Netflix Recommends: Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste by Mattias Frey, and: Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-Funded Video on Demand by Amanda D. Lotz (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Netflix Recommends: Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste by Mattias Frey, and: Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-Funded Video on Demand by Amanda D. Lotz Ethan Tussey (bio) Netflix Recommends: Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste by Mattias Frey University of California Press. 2021. 282 pages. $85.00 hardcover; $29.95 paper; also available in e-book. Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-Funded Video on Demand by Amanda D. Lotz Polity Press. 2022. 224 pages. $64.95 hardcover; $22.95 paper; also available in e-book. The schadenfreude that accompanied the news of Netflix missing its quarterly subscriber projections in the spring of 2022 represented an unusually boisterous public reaction to a stockholder meeting.1 For many observers, this served as a landmark moment in the streaming wars (the nickname for the perceived competition between subscription streaming platforms), a sign that [End Page 194] Netflix's meteoric rise could decelerate. It has been a decade since Netflix disrupted the status quo in the media industries by transitioning its video-rental company into a streaming media platform. In that time, anxious industry onlookers and internet utopians have wondered what the new normal would mean. Fueled by financial speculation, subscriber growth had been the metric of success for Netflix, but the drop in stock valuation shifted Netflix's focus to revenue and the launching of an advertising-supported tier.2 Netflix promised to revolutionize the entertainment industry, but subscription tiers and advertising breaks feel eerily familiar to those of us who remember a time before streaming. Has Netflix really changed the media industries? Answering that question are two new books on the streaming company that can help us assess the effects of the first decade of the streaming era. The more recent of the two, Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-Funded Video on Demand, comes from one of the key voices on the subject, Amanda Lotz. Throughout her career, Lotz has demonstrated a keen ability to make the murky waters of streaming clearer by providing terminology, schemas, and resources for analyzing digital disruption, the global proliferation of services, and the historic antecedents for these platforms.3 Her latest work strives to correct several assumptions including two opposing points of view: that everything or nothing has fundamentally changed in the streaming era. Instead, Lotz convincingly contends that streaming media platforms, and Netflix especially, have distinct characteristics that must be considered when cataloging continuity and change. These distinctions become clear when one stops applying what Lotz calls the "hegemony of linear norms" to evaluations of Netflix.4 These norms have been carried over from the broadcast television era, such as the belief that the goal of programming is to gain the largest audience/ratings, that programming should foster scheduled regular viewing, and that media corporations are trying to channel audiences to particularly favored titles in which the company has a financial stake. The persistence of these norms has obscured understanding of Netflix as a parallel service sitting alongside the traditional television and film industries. As an alternative to these norms, Lotz provides a taxonomy defined by the geographic region, library specificity, library ownership, and corporate ownership of a given service, which when applied reveals the way these platforms craft their subscription propositions.5 By considering these factors, Lotz demonstrates how subscription platforms are designed to create content that facilitates a myriad of desired states of being, like multitasking viewing or comfort viewing, which have parallels in linear television but are foregrounded on digital platforms and become the reliable experiential offerings that ensure that churn—the loss of subscribers—remains low. Lotz [End Page 195] argues that when we look at streaming subscription services, we are looking at entertainment offerings that seem familiar but operate in unique ways. Lotz's work pairs nicely with Mattias Frey's new book Netflix Recommends: Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste. At first glance, Frey's claim that "there may be more continuity than change in the digital age" seems to adhere to the kind of binary prognostications that Lotz is reacting against, but Frey is no captive to the "hegemony of...