INFOMEDIA - DIGISCREENS Streaming Symposium: From emergence to dominance

Streaming: From emergence to dominance 

Streaming as a technology is being used for the circulation of many different arts, from films and TV series, games, theatre and music, to entertainment videos on social media. Not so long ago, streaming was still considered as an exciting emergent media technology, but as it is coming to a plateau we want to reflect on its current uses, social and cultural implications, its future as a technology, and on the future of the arts being streamed. 

The explosion of subscription video-on-demand services (SVOD) has for example meant a global distribution of film and televisual content which were only available locally before the emergence of streaming. It has also resulted in the production of transnational content—content destined to please a global audience. In the anthology Streaming Video, Amanda D. Lotz and Ramon Lobato ask: “Are SVODs enabling the creation of content that would not otherwise exist?” (2023, p. 2). If SVODs enable the production of new and original content, it has however not given rise to the diversity it promised. While audiences have gained access to content of a larger variety of genres and production provenances, the room given to minorities on screen has remained limited. The diversity of identities and social or cultural situations are often tokenistic or made invisible in the wide array of choice given to audiences on streaming platforms (Ceuterick & Malet, 2024). Seeing the high tempo of streamed video consumption and the economic pressures on producers this generates, what is the future of television? Has streaming been a revolution for television or a phase of its development in which choice and niche content cannot be part of a sustainable model and we are bound to a return to television as a mass culture? 

We can also ask: Did streaming create hierarchies of content and class, whereby linear TV is associated with lower status users and content? Is there a place for mid-brow culture, and mid-size actors in between small national actors and global corporations? The arrival of global actors in national markets has transformed local production industries and changed the work of below-the-line professionals who are often overlooked in research. 

Also, how can streamed arts remain accessible when they are distributed as intangible media and by corporations with commercial—as opposed to social or cultural— interests? International distribution laws also play a restrictive role for the stable global distribution of content. How does streaming impact other arts such as gaming, podcasts, or music? 

Program:

09:00 - 9:15 Welcome and coffee 

09:15 – 10:15 Keynote: Ramon Lobato (Swinburne University of Technology): After streaming: questions for the next phase of video distribution studies. 

10:15 – 10:30 Break 

10:30 – 10:50 Erlend Lavik (University of Bergen): Sketching out a historiography of post-millennial US TV-drama 

10:50 – 11:10 Marine Malet (University of Bergen): The Diversity Promise: Reshaping the Representation of Marginalised Identities on French SVoD Platforms?

11:10 – 11:30 Maud Ceuterick (University of Bergen): The Concept of Quality Television in the Streaming Era, as seen by Norwegian Public Service Media and Cultural Policy

11:30 – 11:50 Richard Misek (University of Bergen): A Small Screen Odyssey 

12:00 – 13:00 Lunch 

13:00 – 14:00 Keynote: Stéfany Boisvert (Université du Québec à Montréal): Francophone Originals in the Age of Streaming: Genre and Narrative Trends in Canadian SVoD Services 

14:00 – 14:10 Break 

14:10 – 14:30 Anne Kustritz (Utrecht University): Streaming Seriality: User Agency and Open Endings in Netflix True Crime Documentaries 

14:30 – 14:50 Anders Lysne (University of Bergen): Streaming troubled young men: NRK and the youth drama series Rådebank 

14:50 – 15:10 Kristine Jørgensen (University of Bergen): The gaming house LL35: The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and the search for a young male audience

15:10-15:30 Anthony Enns (Dalhousie University): Netflix’s Interactive Experiment

15:30 – 15:50 Concluding discussion

16:00 Walk up Fløyen (for those who want!)

19:00 symposium dinner 

Chairs: Richard Misek, Marine Malet, Anders Lysne, and Maud Ceuterick

Organiser: Maud Ceuterick, for the Emerging Media Research Group; the DIGISCREENS (CHANSE) project; and the Film, TV and Visual Culture Research Group at INFOMEDIA

Program and website: Nora Sæter

Keynotes: 

Ramon Lobato (Swinburne University of Technology): 

“After streaming: questions for the next phase of video distribution studies” 

This presentation will reflect on two areas of debate in video streaming scholarship: (1) the extent to which streaming is (and isn’t) dominant, and how this varies from place to place; and (2) the conceptual challenges that screen studies must confront once streaming moves from emergence to dominance (or from a 'disruptive novelty' to a quotidian and banal part of everyday life). As streaming enters its third decade as a mainstream technology for video distribution, I will argue that it is time to shift from an exceptionalist mode of inquiry focused on the specificities of streaming to a more integrated account of distribution dynamics across the wider video landscape. This may include a renewed focus on questions of access, affordability, and social stratification in video. 

Bio: Ramon Lobato is Professor of Digital Media (Australian Research Council Future Fellow) at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. A media industries scholar, Ramon has a special interest in the industrial transformation of video in the streaming age and its implications for audiences, broadcasters, and policymakers. Ramon is the author of Shadow Economies of Cinema (BFI 2012), The Informal Media Economy (Polity 2015, with Thomas), and Netflix Nations (NYU Press 2019). His latest book Hardware: Television and Consumer Electronics after the Smart TV is forthcoming with NYU Press.   

Stéfany Boisvert (Université du Québec à Montréal): 

“Francophone Originals in the Age of Streaming: Genre and Narrative Trends in Canadian SVoD Services” 

This presentation examines how the progressive transition of the Canadian audiovisual industry to online distribution has affected the production of scripted and unscripted series, with a focus on emerging generic and narrative trends. To support these findings, I will also discuss the results of my interviews with industry professionals (screenwriters, directors, producers, and programming directors for Canadian streaming services) in order to highlight what they identify as the main challenges in producing original French-language series, as well as how the affordances of streaming have partially reshaped storytelling, even if linear and non-linear modes of distribution remain intertwined in Quebec and Canada. 

Bio: Stéfany Boisvert is a professor at the École des médias (School of Media) of the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM). Codirector of the Laboratory on consumer and media culture in Quebec (LaboPop), her research focuses on the development of SVOD services in Canada, new forms of serialization, as well as diversity in media productions. She published in journals such as SERIES, Critical Studies in Television, Convergence, Feminist Media Studies, and Media Industries. 

Presenters

Erlend Lavik (University of Bergen): “Sketching out a historiography of post-millennial US TV-drama" 

 My talk highlights similarities between, on the one hand, the by now well-documented shift in the US film industry in the mid-to-late 1970 (from the Hollywood Ranaissance to the blockbuster era) and, on the other, the transition in the early 2010s in the US television industry (from an oft-touted Golden Age of cable dramas to a far vaguer “something else” with the onset of streaming). It offers some hypotheses and promising research questions for further study. 

Richard Misek (University of Bergen): “A Small Screen Odyssey” 

 At the age of fourteen, I gave my first ever talk about a film. Presented to my class at school, it took the form of a twelve-minute close analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), carried out with the help of a VHS copy of the film. In this video essay, I frame my younger self’s presentation within a discussion of multi-screen viewing and the streaming ecosystem, using my early engagement with 2001 as the basis of a reflection about my subsequent experience of viewing the film across multiple screens, platforms, and decades. My long duration viewing experience of the film has been both specific and universal: an expression of my own changing cinephilic habits and of the changing media technologies and consumption practices that have shaped them. The video reflects on the co-evolution of my viewing habits with changing technologies and social norms, and itself forms another stage in my viewing history of 2001. By nesting images from the film within different viewing contexts, the video essay asks: is the 2001: A Space Odyssey that I have watched the same 2001: A Space Odyssey that you have watched? And does it matter?  

Marine Malet (University of Bergen): "The Diversity Promise: Reshaping the Representation of Marginalised Identities on French SVoD Platforms?"

This presentation aims to question how streaming platforms in France perform diversity on screen. Based on an analysis of three French series - Jusqu'ici tout va bien (2023, Netflix), 66-5 (2023, Canal+) and 93-BB (2024, France.tv) - commissioned by three platforms, I present how I examined the representation of commonly underrepresented and marginalised identities - women from the banlieues -, and the hypotheses that can be formulated about how these SVoD platforms actually perform diversity. Is this diversity merely visible, or do the platforms truly contribute to a reconfiguration of the politics of representation? This presentation is an opportunity to present the conceptual and methodological framework I used for such an analysis, as well as the main findings.

Maud Ceuterick (University of Bergen): "The Concept of Quality Television in the Streaming Era, as seen by Norwegian Public Service Media and Cultural Policy"

Through considering the concept of “quality” television from the perspective of Norwegian public service media (PSM) and cultural policy, I look at how the concept, although decried by academics, is a much-used criteria in the industry to determine whether a show gets made or obtains public funding. Taking the national broadcaster NRK’s most popular TV series to date Exit (2019-2023) as an example, I argue that both the cultural political need for quality and the pressure of global streaming on national actors created the context of production for the show.  With Exit, NRK demonstrates a preoccupation to deal with socially relevant issues through a well-crafted aesthetics and characters that audiences familiar with global streaming will enjoy watching. The paper’s methodology combines textual analysis and expert interviews with key informants at NRK who worked on the show Exit and beyond.

Ida Martine Gard Rysjedal (University of Bergen): “Twitch.tv: streaming masculinity” 

Live streaming gaming sessions are very popular on the live streaming service Twitch.tv. This platform allows for ‘normal people’ – both with and without expensive filming equipment – to create content for the platform’s audience. Twitch is used to live stream almost everything, including cooking, artistic work, music, health and lifestyle, just to mention a few. However, gaming remains the dominating category on the platform, with several live-streaming gamers creating content by sharing their gaming sessions. As part of my Ph.D. project – under the ‘Understanding Masculinity in Gaming’ project –, I am studying two men game-streamers on Twitch, and their communities on two selected forums. The aim of the project is to explore masculinities in gaming, and the overarching research question in the project is: “How is masculinity expressed in game culture, and in what way are behavior in games and communication with others used as expressions of masculinities?”. 

In my presentation for the DIGISCREENS Symposium I would like to present my Ph.D. project, with special focus on Twitch.tv as platform. I will present some key features about Twitch as a live-streaming platform, especially connected to how it allows its users to communicate (with each other). I will present some early findings from the data collection, pointing to expressions of identity and community, and how discourses are created and maintained within these. The presentation will be based on the project’s overarching topics and fields – including the methodological approach, as well as masculinity and gender studies with focus on the streamers as cases – and Twitch as platform. 

Anders Lysne (University of Bergen): “Streaming troubled young men: NRK and the youth drama series Rådebank” 

The paper presents a case study of the Norwegian youth drama Rådebank/Rod Knock (Fahre, 2020-2022), exploring how the series about mental health issues among young men growing up in rural Norway produced for national public broadcaster NRK unexpectedly became the broadcaster’s biggest youth drama streaming success after Skam (Andem 2015-2017). Unpacking textual and contextual strategies employed by the series to address its niche target audience of young male viewers with low levels of formal education with issues such as suicide, depression and mental breakdown, the paper explores aspects of Rådebank’s production, representation and reception to analyse its success within NRK’s public service mandate. 

Kristine Jørgensen (University of Bergen) (Torill Elvira Mortensen, Nord Universitet): “The gaming house LL35: The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and the search for a young male audience” 

The gaming house, LL35, was The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK)’s content strategy for reaching the most elusive of audiences, young men between 18-29 in 2022-2023. When NRK launched the concept, the aim was a 24-7 livestream on Twitch.tv, but technical issues and challenging delivering interesting content over time soon required a more curated approach to programming. The show centers on the lives and activities of gaming profiles and influencers living in a house upgraded with the technological infrastructure to serve as full-scale production facilities for streaming gaming live around the clock, featuring a state-of-the-art gaming room, equipped with cameras everywhere except the private rooms and bathrooms of the building. 

In this talk, we will present the main arguments and findings from a recently published study that discusses the case of LL35 in the light of Norwegian media policy, with particular focus on the Norwegian public service mandate. Based on an analysis of LL35’s content over time and interviews with the producers, and theoretically grounded in ideas of the media welfare state including studies public service youth content, and esports and streaming research, we discuss LL35 as a hybrid between a streaming service and broadcasting phenomenon. We critically engage with the most important dilemmas NRK faced with LL35 in light of the public service mandate. The research shows that despite the will for innovation in NRK, combining the social media logic of Twitch and the media logic of NRK was a challenge. It also underlined the mutual dependency of legacy television and streaming, and how their roles shift. In conclusion, while LL35 has certainly been an interesting exploration from a PBS perspective, it does demonstrate some real challenges that PBSs face when moving from a legacy media logic and to a social media logic.

Anne Kustritz (Utrecht University): "Streaming Seriality: User Agency and Open Endings in Netflix True Crime Documentaries"

This paper examines true crime documentary mini-series Making a Murderer and The Staircase within the context of their snowball transmedia structure. While their success partly rests upon the spreadable features of streaming platforms they also owe a great deal to the community activities of dedicated fans on a variety of third-party platforms and social media networks.  Consequently, the narrative closure of true crime streaming mini-series and limited-series merely offers an opportunity for further narrative encounters via transmedia user-generated seriality.  This amateur transmedia structure prompts reconsideration of forces that undermine the boundaries of the streaming mini-series in the digital age.

Bio: Anne Kustritz is an Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at Utrecht University.  Her work deals with creative fan communities, transformative works, digital economies, and representational politics.  She is the author of Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction: Pocket Publics, which documents the digital transition of the slash fan fiction community around the turn of the millennium and the “pockets” of counterpublic space they constructed for the circulation of new forms of gender, sexuality, and relationality.  Her articles appear in Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of American Culture, and Sexualities.

Anthony Enns (Dalhousie University): “Netflix’s Interactive Experiment”

The rise of streaming services like Netflix allowed producers to develop the first interactive television narratives, which covered a wide range of genres for both children and adult viewers. This trend has been celebrated for enhancing user engagement and decentering media control, yet some critics have also noted that the freedom of viewers is often constrained and that interactivity often functions as a form of pseudo-individualization that distracts and manipulates users—a critique that supports existing research on how interactivity has the potential to increase frustration, withdrawal, and social instability. This paper will address the debate over interactive television by examining how recent changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of televisual texts has enabled new forms of narrative experimentation while simultaneously exacerbating existing problems with data surveillance and profiling.

Bio: Anthony Enns is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies at Dalhousie University. His work on television has appeared in such journals as Journal of Popular Film and Television, Journal of Sonic Studies, Popular Culture Review, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Studies in Popular Culture, and Television and New Media.