On streaming-media platforms, their audiences, and public life

Abstract

Over the past decade, streaming-media platforms have emerged as new and natively digital forms of content delivery. For the audience, streaming-media platforms appear as the new way of watching TV or a new kind of film distribution at the outset. Yet they radically transform the spatial and temporal settings of audience activity, introducing an algorithmically modulated logic of programming that we provisionally call microcasting and changing the way we relate to entertainment content in general. This essay critically evaluates how streaming-media platforms restructure the temporal, spatial, and relational dynamics of audience activity and strip off its collective essence. It discusses this new technological form’s actual and potential effects on public life by referring to certain foundational concepts from television, audience, and film studies.