In the current digital age, streaming services have marked a seismic shift in the world of entertainment, revolutionizing the way people consume media at large.
Platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and many, many more offer an unprecedented degree of choice and accessibility in what, when or how they watch or listen to content.
This new era of streaming has empowered both consumers, and creators, disrupting traditional media distributing models for better or for worse. The roots of streaming services can be traced back to the 1990s and early 2000s, prior to the commercialization of the internet, when companies like RealNetworks, Microsoft and Adobe developed technologies that allowed users to stream audio and video over the internet, albeit at low quality and with frequent buffering issues. Famously, YouTube revolutionized online video streaming in 2005, setting the stage for the streaming revolution to come. However, the true pioneer of streaming services as we know them, Netflix, started out far earlier, as an online DVD rental site in 1997, delivering films through the US Postal Service, only within the US.
Prominent streaming platform
Netflix first introduced streaming to their website in 2007, allowing subscribers to watch their already significant catalog of films and TV shows over the internet.
This was during the period when DVD and Blu-rays were beginning to fade out in favour of the internet, and Netflix was quickly able to capitalize on it, quickly becoming the most prominent subscription based entertainment streaming platform, with only Hulu and HBO as any serious competition.
Netflix later began producing its own original content, starting with “House of Cards” in 2013, which would turn out to be its greatest selling point, creating some of the biggest shows in the years since, such as “Orange is the New Black”, “Stranger Things”, and “Squid Game”.
As on-demand streaming gained popularity, competition in the streaming market intensified. Companies like Amazon, Disney, Apple, and Google entered the fray, launching their own streaming platforms to compete for viewership. This era, often referred to as the “streaming wars,” saw a proliferation of streaming options for consumers, each offering its own exclusive content and features.
The competition drove innovation and led to an explosion of original content production, but this period was criticized for overwhelming consumers with options, oversaturating the market with streaming platforms, each offering their own exclusives. These platforms were also criticized for greenlighting low quality production, lowering standards for the sake of churning out more exclusives to pad their numbers.
Criticism
Streaming services have been criticized for far more than just that, however. More recently, streaming services, especially Netflix, have gained a reputation for recklessly canceling new shows before giving them the chance to breathe.
The costs of streaming services have inflated recently, and Netflix has begun cracking down on the common practice of password sharing, which if proves to be profitable, is guaranteed to be adopted by other platforms.
For creators, one of the biggest problems with streaming is the lack of residuals, with writers and actors seeing next to nothing despite having worked on massively popular shows on these platforms.
Despite all this, as streaming services continue to dominate the entertainment landscape, the future of streaming is filled with promise and potential. Advances in technology, such as 5G networks, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, promise to further enhance the streaming experience and open up new possibilities for content creation and distribution.
By this point, streaming is too big to fail, and with a growing global audience and an insatiable appetite for content, streaming services are poised to shape the future of entertainment for years to come.
