Streaming diversity: Studying screen diversity in the streaming era

Abstract

The unprecedented growth of video-on-demand (VOD) streaming platforms has brought both new optimism and new complications to concerns around screen ‘diversity’. To what extent have major global and smaller regional VOD platforms invested in screen diversity, at the level of genres, languages, country-of-origin, social representation or creative labour? Just how ‘diverse’ are the catalogues of VOD services? How is this content represented to audiences and made discoverable through platform interfaces and recommendation systems? How might this vary across the major US-based services, compared with smaller and more niche platforms, or with local broadcaster VODs, or with national public service VODs? This introduction to a special collection on diversity in the streaming era surveys recent developments in screen and media studies scholarship that attempt to address these questions. In doing so, we examine how streaming platforms are addressing diversity at the levels of industry, policy, texts, technologies and audiences. At each level, we observe different definitions, operationalisations, and practices of ‘diversity’ that are informed by a range of disciplinary theorisations, policy histories and priorities, and national and regional contexts, all of which come to intersect with each other in new and challenging ways in the VOD era. In conclusion, we argue that to properly respond to the problem of ‘diversity’, research on screen diversity and on VODs must engage with these diverse dimensions of ‘diversity’.