Streaming Television

Television scholars have been exploring changes within the television industry for decades, with studies of “new” media like cable and satellite television acknowledging the innovative possibilities created by technological advancements while also reasserting the relevance of long-standing modes of practice and conceptual understanding. As such, the emergence of digital technologies as integral to television distribution has inspired work focused on similar themes of change and continuity. While digital technologies span a wide variety of media, this bibliography focuses on streaming television, and as such, related works about streaming video, which may include cinema, gaming, and mobile or social media, may not be included here. There are a variety of reasons for this focus on television, but perhaps most importantly, the content that has consistently animated streaming businesses like Netflix is best called “television,” because it tends to be viewed at home, on small screens, with programming that is serialized or episodic and produced by major media conglomerates. One other caveat is that “streaming television” is only one of a host of common terms to refer to television viewed through the Internet today. Other common terms include convergence, spreadable media, connected viewing, transmedia, web TV, Internet-distributed TV, binge viewing, and subscription video on demand (SVOD), among others. This breadth of keywords demonstrates not only that this is cutting-edge work, but also that scholars and the industry they study are constantly working to pin down an ever-changing research object. To define this evolving area of study, then, this article prioritizes work that builds upon historical and theoretical foundations for the exploration of streaming television. The section organization highlights history, industry, and audience, with additional sections reviewing book-length studies, both single-authored and anthologized. Positioning an entry in any single category is not meant to limit the scope or significance of the work; as such, authors may appear across sections, and some works could comfortably fit under more than one section because the work in this article is nuanced and may feature multiple methodologies. Nevertheless, the section categorizations seek to make sense of a developing subfield and a complex set of objects. The streaming landscape is only becoming more competitive, through the emergence of new streamers (like Hulu and Amazon) and of traditional media companies creating streaming portals (the BBC iPlayer, HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+, etc.). As such, Netflix may not always be the dominant player in the United States, just as it is often not the dominant player abroad, and for this reason, Netflix is not separated out as an organizing category. This article argues that scholarly work exploring how we study streaming television provides essential tools to understand the industry and its content, now and for years to come.