In my mind, I’ve completed a journey. The coming publication of After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the 21st Century is the long-intended outcome of exploring industry change that began with The Television Will Be Revolutionized (2007). After Mass Media is the ‘so what’ to a lot of the more descriptive analysis of recent years (Netflix and Streaming Video). It, at last, connects industrial change to storytelling. It doesn’t have all the answers but provocatively suggests some paths forward.
Why has it taken so long to get to and write this book? I’m not sure. The business of streaming took longer to hit maturity than I expected? I moved around the world? There was a global pandemic? Ending my Michigan life took most of 2018. I was fortunate to land in Australia at the start of 2019 with a grant to study Internet-distributed Television with Ramon Lobato and Stuart Cunningham and five years without teaching. That grant project became the vehicle to use my new standpoint outside the US to better understand non-US streaming.
Just as needed to explain the limits of any conversation that conflated YouTube and Netflix as ‘internet television’ when I wrote Portals in 2016, the first collaborative writing Ramon and I did for Media Industry Journal was of an era when ‘streaming’ was widely perceived as a single coherent category. That article was the start of more nuanced categorization of the field that would continue in Netflix and Streaming Video.
I wrote Media Disrupted in 2019 while I began to get my bearings in Australia. The idea had been in my head since finishing We Now Disrupt This Broadcast and hosting a small symposium at UMichigan that brought together Dan Herbert, Lee Marshall, and John B. Thompson for conversation about the implications of internet distribution for media industries I knew less about. I imagined Media Disrupted as an ‘airport book’, an account of media disruption for a general readership. I also enjoyed writing about more than video streaming and diving into what had happened to newspapers (which I increasingly fear is predictive of what is about to happen to ‘television’). It published just as most of the globe grounded their planes. I also had an amazing time working through ‘circulation power’ with Dave Hesmondhalgh published in Int’l Journal of Communication.
I next looked for evidence of how to make sense of Netflix, which I knew was not one thing, but also not 190 different things (to align to each of the countries of its availability). My first answer appears in this Int’l Journal of Cultural Studies article. This is where I figured out the difference between ‘global’ in a federated sense and global as direct-to-consumer across a multi-territory market; the start of the work trying to sort implications of the spread of offices, commissions, and subscribers. I didn’t have the best evidence but began working from a notion that 1) Not all video distribution is the same, 2) Streaming is largely different from and complementary to linear ad supported television, 3) Streamers are varied and the dynamics of the market were most nascent and, 4) Netflix’s global strategy was different from ‘Hollywood’s’ approach — it too was a ‘US streamer’ but a zebra among horses.
I was writing that article when the pandemic hit and cleared my calendar for the foreseeable future. I decided to finally sort through the mostly half-formed thoughts about streaming bouncing around my brain. I couldn’t figure out how to connect it all, so started with the blog series of 30 Questions and Answers, which I revised and further developed as Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-funded Video a year later.
Sometime during all this I started having conversations with Kevin Sanson and Anna Potter about what was happening with television series production in Australia. We were funded by the ARC with a Discovery Project to explore ‘Making Australian Television in the 21st Century’, which aimed to explore how the internationalization of the scripted series business over preceding decades and internet distribution now challenged once-national industries. A range of articles emerged from our efforts to develop a comprehensive picture of what had happened: Kevin and I look at production company ownership in Television & New Media, Anna and I sorted that the real culprit of change in Australia was not streamers but the arrival of ‘multichannels’ in 2009 in Media International Australia; Cathy Johnson joined Anna and I for a comparative account of shifting money in the sector across the US, UK, and Australia in Convergence; Anna and I wrote a giant tendered report about business models and policy for drama and news for the Australian government.
From 2020-22, the Australian government also held a bunch of policymaking inquiry on creating local content quotas on streaming services to which we dutifully contributed. Probably the most impactful work from this project/period was the Int’l Journal of Cultural Policy article Anna and I wrote that begins a conversation seeking more sophisticated ways to categorize the cultural specificity of drama produced with government support; the Australian Television Drama Index, which injected much needed empirical data into deliberation of what happened to Australian TV drama (the commercial broadcasters stopped making it), and our 2024 Report on the failings of Australian cultural policy in the sector.
From 2021 through 2023, I embodied the overlap in the two ARC projects in work that was relevant to both. The next advance on the streaming front came with our purchase of streamer library data from Ampere Analysis. The grant was meant to fund a lot of field-based research that was impossible given Australia’s COVID lockdowns, and we found our attempts to create our own database of titles increasingly futile. The Ampere data enabled better support for my efforts to explain how Netflix was more than one thing and fewer than 190. I never settled on a number, but the Journal of Communication article is a career highlight in many ways. The Ampere data made clear some things I’d intuited but couldn’t know: 60% of the libraries are common across countries; only 40% of any library is US produced; less than 3% of most libraries is domestic, and the exceptions reveal a lot. I finally felt like I could color in some aspects of the conceptual picture with permanent marker.
Because I and everyone else was well and tired of Netflix at that point, we then considered what the Ampere data could tell us about the streaming services that weren’t among the usual suspects. We first published the Global Streaming Strategy Assessment as a more public-facing white paper, and later an article with academic heft as part of the special issue of Int’l Journal of Cultural Studies on Relocating Video Cultures that I edited with Jennifer Kang.
At the same time, chapter drafts for Streaming Video: Storytelling Across Borders were coming in. Ramon and I viewed the edited collection as an opportunity to pull together accounts that would inject some variety into the dominant conversations about streaming that centered the US and Europe. It also offered a way to amplify the work of the great group of mostly early career scholars who’d we been talking with informally as part of the Global Internet Streaming Consortium.
Streaming Video asked its contributors to tie media industry changes to implications for storytelling in their countries of expertise (industry/text). With the Relocating Video Cultures special issue, I hoped to advance understanding of the varied adoption and consequences of internet-distributed video in places largely under-considered in western scholarship (industry/technology/context). Again, bringing together country experts for shared conversation proved fruitful.
All of this work added to the ideas floating around my head for the bigger ‘so what’ book I’d long intended. It felt like it took a long time to sort out what became After Mass Media. I hadn’t quite ‘found’ the book in the first reviewed version, but some hard but engaged reviews helped me get there. Too much was still in my head. The book is wide ranging. In my mind, I do the work I think most readers expect in the first chapters to the earn the ability to do something less conventional in the second half. I have the feeling that I ‘left it all in the pool’ after a big race (I swim). I don’t think there is a mic drop at the end of the book, but if you’ve been reading along since The Television Will Be Revolutionized, I think you’ll see I’ve brought a lot full circle.
Then Media Industries in the Digital Age (MIDA). Read the preface for more on the what and why of that one, but the short version: Understanding Media Industries (UMI) needed updated, but the state of affairs was too unstable for a comprehensive account (and Oxford didn’t want the book anymore). I only wanted to revisit that book if we could find a way to integrate ‘legacy’ and ‘new’ media – that needed to happen for thinking in the field move ahead. I (and a lot of other folks) also needed a book to teach yesterday, so it needed written and published quickly. MIDA is designed to be read by more than undergrads, which meant leaving out a lot of the more ‘teachy’ bits of UMI. I’ve pulled those bits into my lectures and section activities. The Americanness of UMI was also newly clear; our answer is to let folks supplement it with what they need because so much is context specific.
Of course I’ll never stop being interested in the evolution of what was the ‘television industry’ and the implications of industrial changes on the stories it makes and the cultural role of those stories. But I feel I’ve answered all the industrial questions I can with the data available. A lot of the work that has sought to understand the changes of streaming is mostly me explaining how I arrived at conclusions in the absence of data unavailable. This isn’t a jab at the streamers, that data has never been available. When I started my career, Nielsen data was only available in drips and drabs. There were fewer shows available, which made that data more helpful, but Nielsen data in any depth cost more than anyone could afford. I hope everyday that a streamer will reach out to collaborate; I have a lot of good questions we could answer together.
Until there is a streamer that wants to collaborate, I’m off to see what I can learn from viewers. We (it was work relevant to both grants) did a nationally (AU) representative survey of series and movie viewing in 2022 that we published some descriptive whitepapers from (Australian Screen Stories Viewing Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) and continue to work on some academic publications from the data. I’ve done a variety of pilot studies as I’ve wrapped up the projects from this period of work aimed at establishing a new agenda that pivots on to understanding how we use media in the digital age. It may take awhile….
