and control of time (as in the case of the 2012 Olympics). Even when television

and sanctioned streaming services still operate under the impression of that dominance,

unsanctioned streaming allows viewers to capture those escaped events.

Increasingly, rights holders are putting more of their content online, behind

authentication systems that regulate access based on geographic location. While these

systems, called geofences, are successful enough in preventing casual out-of-area viewers

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from watching a program, there are many VPN services available that allow single users to

easily, and legally, bypass geographic restrictions. Simply put, VPNs are a way in which

private networks can be extended over public Internet infrastructure through the use of

encryption and dedicated connections. In doing so, they “change” the location of any user to

the location of the private network. Users can then leverage this ability to bypass

geographic restrictions on content. We classify this ‘legal’ tactic as unsanctioned first party

streaming.

In this way the use of VPNs as legal pathways to content legitimates ‘illegal’

streaming, but streamers are also blazing invisible pathways that legally transcend the

geographic logics of the nation-state and construct deterritorialized space for consumption.

VPNs may soon become vulnerable to intermediary routing services becoming regulated by

territorial governments, but technology has long proven flexible enough to allow users to

stay slightly ahead of copyright restrictions in a cycle of users tactics and institutional

strategies. Streaming invites us to look at the in-between, the spaces and gaps of copyright.

VPNs show how streaming as a cultural practice cannot be divested without disruption to

the strategic logic of the law and copyright. This is the unsanctioned third-party streaming

that takes us from boxing to digital streaming but the use of VPNs augments and further

ruptures the facade of national broadcasting’s centrality as first party unsanctioned

streaming.

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VPNs and Unsanctioned First Party Streaming

Historically, VPNs have been used by businesses and governments to build out

secure networks across national and international areas at a much less cost than dedicated

leased lines. This technology has replaced the need for businesses to construct their own

costly leased lines to connect local area networks (LANs) without sacrificing the security or

reliability of leased lines. VPNs have played a key role in the globalization of business and

the emergence of transnational corporations as well as the evolution of the Internet as a

(potentially) secure channel of communication. In recent years, however, VPNs have

become increasingly popular at the individual level, with people using them for a variety of

purposes that require anonymity and secure channels of communication (Houmansadr,

Riedl, Borisov, & Singer, 2013; Houmansadr, Wong, & Shmatikoc, 2014). They have come to

serve as one means of preserving anonymity and escaping Internet filters for citizens living

in countries with restrictive and intrusive Internet policies (Roberts, Zuckerman, Faris,

York, & Palfrey, 2011). Further, as global internet surveillance and data mining (by the

state and hackers) becomes a greater day-to-day reality across the world, VPNs are part of

a suite of developing technologies and practices used by people across the world to avoid

detection and censorship (Karlin et. al., 2011; Wustrow, Wolchok, Goldberg, & Halderman,

2011).

VPNs and other similar technologies have always required a level of expertise

beyond the skills of an average computer user. In recent years, however, a number of

consumer-friendly VPN services have emerged on the market that has made the process of

changing a computer’s location much simpler. This came to a head during the

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aforementioned 2012 Olympics when the simple (and humorously) designed VPN program

TunnelBear (www.tunnelbear.com) received much press as an easy to use service for

bypassing the BBC’s geofence to its digital Olympic streams (Baker & Adegoke, 2012;

Klosowski, 2012; Moore, 2012). The program itself is marketed with the tagline “Simple,

private, free access to the global internet you love.” Once opened, the application resembles

an old wooden radio. During the 2012 Olympics, the program only contained two buttons:

an on-off switch and a US-UK switch (it has since expanded to include four more countries).

By flipping the switch to “on,” the user could easily change their location from the US to the

UK and access BBC content.

TunnelBear’s focus on being “really, really simple” is mirrored in the design of its

website, which repeatedly touts the ability of the program to allow the user to “enjoy an

open and unrestricted Internet” with only glancing, vague mentions of the security uses of

VPN. Other similar services, like the popular service Unblock-Us, have cropped up that

eschew the primary security features of VPN and focus solely on allowing users to bypass

geofenced content.

The amount of online streaming content that can be accessed by utilizing VPNs is

continuously increasing, as existing television stations continue to put more of their

content online, and new, online-only services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon continue to

crop up or expand to more countries. In using a VPN, an American-based streamer can

quite easily watch the BBC’s entire online catalog, explore a much wider variety of movies

and television shows on Hulu and Netflix than is available in America, watch American

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broadcast channels, and access league-offered streaming services with no restrictions, all

with a click of a button.

Digital Geography

This leads back to our opening anecdote about the 2012 Olympics and #NBCFail. As

mentioned before, NBC tape delayed many of the most highly anticipated events in the

Olympics, and what they did stream live was devoid of commentary and presentation--that

is if a viewer could even get the malfunctioning streams to work. While the angst and vitriol

built over the course of the Olympics, it was present from the very beginning when NBC

chose not to stream the opening ceremonies live. The fact that many were able to follow

the ceremonies through Twitter and Facebook illustrates the way in which social media

exposed the tension between the nation-state as a self-contained unit of mediated

consumption and the geographically agnostic consumption proffered by the Internet. This

tension was further highlighted as the use of user-friendly VPN services like TunnelBear

began to gain traction in the mainstream media (Baker & Adegoke, 2012). Thus the true

significance of the 2012 Olympics and #NBCFail lies not in the outrage the network

sustained from its audiences, but from the ways in which the audience could bypass the

imposed structures of Internet broadcasting. In doing so, audiences were not just

bypassing existing constraints of the nation-state and its broadcasting infrastructure but

fully realizing a digital omnipresence where audiences could tactically buck the geographic

restraints of global copyright and online content distribution.

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 This digital omnipresence stands in stark contrast to the logics of Internet

broadcasting that encourage a geographically based approach to regulating distribution

and access to online streaming content. As explained, the dominant broadcasting model has

been mapped onto the current state of digital space and infrastructure to reinforce the

primacy of the nation-state. Still VPNs push back on the idea that physical location within

the Internet exists in such a way that it can be used as a regulatory or defining agent and

remind us that the geographic mapping of the Internet is a construction. As Mike Crang

(2000) explains, spatial metaphors have become the vehicle through which networks are

culturally understood and enacted, where the “imagining of electronic space is vital to

creating it” (p. 302). Yet, along with a more palatable understanding of the basic workings

of the Internet comes a naturalizing of the Internet as a spatially faithful digital

reproduction of the world in which we live.

In terms of experience, this naturalization has led to the frequent understanding of

the Internet as a second geographic plane, albeit with its own structures of relations and

power: As Serra Tinic (2005) explained:

“We have become accustomed to living on two planes: those of 'virtual geography'
and of the 'geography of experience.' While the latter is the place we live and work
in and experience at first hand, it is permeated by the virtual geography of the global
media, which provides an experience that is no more or less real. It is a different
kind of perception, of things not bounded by rules of proximity, of being there. In
virtual geography, people form, maintain, and (re)establish cultural affinities,
communities, and identities that may or may not coincide with the political and
social identity projects of nation building” (p. 17).

Shaun Moores (2000), in discussing the impact of electronic media on social relationships

and identity, made a similar argument to Tinic, stressing that electronic media, as well as

broadcast media, produce a “doubling of place” for the user that allows for pluralized

identities and interpersonal performances. While both Tinic and Moores adeptly address

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the feeling of using the Internet, both of their analyses presuppose the Internet as a vehicle

of mobility. You may end up somewhere else, but you still start where you physically are.

This analysis, however, emphasizes how the Internet cannot only enable

“transportation” to other places, it can, through the use of VPNs, also change what place you

start at. This is critically important as the Internet is increasingly being regulated,

controlled, and restricted at the national level. Where you start increasingly shapes where

you can end up, as evidenced during the Arab Spring in 2011, where VPNs and similar

services enabled dissidents to continue communicating with each other and supporters

outside their countries even as governments shut down national ISPs and outgoing internet

traffic (Castells, 2013; Howard & Hussain, 2011). These remain fleeting, ephemeral tactics

that don’t amass their gains, but the simultaneous presence that VPNs afford remains as

audiences are ‘making do’ within an increasingly restrictive global media environment

(Kantola, 2013). Herein VPNs act as streaming tactics. While geography and space are often

secondary in discussions about digital media they continually shape policies, markets, and

the everydayness of audiences lived experience (Christensen & Christensen, 2013).

In terms of the increasing convergence of television and Internet content production

and distribution, this ambiguity of location necessitates a rethinking of how contemporary

broadcast models can be transposed to the Internet. Merely attempting to produce an

Internet broadcast infrastructure that mirrors the geographical structures of the television

industry has been satisfactory in the short term. Yet, as the continual increase of

unsanctioned first party streamers show, Internet geofences construct the boundaries of

broadcast on top of shifting ground. The Internet isn’t some vacuous ‘placelessness’ within

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the phantasmagoric global or a canvas waiting for the digital reprint of timeless television

logics and strategies, but a network infused with an overwhelming amount of presence.

Current sports streaming models and the general transposition of television content

to the Internet creates an illusion of bounded place and common participants through

copyright and policy--constructing the experience much like a stadium. This makes sense,

as mediated representations of sport have long been enacted and understood through the

stadium. As Anna McCarthy (1995) detailed, in the early days of television, many fans

watching televised sports at taverns acted as if they were at the stadium, constructing the

tavern “as a place where the televised event and the bleacher experience seemed to blend

together” (p. 37). Even today, pubs in England are known to go as far as installing stadium

seating within the pub and laying down turf (Dixon, 2013). Thus, this blending continues

on today in sports bars, Olympic and Super Bowl living room parties (Rothenbuhler, 1988),

the history of radio and television distribution rights, and the marketing of streaming

packages.

I argue for conceptualizing streamers within this framework, especially the

unsanctioned first party streamers who utilize VPNs and other similar services to bypass

content restrictions and geofences. These streamers are not “pirating” material as much as

they are tactically “sneaking into” the digital stadium. In contrast to the use of the Internet

as a producer of non-localized space, such as in the case of the physical traveler, who

utilizes the Internet to generate “mobile social spaces which are not embedded in any

particular physical place” (Mascheroni, 2007, p. 541, Monterde & Postill, 2013).

Unsanctioned first-party streaming utilizes the Internet as a producer of omnipresent

physical place, imagining viewers within specific geographic locations and enabling access

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to the particular mediated representations of the desired content. In exploiting these

visible pathways, these streamers not only speak to the illusory boundaries of modern

streaming models, but also to the general fallacy that the structure of the Internet rigidly

reflects the geographic boundaries of the nations it operates within.

Streaming Courts: Legal Case Analysis

To combat this move by audiences television broadcasters increasingly stream their

content online behind the aforementioned, geographically restricted “geofences.” This is

part of an ongoing legal battle between audiences and rights holders, where media

industries attempt to curtail this ubiquitous cultural practice. The legal history will begin

with the landmark Sony Betamax case and MGM v. Grokster, analyzing the ‘inducement

doctrine’ where Grokster was found liable because they were proven to have induced or

encouraged copyright violation with their software. The technology itself was not ruled

against, but the actions of the company made it vulnerable to litigation. The global nature

of streaming and the United States desire to enforce U.S. copyright law internationally has

resulted in a mixture of outcomes related to current streaming practices.

Recent legislations in the form of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP

Act (PIPA) have attempted to make Internet Service Providers (ISPs) responsible and liable

for the actions of individual users. The current system in place, set up by the DMCA, is a

takedown system where the onus is on the copyright holder to issue a complaint that

another party is infringing on their copyright. This triggers a takedown notice being put in

place of a website or the website being removed from search results. This takedown system

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is not sufficient enough for the MPAA lobby because the responsibility for monitoring and

filing complaints is on the copyright holder and the takedown system doesn’t serve as a

strong deterrent to future copyright infringement or violation. Several pieces of legislation

such as the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), which

would make ISPs as an intermediary responsible for the regulation of streaming, the

Commercial Felony Streaming Act (2012), are examples of contemporary streaming

policies that aggressively penalize audiences and ISPs for infringing uses of media and

technology.

Sony Corp. v. Universal Studios, 464 U.S. 417 (1984) is the first landmark case in the

legal history of file sharing and streaming. In this case, the Supreme Court concluded that

Sony’s Betamax (the first mass-produced videocassette recorder) did not make Sony liable

for secondary copyright infringement because the technology could be used for non-

infringing purposes. The majority opinion for the Court stated: “The question is thus

whether the Betamax is capable of commercially significant noninfringing uses…one

potential use of the Betamax plainly satisfies this standard, however it is understood:

private, noncommercial time-shifting in the home.” In this case, the copying technology

wins a major battle and sets a legal precedent for non-infringing uses of technology. Today

this case is still considered foundational for attempting to defend against peer-to-peer

copyright litigation.

The first case testing peer-to-peer technology came in A&M Records v. Napster, 239

F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001). The 9th Circuit Court ruled against Napster because it was found

that Napster had the technology to monitor copyright infringing behavior and Napster

“knowingly encourages and assists the infringement” of copyright. The 9th Circuit of

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Appeals did rule in favor of peer-to-peer technology in MGM v. Grokster, 545 U.S. 913

(2005). Drawing from the Betamax ruling, the Court found “substantial noninfringing uses”

for p2p, but the Supreme Court overturned the ruling. The Court established what is now

known as the ‘inducement doctrine’ where Grokster was found liable because they were

proven to have induced or encouraged copyright violation with their software. The

technology itself was not ruled against, but the actions of the company made it vulnerable

to litigation.

Rather than suing intermediaries, the RIAA with the backing of some of the largest

record companies in the world sued individual users. The RIAA targeted college campuses

in an effort to scare the general public (especially targeting California college campuses)

into obeying copyright law and viewing P2P technology as theft. Some 30,000 cases were

tried against individual Internet accounts over four years. In Capitol v. Thomas, Jammie

Thomas was ordered to pay $222,000 for downloading 24 song files. The case is still

pending after multiple hearings and appeals. Music downloading and streaming slightly

differ. It is much tougher to target individual streamers because they don’t download

anything (although the 9th Circuit has aggressively ruled that transient or ephemeral

streaming could constitute a copy) but hosting sites—intermediaries are open to criminal

and liability claims. Right now if you don’t distribute or host videos yourself, you aren’t

directly subject to prosecution and no one has yet been sued for viewing (akin to drug

dealing versus possession). Some laws are in the works to tweak that such as Bill S.978 or

the Commercial Felony Streaming Act (2012), which has gotten out of committee in the

Senate but has yet to be introduced on the floor of the Senate. Streaming is international

and quite messy as the US tries to enforce and extend its copyright power.

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 Three international cases complicate United States case law pertaining to streaming.

This is especially true because VPNs are making it easier to establish private, encrypted,

long distance connections where streaming may be ruled completely legal. In Atari Europe

S.A.S.U. v. Rapidshare AG (2010) a German high court ruled in favor of the file-hosting

service Rapidshare because "most people utilize RapidShare for legal use cases” and the

company responded to copyright holder requests to take down content when asked. In the

UK the prosecution of Oink’s Pink Palace (or OiNK) creator and founder, Alan Ellis,

returned a verdict of not guilty to charges of conspiracy to defraud in 2010. Alan Ellis was

the first person to be tried for illegal file hosting and sharing in the UK.

The charges levied against Hong Kong based Megaupload demonstrate the

interconnected nature of global streaming. As mentioned in Chapter 2’s review of MPAA

actions against “rogue sites,” in January of 2012 the United States Department of Justice

seized Megaupload’s domain names and froze $42 million dollars of assets because of

alleged copyright infringement. This was a big United States coup and show of power to

the rest of world. The site owner, Kim Dotcom, is a German-born, New Zealand national

who was living in Australia at the time of the arrest and indictment. Thanks to the courts,

we do have some numbers that show just how widespread streaming has become globally.

At the time of the arrest, Megaupload had 82,764,913 unique visitors, over 1,000,000,000

pages views in its history, and 50,000,000 visitors per day. It was the 13th most visited site

on the Internet and Kim Dotcom admitted in court that Megaupload was "hosting 12 billion

unique files for over 100 million users" (Foreman, 2012). Despite the high-profile

takedown, the United States demands to extradite Dotcom were ultimately blocked.

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 While intermediaries are threatened within the territorial United States, there

remains opposition to the United States locking down hosting sites internationally. If the

MPAA declines to go the unpopular route of litigating individual streamers (learning from

the unpopular decision by the RIAA), then these intermediaries may be able to continue to

operate just outside Western copyright’s control. The China Internet Network Information

Center believes “that illegal file-sharing sites account for some 65.8% of their total 222.4

million online population” (Mayo, 2009). Countries like China represent ongoing questions

for copyright holders.

Cosmopolitanizing Strategies

While VPNs are part of the rupturing of first party streaming to broadcast logics, this

section looks at the ways that the streaming industry situates itself globally through the

usage of “cosmopolitanizing strategies.” As such, streaming is a prime case study of the

globalization of media, providing an opportunity to consider interactions between the

global and the local as a contemporary mediascape is developed or “engineered.” Many

authors (cf. Canclini, 1995; Featherstone, Lash, & Robertson, 1995; Pieterse, 1995; 2004;

Kraidy, 2005) have conceptualized globalization as a relatively straightforward bilateral

process of hybridization. For example, Ritzer (2012) has characterized globalization as

following the model of McDonaldization—an (American) institution acts in hegemonic

ways to standardize process and product in ever-expanding markets around the world.

In the actual case of McDonalds, the hybridization produced is primarily the result

of local cuisine interacting with McDonald’s traditional American menu to produce hybrid

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menu items such as Shrimp burgers in Japan, spicy Shaka shaka chicken in Singapore,

McVeggie burgers in India, and the McArabia sandwich in the Middle East—a pita bread

based version of a shawarma featuring McDonald’s burgers and chicken patties (Nasr,

2013). These global processes act as hegemonic and colonial influences on local culture.

This kind of homogeneity also exists in media industries with increased conglomeration of

global media corporations and the selling and distributing of global formats. Co-

productions or international joint ventures (IJVs) produce transnational media markets for

companies targeting broader audiences.

In contrast to this version of global homogeneity, many authors have come to view

cultural globalization as comprising “multilateral and complex movements among plural

origins and plural destinations” (Allen & Sakamoto, 2008). As a result, for many scholars,

the globalization of culture has become a discussion of the constantly evolving fusion of

cultures that may occur at local, regional and global levels (cf. Pieterse, 2004).

In moving beyond the often reductive homogeneous versus hybrid debates in

definitions of globalization, we focus on the emergence of global streaming services as a

distinct brand identity, which is constructed in order to traverse multiple cultural registers.

Tinic (2015) calls for this same attention to “(t)he proliferation of digital windows,

specialty channels, and fragmented audiences” (para. 1) for global media scholars. In her

analysis of the television show Orphan Black, Tinic shows the “continuity and change” in

post-network global television production. Orphan Black is local in its Canadian production

and speaks to the specificities of Canadian culture but also overcomes the contradictions of

“national specificity” to appeal to British and American markets. Tinic explains:

“New platforms and specialty channels have increased opportunities for producers
in small-market nations to sell their programs globally. Yet concomitant audience
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 fragmentation and ever-increasing production budgets have resulted in intensified
competition for content in an era that simultaneously requires unique brand
differentiation and nuanced cultural negotiations between transnational creative
partners” (para. 8).

Streaming media is used to navigate and make slippery nominal dichotomies; global/local,

national/regional. This intentionally developed cultural product may be seen as an

example of an engineered cosmopolitanism that allows streaming to exist along multiple

levels of globalization: local, regional, and global. Rather than seeing cosmopolitanism as a

unidirectional move towards the global, we consider this engineered cosmopolitanism as a

multi-directional, ideological force that maneuvers streaming services within multiple

registers. The engineering of cosmopolitanism can thereby penetrate the local, establish

the regional, and enchant the global. Pascual (2012) describes a number of what she terms

“cosmopolitanizing strategies” that function to position food within the global, regional and

local. Examples of these strategies include disruption, performance, and hybridization,

which can be applied to media industry re-articulation of streaming media. While Pascaul

has related this theory to food cultures and eating, our emphasis in this chapter applies

these strategies to the domain of streaming technologies.

For Pascaul, the cosmpolitanizing strategy of disruption involves the fragmentation

of traditional expectations about menu structure (e.g. appetizer, first course, second course,

dessert) replaced by, for example, a series of small plates that serve to disorient a diner but

also to involve them in a process of co-creation. Disruption can be seen in streaming as this

same fragmentation of traditional broadcasting, particularly in relation to scheduling.

Decoupling content from its nationalistic origins disorients audiences, cutting or

minimizing expectations associated with scheduling. Reducing this imprint opens up

polyvocal possibilities, traversing multiple registers of globalization. Just as the small plates

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jar diners from prescribed norms and rules, encouraging the process of co-creation,

streaming encourages tasting and sampling outside of the routinized consumption patterns

entrenched by scheduling. Streaming through the use of VPN’s adds to this disruption by

disrupting the geography of broadcasting.

Likewise, for Pascual, the cosmopolitanizing strategy of performance refers to the

recognition that the dining experience is performed, with roles played by, among others,

chefs, wait staff, and diners. The restaurant space and layout, the timing of courses, and the

menu all are involved in the creation of a spectacle of consumption. In all this, food is

central but modes of preparation and presentation may extend the experience of dining to

the level of spectacle that in turn may be tied to additional symbolic meanings.

Performance in relation to streaming might refer to the preparation and presentation of

content, seen and unseen. The affordances and algorithms are the chefs who perform the

role of delivering content, utilizing things such as suggestions/recommendations and data

points to create a spectacle. The spectacle of consumption can also refer to the unveiling of

an entire season presented for consumption. This long-form viewing or binging on an

entire season is a preparation and presentation unique to the design and affordances of

streaming media. Amazon Prime’s usage of audience voting on which pilot episodes get

made into full seasons is another example of moving the production of content into the

arena of spectacle as a cosmopolitanizing strategy.

Finally, the hybridization of cuisine typically involves the mixing of ingredients but

also of preparation and cooking techniques. Of all of the cosmopolitanizing strategies,

hybridization is the one most widely used in streaming. Streaming at the local, regional,

and global levels conjoin in the making and re-making of consumption. The hybridization

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present in streaming is a central cosmopolitanizing strategy that both incorporates but also

reaches beyond the local. This is not to say that entrenched barriers to diversity and

programming aren’t ingrained in the traditional corporate structure of broadcasting, which

streaming isn’t going to change immediately. In fact, the reliance on algorithmically

generated tastes and preferences likely reifies this dominant logic. However, when thinking

of streaming as a cosmopolitanizing strategy, there is a need to appeal to particular

localities within the aggressive global distribution push.

There is also a need to appear diverse in streaming programming and appeal to a

wide consumer base, which promotes certain programs such as Amazon’s ‘Transparent’ or

Netflix’s ‘Orange is the New Black’. These programs have garnered tremendous critical and

cultural appraisal and act metonymically to brand the streaming services as breaking

television boundaries. To return to this Ted Sarandos (Netflix CCO) quote, “We invest in a

lot of content for really small audiences too, because it’s still valuable for subscribers who

are really engaged fans of a particular program, and, therefore, it’s a valuable invest for us.

We’re fortunate because we have unlimited inventory space. It allows us to value content in

more ways than just mass numbers” (p. 136). Here we see the ‘unlimited inventory space’

provided by digital and streaming technology as a reason to justify content to niche

markets and audiences that are increasingly hybrid or diverse. As stated in Chapter three,

this is part of emergent streaming logic but also allows these services to balance appearing

local and global.

Fermantez (2007) analyzes the case of a Hawaiian surfing club (Hui o He’e Nalu)

and a for-profit version of the original club (Da Hui Inc.). In his analysis he draws on Stuart

Hall who identifies a “tricky version of ‘the local’ that operates within and has been shaped

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by ‘the global’” (Hall, 1993, p. 354). Da Hui Inc. can be seen as a re-articulation of the Local

in Hawai`i that satisfies “the demands of a global capitalism” (p. 95). However, Fermantez

deftly moves beyond an argument based solely on resistance as “both organizations have

both local and global indigenous articulations, the resistance within them is complicit in

and reinforcing of local and global hegemonies” (p. 96). In the same way, global streaming

can be seen as both empowering of a particular kind of Local rootedness while at the same

time, co-constructively reifying a regional and global imaginary--a commodified brand

awaiting consumption. Just as Da Hui Inc. “deftly rides both local and global waves to shore

on the back of Native Hawaiian resistance” (p. 95), streaming acts constitutively as both

resistance and incorporation.

Streaming should be considered an engineered cosmopolitanism that is at the same

time local, regional, and global. As noted above, streaming employs a series of

cosmopolitanizing strategies that act to both break down boundaries with other genres and

cultures while at the same time to establish rootedness within the locality. This dual

process of cosmopolitanization has been elaborated in what Calhoun terms national

cosmopolitanism “the pleasures of being both home and away” (Calhoun, 2008, p. 445) and

what Pascual has described as the “double movement of embracing one’s roots and the

worldwide community of human beings at once” (Pascual, 2012, p. 602).

These cosmopolitanizing strategies use this double move to serve the strategic ends

of existing within multiple valences of globalization. Streaming leverages the local and

codifies the regional, all while skimming the surface of sticky entanglements with Local

politics and culture. Here streaming acts as a contact zone (Walker, 2011) where waves of

commodity, culture, and genre collide to form an engineered cosmopolitan stream to wash

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up along global shores. Rather than an arbitrary kaleidoscopic mixing of genres, the

combinations articulate streaming as a moment of engineered cosmopolitanism.

Transnational Streaming

Netflix has aggressively been pushing internationally in an attempt to reach new

markets but also to keep up with the demands of a costly, shrinking United States library of

content. This also results in the positioning of a distinct algorithmic audience operating

transnationally. Netflix wants to be in 200 countries in the next two years, up from the

current 50 as it accelerates its global expansion (Lever & Estienne, 2015). The burgeoning,

transnational streaming industry is not just about the reception of media content for

audiences but also influencing production processes. In Canada, the chair of the Canadian

Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced that streaming

companies and the abundance of content through streaming has led to a decision to lift

quotas on domestically produced Canadian television (De Vynck, 2015). This will

significantly reduce the amount of nationally produced Canadian television that must be

shown domestically and the regulatory wall that shielded Canadian content from United

States programming.

The stripping of decades of regulation fundamentally alters domestic Canadian

regulation and production practices. Chair Jean-Pierre Blais forcefully stated, “Radio begat

television, television begat cable and satellite, and broadband Internet has changed

everything” (as quoted in Brownell, 2015). Blais, invoking Katz (1988), foresees

broadcasters being “disintermediated” and cut out as middlemen in the future of television

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production and distribution. “The trick for all of us – creators, distributors, viewers, even

regulators – is how to adapt to life in this new age. Because it won’t be easy.”

Intermediaries will continue to be mechanized, which means that the streaming algorithm

might begin to change the global distribution of television and content by reducing the

need for international fairs as the focal buyers and sellers of media content. This is a

process of “disintermediation” Katz (1988; 2003) describes as “communicators”

circumventing intermediaries to directly target audiences. Transnational streaming, as an

emergent strategic logic, chips away at intermediary control of distribution.

While Netflix global expansion is viewed as extremely successful, especially in

countries such as Canada and the UK, some domestic markets have been tougher to crack

than others (Hall, 2014). In Germany and France, for example, subscribers were harder to

come by than initially anticipated--disappointing analysts (Steel, 2014). Netflix is facing

increased competition from local and regional streaming services as they continue to

expand. Netflix is rushing to cement its own brand internationally before other companies

calcify foreign markets, reducing Netflix’s first-in-space advantages. In France, “Netflix's

main rivals are FilmoTV and CanalPlay (part of broadcaster Canal+), which already owns

the French rights to one of Netflix's flagship shows, ‘Orange is the New Black’” (Hall, 2014,

para. 7). Streaming is also changing local and regional distribution and market structures.

Within Nollywood, iRokotv is ushering in a new era of regional and diasporic distribution.

This disruptive and lucrative business model is discussed in greater detail below.

Streaming reduces the reliance on materiality. Thus DVD and VHS sales--the backbone of

regional film and television industries--are losing substantial ground to emergent

streaming companies.

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 Here we can make a theoretical contribution by organizing categories of streaming

within the globalizing streaming industry. We can divide the streaming industry into three

categories based on geography and audiences. These categories operate in contradiction to

the disruptive force of VPN technologies, which contest the mapping of broadcast logics

into digital space. However, many existing and emerging streaming companies are trying to

maneuver within existing legal regimes in order to establish their place within the shifting

marketplace. The three types of streaming industry sites include:

1. Transnational streaming

This includes companies like Netflix that are expanding beyond national origins and

devoid of explicit local markers. These companies are increasingly opaque and

global in their appearance. There may be a need to label these companies as global

streaming as the national streaming category becomes less needed with increased

regional expansion and more transnational. However, Netflix should stand in a

different category than these kinds of streaming services because of their broader

reach.

2. National streaming

These streaming services only operate within a specific nation-state and often

provide content tied to particular national tastes and culture. Many of these

companies are becoming regional after successfully starting in their home country

and choosing to expand. One example might be the French streaming service

CanalPlay, which is the SVOD (streaming video on demand) arm of Canal+. This

streaming service has recently expanded to Spain with the name Yomvi, presented

by Canal+. The growth has been staggering: “According to Rentrak, Yomvi users shot

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 up 96% from July to November to 546,996. VOD views are growing at 9% per month

on TVs and smart TVs, while views on connected devices such as smartphones and

tablets are increasing 11% each month” (Hopewell, 2014, para. 4).

3. Diasporic streaming

These companies target specific diasporic audiences examples include Bollywood

streaming services such as Spuul and iRokotv that provides content to Nigerian

audiences and tries to dominate the licensing of Nollywood.

The algorithm constructs connections to particular kinds of localities shaped by the

available content libraries. In my own family recommendation algorithms situate my sons

viewing habits within a specific techno-flow that connects our consumption with Canadian

children’s television and Japanese anime. The techno-flow facilitated by the algorithm

invites my family to drill down into the local space of Canadian television programming,

forging an otherwise impossible bridge to the content and culture. This is a kind of

transnational television time that Netflix forges for the audience that is unique to this

algorithmic audience. I use the term transnational because this isn’t some global

hegemonic eradication of culture that solely reinforces a global Hollywood but a

cosmopolitanizing strategy, which samples particular localities while maintaining its global

form.

Interestingly, the above mentioned French/Spanish streaming service Yomvi serves

as another microcosm for the salient points in this dissertation. “According to the Cocktail

Analysis, 87% of Spanish Internet users still share unauthorized content or download from

illegal sites such as Mega and Rapidshare. But Yomvi and other legal VOD/Internet

platforms — such as Wuaki, Apple TV, Cineclick and Filmin — are pushing back on piracy

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thanks to the day-date strategy, as well as easy portability and lower pricing” (Hopewell,

2014, para. 11). Spanish users are still engaged in the third party unsanctioned streaming

practices analyzed in chapter two of the dissertation. The figure of 87% of Internet users

shows that this ubiquitous practice is not just a US or North American practice. The

websites Megashare and Rapidshare are also mentioned above as seminal moments in the

legal history of streaming. As stated in chapter two these websites are some of the driving

impetus for SOPA and PIPA legislation, which would have had global ramifications on

United States copyright interventions internationally. Within the Spain context, we see the

same industry re-articulation of this ‘illicit’ streaming practice. Younger audiences

worldwide, those who have grown up participating in unsanctioned streaming, are

transitioning into subscribers of services like Yomvi. This is a break from the cable of their

forefathers, but increasingly on a global scale.

Pascaul’s three cosmopolitanizing strategies work again to analyze my son’s content

adventures. My son’s normal consumption patterns are disrupted through algorithmic

recommendations. Normally he would just continue to watch the same program over and

over but with the Roku 2 in our home he learned quickly how to scroll through rows or

columns and columns of content until he sees a picture that he likes. The selections

generated in the columns come from the recommendation algorithm, organized by one of

the myriad of genres, which Netflix generates. The disruption to normal television viewing

led my son to Canadian children’s programming. Now my son is performing a localized

identity as he learns some of the social and cultural cues that are read from the programs.

This is amplified even further with the connection to Japanese anime. Finally, all of this

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leads to increased hybridization as localities get manifested to a larger viewing audience

who are invited to play around with the localness of the programming.

iROKOtv

iROKOtv, colloquially referred to as the “Netflix of Africa,” is a compelling case study

of diasporic streaming. Nollywood, the booming Nigerian film industry, is the subject of

much academic scholarship (see Larkin 2000; Ukah, 2003; Adejunmobi, 2007). Recently

hacked and leaked emails within the Sony Pictures reveal that industry lore about

production and distribution of black and African actors and movies remains mired in racial

prejudice. The leaked email from an unnamed producer to Sony Pictures Chairman Michael

Lynton reads, “I believe that the international motion picture audience is racist — in

general, pictures with an African American lead don’t play well overseas” (as cited in

Olopade and Alabi, 2015, para. 2). This is an example of what Havens (2013), in the book

Black Television Travels, identifies as the “contested discourses” of industry lore, which

“determines whether series get made and what kinds of series get made” (p. 26-27,

emphasis original). However, the introduction of streaming is bypassing some of these

traditional gatekeepers for diasporic audiences.

Streaming services like iROKOtv are shifting production practices and conventions

as emergent diasporic streaming. “Three years from its founding, Njoku's iROKOtv.com

online video library has 5,000 titles of popular Nollywood titles and gets a million unique

hits monthly from 178 countries around the world” (Nyambura-Mwaura, 2013). iROKOtv is

asserting itself as part of the streaming future of Nollywood, which specifically influences

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production practices and the distribution of content. The term digital diaspora is

colloquially used to refer to any diaspora’s use or organization on the Internet (Brinkerhoff,

2006). There has been a recent proliferation of digital diaspora literature (Wong, 2003;

Hiller & Franz, 2004; Everett, 2009; Harindranath, 2012), congruent with the rise of

diasporic communication through new media and the Internet as constitutive of everyday

social life. “It is not enough to speak of digital diaspora as a given, yet it is important to

delineate a definition that both derives from and reflects everyday social and transnational

practices” (Laguerre, 2010, p. 62). In a particularly nuanced approach to digital diaspora,

Leurs and Ponzanesi (2011) claim that digital diaspora evolved away from either a vertical

relationship with a homeland or a horizontal relationship with a dispersed transnational

community to move “towards the notion of hypertextual diaspora” where “affiliations,

locations and spaces are constantly destabilized and renegotiated” (p. 1). This is an integral

part of what had been dubbed a “New Nollywood” (Haynes, 2014).

Nollywood scholar Moradewun Adejunmobi (2014) agrees that the advent of

streaming is just as important a development as regional media corporations and satellite

television. She considers streaming working in conjunction with global theatrical releases

to service the dispersed diasporic audience. “Even more than theatrical release, online

distribution will begin to shape what viewers outside Nigeria see, and also what producers

within Nigeria produce” (p. 86). Diasporic streaming is a site of disintermediation as formal

and informal intermediaries such as DVD shops and cable companies are bypassed.

Production and licensing of Nollywood content is being refashioned through streaming

technology.

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 The now canonical origin story for iRokotv is repeated by every major news outlet

that covers the story. The story goes that Jason Njoku realized that his mother in South

London was consuming a great deal of Nollywood movies that she would buy DVDs or

VCDs from African markets or small-time merchants who brought them in “overstuffed

suitcases” (Rice, 2013). Nollywood DVDs were not always easy to come by for members of

the diaspora. Njoku saw that YouTube had become a site for watching unauthorized

Nollywood movies, some getting tens of thousands of views, but the movies were cut up

into smaller ten-minute segments. Njoku set up his own YouTube channel called

“NollywoodLove” but what he did differently from other channels was physically going to

Lagos and Alaba, Nigeria and paying for licenses from local “marketers.” “Njoku pioneered

the practice of licensing films from producer/directors in Lagos rather than just posting

them online without permission from the copyright holders as many individuals had been

doing for a number of years” (Adejunmobi, 2014, p. 82). This means that Njoku can

aggressively pursue other channels or sites that display content he has already licensed.

In 2012, Njoku would shed his YouTube channel and start his own streaming

company, iROKOtv, which is now a subscription-based service. iROKOtv spawned iROKO

Partners, which includes iROKOtv and the music streaming service iROKOING. iROKOING

boasts a 35,000 song library and “showcases the most awesome West African singers and

manages and monetizes the video YouTube sites for many of the industry’s top artists”

(iROKO Partners, 2015). The streaming model has already spawned a number of competing

sites iBAKAtv and Naijatv, but iROKOtv is the dominant leader in the industry.

In speaking of the Dish Network station Afrotainment, Havens states, “We see here

both a recognition of legitimate television providers of the pirate trade in Nollywood films

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and the beginnings of business practices that promise to reshape transnational industry

lore surrounding black and African television and film programming” (p. 163). What

Havens does not foresee is how streaming rather than satellite television offers a way for

Nigerian entrepreneurs like Jason Njoku to circumvent the need for traditional institutional

backing to become a dominant diasporic flow and re-write some of Nollywood’s piratical

infrastructure.

Havens is correct that “illegitimate programming flows” (as piracy) cannot

“significantly influence more dominant flows without the kinds of institutional backing that

dominant flows enjoy” (p. 170). Havens observes digital piracy inhibiting “transnational

business models,” using the example of the popular Belizean television production Noh

Matta Wat to show how piracy can limit the profitability and overall viability of diasporic

media. This forces content producers to focus largely on domestic sales, which are still

subject to the constraints of bootlegging and piracy.

Within this “underground globalization” (Zook, 2003) or “globalization from below”

there is a sophisticated system wherein “piracy operates as a corruption of

communications infrastructures that develops its own circuits of distribution using

officially organized media” (Larkin, 2004, p. 291). According to Havens, however, piracy

spreads content transnationally but often doesn’t produce a market for the sustained

production of television and film. iROKOtv leverages the speed of streaming technology and

its accessibility and ubiquity within the diaspora to establish its own diasporic flow and

media infrastructure. One that is not as susceptible to the pitfalls of piracy. Diasporic

streaming succeeds in connecting the diaspora to the local. In the case of Nollywood (and

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most diasporic populations) there is a fear of the loss of cultural practices, a fear

ameliorated to a certain degree by programming built from the local context or “home”:

“(B)ut to diasporic audiences for whom the social realities of Nigeria—and the
associated shape-shifting talents of Nollywood stars—might seem surprising.
Indeed, Nollywood star images have been crucial cross-generational tools for
Nigerian-Americans worried that their children lack an awareness of Nigerian
cultural practices” (Tsika, 2014, p. 102).

Streaming melds the diasporic with this awareness. What remains to be seen is the degree

to which recognition of the diasporic audience will begin to influence production choices

for producers and filmmakers.

Regardless, iROKOtv has emerged as a potentially dominant diasporic flow within

Nollywood because of two related strategies; interoperability and copyright. Part of what

makes iROKOtv such a compelling a case study is the ability of Njoku to attach his company

to other institutions, the underlying interoperability of streaming as a business model.

iROKOtv is nimble in the current media environment, relying on the initial infrastructure of

Google before quickly building their own. In addition to leveraging YouTube platforms,

Njoku has aggressively partnered with other companies to establish its brand,

predominantly mobile conglomerates. With the release of the iROKOtv app, the streaming

company joined with Nokia to promote the Lumia phone to their Nigerian customer base

(Rooney, 2013). In 2015, iROKOtv also partnered with Vodafone Ghana as part of the

Ghanaian broadband market and Rwanda mobile company Tigo Rwanda (Tetteh, 2015).

This is largely because Njoku views mobile as the future of streaming media. “Just as

Africans leapfrogged landlines--65% are mobile subscribers--most experts expect them to

skip over PCs and consume video exclusively via mobile” (Rice, 2013). Njoku has even

followed the Netflix model by venturing into the content creation space by forming a

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production company ROK Studios and developing its own original programming. Beyond

these media partnerships, iROKOtv has streamlined the disjunctive piracy of Nollywood

and established a clear “windowing” of content for producers to monetize.

Copyright and licensing are the other major tool that iROKOtv manipulates to

ingratiate streaming with producers. iROKOtv strategically positions itself as warriors

against piracy. From their own website they claim, “iROKO Partners tirelessly battles online

piracy, investing tens of thousands of dollars each year in shutting down illegal sites,

ensuring that movie producers’ intellectual property is protected” (iROKOPartners, 2015).

As previously mentioned, Njoku’s decision to pay producers and “marketers” for the rights

to license Nollywood films and television differentiated his company.

Njoku immediately began policing YouTube for any unsanctioned content and filling

out Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices to get the movies taken down (Rice,

2013). He also kept any rival companies from trying to copy his trademark. “When a

competitor started a copycat website called irokotvmovies.com, Njoku filed a complaint

with the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization, which shut down the site for

trademark infringement” (p. 111). Building licensing into the Nollywood media ecology

legitimates Njoku’s authority within the space as producers seek revenue streams beyond

theatrical releases to recover production costs. Putting movies into DVD or straight-to-

video (STV) feeds straight into the system of piracy. iROKOtv inserts itself into this process

as a viable alternative to the existing practices of piracy (this transition is not without its

own bumps, Rice notes that Njoku has taken to filming his licensing deals).

iROKOtv’s streaming business model positions itself between the above and the

below of globalization. iROKOtv is embedded within the local context of Nollywood, signing

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local content producers to licensing deals and delivering a slice of “home” through

programming. iROKOtv is also global in its partnerships and shrewd (or ruthless depending

on your positioning) in its deployment of copyright. Diasporic streaming is at once local,

diasporic, and global:

“Global corporations may one day adjudge Nollywood films sufficiently sales-worthy
to try and market them to a composite global audience, but unless they remit higher
profits directly to producers, most Nollywood producers will not seek to create films
for this composite global audience...small companies focused on transnational
distribution using the Internet are likely to play a much greater role than global
corporations in shaping content for Nollywood” (Adejunmobi, 2014, pgs. 89-90).
Transnational streaming companies like Netflix will continue to try to position themselves

through cosmopolitanizing strategies that build a composite global audience. This will only

continue as Netflix expands. However, diasporic streaming will continue to play a major

role in the unfolding of streaming globally and the interconnected production practices and

content choices that are continually made and re-made through streaming.

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Conclusion

This chapter assesses digital streaming in a global context. The media industry

strategy of geofencing is described as an attempt by transnational media corporations to

replicate the broadcast model of locking down content. VPNs show the promise of first

party streaming disrupting broadcast logics through digital geographies. The emergent,

global streaming industry incorporates “cosmopolitanzing strategies” to simultaneously

exist along multiple valences of globalization. The strategies of disruption, performance,

and hybridization are considered. In the latter half of the chapter, a typology for streaming

is introduced. Streaming is defined as transnational, national, and diasporic streaming.

These iterations of streaming can all apply cosmopolitanizing strategies to traverse layers

of globalization. The case study of iROKOtv contextualizes diasporic streaming, tracking

shifts in distribution and consumption within Nollywood and the Nigerian diaspora. Once

again, streaming exists in-between the global and the local, the industry, and the audience.

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Adejunmobi, M. A. (2014). Evolving Nollywood templates for minor transnational film.

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 EPILOGUE: STREAMING FUTURES

Origins

When I began this dissertation research four years ago, there was hardly anyone

writing or talking academically about streaming. Today, there has been an explosion of

interest and publication (much in the past six months) leading to streaming becoming a

frequent topic at conferences and in research articles. My hope is that this dissertation will

contribute to this emergent discussion as we continue to collectively tease out the social

and technological ramifications of streaming. Throughout this dissertation, I have proposed

new ways of looking at streaming and organizing this nascent audience and industry

practice. One of the primary ways to begin to unpack streaming is through a typology for

organizing and defining this nascent media industry--dividing streaming into transnational,

national, and diasporic levels of streaming media. Streaming produces emergent

articulations of industry lore, which impact global television production and distribution.

The rise of streaming technology continues to produce a shift in audience and media

industry practices and lore.

As noted briefly in Chapter 2, towards the end of my research I noticed that I was

using Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime more and more (especially with a growing family)

and migrating from the pop-up ads (and family unfriendly soft-core porn) of unsanctioned

streaming. The ubiquitous unsanctioned third-party streaming I was participating in was

being re-articulated as media industry practice. But it would be premature to conclude that

the industry has calcified audience practices and snuffed out unsanctioned streaming

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altogether. Media innovations continue to begat audience tactics and “making do” within

the everydayness of mediated life.

Another emergent streaming ripple involves mobile telephones and “app”

technologies. Meerkat and Periscope are two of the latest first party streaming apps, which

allow for streaming everyday life straight from your mobile phone (or to view another user

livestream). Streaming performed through a mobile phone generates even greater

portability and mobility but also spawns inchoate tactical possibilities. Periscope has

already been heralded as the next big thing that is “changing the Internet forever”

(Williams, 2015). However, just as in the early days of Justin.tv, many users have already

moved from showing the banality of everyday life to finding unsanctioned uses for the

technology that momentarily rupture the strategic logic of media industries (Li, 2015).

Meerkat and Periscope are being employed to display television shows, live concert

performances, and other unsanctioned content. Again, the cycle continues as audiences

intervene in the flow of media and technology.

Futures

Future avenues for streaming research are rich and will continue to be an area of

productive and important scholarship. Future research should consider the centrality of

mobile phones and mobile technologies to the emergence of a broader streaming culture.

The mobile phone has come to challenge the pre-existing dominance of the computer

within the third communicative revolution of electronic media while pushing towards a

fourth communicative revolution (Fortunati, 2013). This revolution is part of the

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conditions of post-convergence that are further augmented by streaming technologies.

Through decreasing bandwidth limitations and restrictions, mobile technologies capitalize

on streaming technologies. They enhance individualization and collapse space/time as the

mobile phone further subsumes the place of the television and the computer in social and

digital life. The Internet becomes woven through the mobile phone as streaming becomes

an increasingly interstitial component of everyday life as a form of civic streaming. This

fusion moves the mobile phone beyond convergence as streaming affords the user a global

palate of mediated culture and networked individualism.

Future work beyond this dissertation needs to continue to review mobile phone

literature and the ways mobile phones and networked individualism push the fourth

communicative revolution into an era of post-convergence. This is articulated through

changes in ownership, control, and individualism. The mobile phone is an increasingly

important site for studying streaming with increased bandwidth and compression,

resulting in quality picture and streaming speeds. This is especially significant in

developing countries where mobile phones are allowing entire countries to bypass the

cumbersome restrictions of laying down fiber optic cables. Countries, instead, are opting

for cheaper WiFi technologies, which increase mobile capacity for streaming of content for

industry and audiences.

No literature currently exists on the cultural impact of streaming on gaming and the

video game industry. The recent acquisition of Twitch, a popular video game streaming

platform, by Amazon for just under a billion dollars shows how rapidly this gaming space is

growing in importance. Twitch is used solely for first person live-streaming of players or

game experts playing video games for audiences (some channels such as

201
TwitchPlaysPokemon invite the audience to participate in the co-construction of the game

space). While Taylor (2012), in her seminal book Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the

Professionalization of Computer Gaming, delivers the most comprehensive accounting of the

competitive e-games landscape to date, her research ends before the rise of streaming as

both a technological affordance and transitional force within gaming.

Beyond the scope of this dissertation is Twitch and mobile gaming’s influence on the

construction of expertise and learning through game play. Mobile technologies and social

networking have allowed for new articulations of video games that fundamentally change

the constitution of the magic circle. Twitch is an ideal space to show audience adoption of

streaming technology but also the industry’s re-articulation of the video game space that

solidifies streaming as a dominant mode of spectatorship, participation, and play.

Net Neutrality and Advocacy

The current status of streaming could be labeled as tenuous at best. Every victory to

protect “Net Neutrality” seems to parlay into yet another battle where lobbyists and

corporate conglomerates seemingly gain ground. As Tim Wu (2010) points out while we

may believe that the Internet exists as this unbreakable force beyond government and state

control, this can all change very rapidly:

“The simple fact is that the Internet is simply not the infinitely elastic phantasm that
it is popularly imagined to be, but rather an actual physical entity that can be
warped or broken. For while the network is designed to connect every user with
every other on an equal footing, it has always depended on a finite number of
physical connections, whether wired or spectral, and switches, operated by a finite
number of firms upon whose good behavior the whole thing depends” ( p. 612).

202
The fight against a tiered Internet is one we must all participate in. The current structure of

the Internet is what catalyzes streaming and enables the Internet to act equally for

companies and users regardless of the amount of money you possess in an offshore bank

account. A free and open Internet spurs creativity and innovation. Streaming is an integral

part of this process.

Streaming has moved from a tactic of the powerless to becoming increasingly

incorporated into existing power structures and conglomerates. The rise of the streaming

industry and the battle amongst emergent Internet companies and the traditional powers

of corporate titans make streaming appear to be the prerogative of only the powerful. But

this is not the full picture. Streaming can also be a source of public pedagogy. With the

decline of public broadcasting in the United States there remains a space, facilitated

through streaming, for citizens to use these tools and technologies for activism--myriad in

its scope and possibility. Town hall meetings can be streamed, as well as instances of

excessive police force and brutality, for example. Streaming pedagogy opens up the process

of learning and democratizes some of these possibilities. As we return to the “middle way”

theory proposed in the introduction to this dissertation, we can see that streaming is not

enacting total social transformation. However, while it may have connections with the past

in the form of radio and a history of streaming antecedents, streaming maintains cultural

implications in the contemporary moment.

Throughout the dissertation, I attempt to tease out these liminal spaces during this

period of transition and emergent discourses in the media industries. Streaming is

discourse, lore and business model. Streaming is individual and local, yet transnational and

diasporic. Streaming is sanctioned and unsanctioned. Streaming is historically rooted, and,

203
yet, emergent and disruptive. Streaming is audience and industry. It is an emergent and

divergent force, which continues to flow across time and space, audience and industry.

The dream of an uninterrupted flow of information, this is the verisimilitude of

streaming. Always-already omnipresent, but constantly expanding and unfinished. This

dissertation interrogates streaming both as a technological innovation and as a cultural

practice that co-configures audiences and industry. I contend that streaming media, as a

larger cultural form, produces a distinct orientation towards ownership, access, industry

lore, and copyright as the networked individual becomes the focal point of streaming and

participates in the re-articulation of media industries, media content, and consumption.

204
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