Streaming Media Platforms and Digital Distribution

Industry Convergence and Technological Change
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-47296-6
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 368 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Centered on streaming media platforms, this book explores how digital technologies have fundamentally transformed the way we understand entertainment and the tightening nexus between technology, culture, and capitalism.

Building on a wide-ranging body of interdisciplinary inquiry, extending from media industry studies and critical political economy to media archaeology and film and media studies more generally, this book presents a unique critical approach that moves from macro-level analysis of industry economics to micro-level considerations focusing, for example, on streaming’s impact on changing narrative styles, genre formation, and related text-based aesthetic trends. The book’s core chapters develop in-depth analyses of streaming media’s three most emblematic platforms, Disney+, Netflix, and YouTube, highlighting their specificities while also assessing their place within a larger, shifting ecosystem. In offering a comparative account attentive to the importance of both historicizing and theorizing the changes brought about by streaming, this book lays out a path for renewed critical thinking about the contradictions in contemporary media and their impact on life in the 21st century.

This is essential reading for advanced students and scholars interested in the ever-evolving relationship between technology, media, culture, and economics.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

McDonald, Kevin

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A Specter was Haunting…

Chapter 1

Contorted Convergences: From an Accidental SVOD Window to the End of the Streaming Wars

I. At the Dawn of Streaming

II. How the SVOD Window Was Won

III. Over the Digital Sublime and into the Streaming Wars

Chapter 2

Disney Plus Disney: The Double Logic of Digital Enclosures

I. Platform Problems: Technology and Control

II. Marvel’s Superhero Success: From a Cinematic Universe to Streaming’s Second Coming

III. This Is What Dreams Are Made Of

Chapter 3

In Remembering Times Lost: Netflix, Nostalgia, and Intermediation

I. Never Out of Time: Stranger Things or a New Approach to Original Programming

II. As the World Churns: Platform Economics and Technological Exceptionalism

III. Can We All Just Be on the Right Side of History? Making a Murderer, Televisualization and Surplus Content

Chapter 4

Portal Into the Future of Entertainment: YouTube between New Media and Post-Cinema

I. Welcome Home: Technological Wonder and Vestiges of an Unhomely Divide

II. The Rise and Fall of Internet Starlets: Music Videos and Digital Aesthetics

III. Zany Zombies in a Whack New World: Internet Aesthetics and Hollywood Gimmickry

Chapter 5

Coda: All Just a Dream…

Works Cited

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Kevin McDonald is a lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies at Cal State Northridge, USA. He is the author of Film Theory: The Basics (revised and expanded 2nd edition, 2022) and coeditor of The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century (2016). His teaching and research focus on film, contemporary popular culture, and the intersections between media, technology, and performance.