Netflix Nations. Ramon Lobato
slipperiness as these other platforms. Netflix, like Facebook and YouTube, is presently engaged in a number of disputes with government agencies about how and whether it should censor its film and television content. In India, for example, Netflix claims that because it is an internet-delivered service rather than a broadcaster, it should not have to follow the obscenity policies that apply to Indian television stations (see Chapter 4). This is not all that far from Uber’s insistence that because it is a technology platform it should not have to follow the licensing and tax laws that apply to taxi companies, or Facebook’s insistence that it is not a media company and therefore should not have to fully regulate the communications taking place through its networks. In each case, a service’s digital status is invoked to sidestep regulatory responsibilities.
Even though these three companies operate in very different markets (transport, communications/advertising, and scripted entertainment), they have a common operational logic that hinges on their status as a digital service that is (a) categorically dissimilar to the established incumbents they now compete with and (b) operating in global markets from a U.S. base, partially outside the jurisdictional reach of national governments. Following this logic, and notwithstanding the lines of historical evolution between Netflix and television traced in the previous section, one can also argue that these structural similarities with other digital services place Netflix within the platform economy as much as within the entertainment industries.
Another common characteristic of digital media platforms is a reliance on algorithmic recommendations. Along with Amazon and Pandora, Netflix has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of recommendations generally, having invested heavily in this area since its years as a DVD rental service. The company famously ran an open engineering competition, the US$1 million Netflix Prize of 2006–2009, to improve its predictive powers by 10%. The fruits of these efforts have paid off in the form of its eerily accurate prediction engine, which seeks to, in Hastings’s words, “get so good at suggestions that we’re able to show you exactly the right film or TV show for your mood when you turn on Netflix” (The Economist 2017). On the Netflix home screen, algorithmic recommendations are used to autocurate selections of content geared around individual users’ data profiles. Every video selection that appears on the home screen is the result of intricate calculations based on user-submitted data (movie ratings and viewing history), collaborative filtering (predictions based on other people’s activities), and manual coding of films for all conceivable metadata points, from character types to endings.
This naturally puts Netflix squarely in the middle of debates about the datafication of culture, filter bubbles, and big-data politics (Pariser 2011; boyd and Crawford 2012; Beer 2013). Its recommendation system has been accused of everything from unjustified consumer surveillance to the demise of the mass audience and the end of serendipity. Film scholars in particular have voiced concern about the way personalization leads to filter bubbles. In an essay on Netflix’s “mathematization of taste,” Neta Alexander (2016, 94) warns that “the rise of predictive personalization might be good news for the study of artificial intelligence and machine learning, but it is bad news for anyone who wishes to encounter what Sontag calls ‘great films.’ ” We should, however, bear in mind that algorithms can be programmed for diversity as well as for taste reproduction (Blakley 2016).
The debate about Netflix’s effect on taste and consumption continues to rage, though it is not a primary focus of this book. For our purposes, let us instead focus on the design of the Netflix interface and how this mediates relations between television, cinema, and digital media. The Netflix interface changes regularly but at the time of writing is organized into categories that are curated automatically from a list of thousands of potential options, including popular genres (romantic comedies) as well as hyperspecific microgenres (fight-the-system documentaries) (Madrigal 2014). This smorgasbord of content is arranged into celluloid-like strips of color that slide off the right-hand side of the page, suggesting an infinite variety of choices. In this way, the viewer is positioned as the sovereign navigator-user of an endless archive of screen content. Such design choices are carefully constructed to create the appearance of textual abundance and conceal limitations in what is a finite Netflix catalog.
Figure 1.2. Netflix desktop interface, as of January 2018. The interface, designed in such a way as to conceal catalog limitations, suggests an endless bounty of content available to the user. Screenshot by the author.
Until 2015, the Netflix desktop interface had a light grey background. Video artwork was formatted in vertical, DVD-style boxes, so that the overall effect was reminiscent of a video store. Now, the background is dark—as in a movie theater—and the DVD covers have been rearranged into a horizontal format suggesting frames on a celluloid filmstrip. This site update seems designed not only to make the service as tablet-friendly as possible, hence the shift to the horizontal format, but also to discursively reposition the site within the pantheon of older media technologies by moving the idea of Netflix away from video-store and DVD culture—surely a fading memory for most of its users—and realigning the service with that most resilient medium, cinema. Interestingly, the iconography of television is nowhere to be found in Netflix’s interface design, despite the abundance of TV series available through Netflix. There are no remote controls, advertisements, or schedules. Even though the idea of television is central to Netflix’s commercial ambitions—recall Hastings’s description of Netflix as “a new global Internet TV network”—the television experience does not seem to be central to how Netflix wishes its users to imagine streaming. Perhaps this is because of the degraded nature of the “idiot box,” and Netflix’s related desire to market itself as a premium service. In any case, it is one of the ironies of internet television that its referent medium, television, is being simultaneously reimagined, integrated, erased, and remediated through the emergence of streaming services.
Toward a Synthesis
This brings us back to Netflix’s relationship to screen media. As we have seen, Netflix is a shape-shifter: it combines elements of diverse media technologies and institutions. This has implications for the analytical frameworks we use in media research. The trick is not to take an either/or approach, trying to shoehorn Netflix into one box or another, but rather to see it as a media object that performatively enacts its association with these media at different times and for different purposes. In its dealings with government, Netflix claims to be a digital media service—certainly not television, which would attract unwelcome regulation. Yet, in its public relations, Netflix constantly refers to television, because of its familiarity to consumers. Its interface design, on the other hand, prefers to evoke the cinema experience. Meanwhile, its subscription business model has echoes of pay-TV, but its algorithmic recommendation system is pure new media. In other words, Netflix is a hybrid technology that remediates a range of earlier media technologies in different aspects of its operation, and this mix of associations is constantly changing.
The good news for television studies is that these issues are already quite familiar to scholars. Television is a hybrid medium that combines and rearranges elements of previous media forms, including radio, cinema, newspapers, and the theater. Equally, television studies—to the extent that it exists as a discrete academic field—has evolved as a historical amalgam of different critical approaches, research methods, and ways of knowing. Television studies is a malleable discipline, and this natural flexibility will be an asset as we enter further into an era of internet-distributed television services, which requires us to keep an open mind as to what exactly television is and how it might be studied. In this respect, Netflix is an important object lesson precisely because it invites us to revisit what we think we know about television and to reconstitute that knowledge anew.
Arguably, what is more important than what we call Netflix is how we think about it. In this chapter, I have argued for a both/and perspective, suggesting that we should acknowledge the specificities of Netflix as a digital media service (such as its mode of interactivity, algorithmic filtering, and regulatory slipperiness) and what this means for its distribution function (its catalog structure, lack of capacity limitations, and nonlinearity) while also appreciating the continuities between Netflix and broadcast media, which