Streaming Services, How A Good Idea Becomes The Most Harmful For Media Consumption

Frankly, I’m not that old (says the 22yo). Back when I was young(er), to the best of my
memory, my siblings and I grew up on television, with the here and there of DVDs. We mostly
relied on channels like Disney (XD, Junior, and Channel), Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network (
even its late night counterpart Adult Swim). That was life as a kid (for us), it was simple and nice
to be able to have access to all these different channels at the click of a button. Yet, as time
passed and we all grew up, so did our methods of entertainment. Disney became Disney+, and
the former (once a stronghold for many cartoons and shows) now only runs reruns of once
popular shows and cartoons while Disney+ now runs all that and while introducing new (“new”)
shows. This process of leaving the old and going to streaming isn’t exclusive to Disney since
others that I previously listed like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network are also undergoing these
new methods of entertainment. So since we’re in an age of streaming services, the question at
hand is, how harmful are all these streaming services for us?
As someone who has a subscription (not really, I leech off my cousin) to Netflix, Disney,
Hulu, and even Crunchyroll. I really enjoy having all these different shows new and old all
accessible to me whenever I want and on whatever I wanna watch it on. For example, whenever
you open Netflix you’ll see all these shows, anime, and movies catered to your liking and for you
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to discover, but then as you’re scrolling you’ll eventually notice some of these titles have a red
banner announcing either it’s a new title or a new episode has dropped. So what happens when
you see that red banner but instead of it announcing a release it says “Leaving Soon” ? Or lets
say when you’re in the middle of watching something and all of a sudden the image quality takes
a noticeable dip, or when the lips aren’t synched with the audio, and my favorite is when you’re
invested in this nice show (I’m looking at you Altered Carbon) and despite its popularity it stops
short of season 2, unable to continue a story that clearly wasn’t finished. Bluntly, these are just
the cons I am listing, and as a fellow user I won’t just say streaming services are the devil’s work
or that all they bring is misery and deceit. That just wouldn’t be true, but in this essay I will be
discussing the negative aspects of the introduction of streaming services as a powerhouse of
media consumption. I will go over the absence of quality when it comes to the media being
produced and the false guise of freedom of choice for the consumer.
The absence of quality would be a stretch, more so an exaggeration since there actually is
quite a number of exceptional work spread out among the services. There are a multitude of
fantastical titles old and new that fill up all these platforms. For example here are just some of
the many titles to have been in the top 10 for Netflix at differing periods of time: Altered
Carbon, Stranger Things, Wednesday, Kpop Demon Hunters, damsel, Bird Box, The Queen’s
Gambit, DAHMER: Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Outer Banks, The Kissing Booth, and
etc. But the issue is more so how these services regard the importance of quality. “Netflix also,
like the studios of old, attempts to enlist the best as well as the most commercial talent outside
the US. However, because of the demand that the shows please a global audience rather than a
local one, the projects these showrunners create are frequently degraded and simplified” (Dennis
Broe 208). Dennis Broe, a critic of media pertaining film, television, and art, and also the
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publisher of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media highlights one of Netflix’s blaring
issues regarding the quality of their works when implementing a cultural approach to a global
scale, in which they regard global likeness over its integrity. He uses the once popular show
Casa del Papel (House of Paper)/ Money Heist as an example of this, “Season two started off
well but then at the midpoint began to stretch out and focus not on what was always the heart of
the series—the Professor and the gang’s duel with the repressive apparatus of the state—but on
internal enemies and foes within the bank with the heist left unresolved at the end of the season.
The stretching out results in the necessity, more commercial than story driven, for a season three
but also leaves audiences feeling that the promise of the second season was not fulfilled in that
season” (Dennis Broe 208). In short, the identity of a show is no longer regarded as the
prominent reason for a work’s continued investment by producers but rather as a means to use it
as set dressing in order to wring out more prolonged viewership due to the reputation of the IP.
It’s been shown in more than just Money Heist, a recent example of this is Squid
Game(apologies for any spoilers I might say now) and its final season, once their stories were
told (with unsatisfying conclusions) and the protagonists finally accomplished what they set out
to do in the first seasons, the episode doesn’t end. For Squid Game it’s the arrival of the Squid
game corporation seeping their way into America, some argue it’s for the sake of the message it
wants to show but in the eyes of streaming service production, is a means to make a preemptive
bridge for “more commercial than story driven”.
The introduction of streaming services has given the consumer a plethora of options to
choose from but the many services that are in today’s stream of choices are counterintuitive to
the promise of ATAWAD (Any Time, Any Where, and Any Device). Before the introduction of
Disney+, if you had Netflix you’d most likely have scrolled past many Disney movies and shows
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but ever since 2019, the year Disney+ launched, most if not all have vanished from Netflix and
onto another streaming service, which means another service you would have to subscribe to in
order to watch those titles again. This is just one of the ways in how consumers get the final say
in what they can watch. In the article Hollywood studio filmmaking in the age of Netflix: a tale of
two institutional logics by Allègre L. Hadida, Joseph Lampel, W. David Walls, & Amit Joshi
discuss the impact of streaming services on convenience, commitment, competition, and
cohabitation with theater industries. In their article they talk about the way IPS are handled by all
these services, “Domination by the commitment logic would result in traditional studios
acquiring or developing online streaming services. We already see evidence of such actions, with
the launch of Disney+ in November 2019 and of WarnerMedia’s and NBCUniversal’s bespoke
streaming services in 2020. Alternatively, domination by the convenience logic would lead to
upstream vertical integration of digital players into traditional studios, as they increasingly seek
to expand their portfolios of intellectual property assets and content and to control production
facilities” (Allègre L & Co 215). IPS are sought after by different services as they attempt to
broaden their collections in hopes of racking in more subscribers than their competition. So
despite whatever service you’ve subscribed to, another service can obtain the license for it and
thus drag-and-drop it to their list like Disney+ and Netflix. But even if a show or movie doesn’t
have to face property warfare, such as limited and exclusive works solely attached to their
respective service, they’re still subject to cancellations. Debopriya Dutta, a Rotten Tomatoesapproved critic, author of Frozen Sparks: A Rhapsodist’s Tale, and multi-published poet, wrote
an article via SlashFilm.com, Why Netflix Canceled Altered Carbon, she talks about once
renowned series Altered Carbon and its rise and fall of popularity leading to its eventual
cancellation of the series. There is one particular statement she makes which ties into a previous
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point of how streaming services tank quality for the sake of their general audience, “Mackie’s
Kovacs feels like a completely different iteration of the character, which inadvertently betrays
the show’s central theme, which argues that the soul persists, no matter how many sleeves are
inhabited” and “season 2 makes the baffling decision to abandon its meticulous, high-concept
roots and revel in the shallow stylistic excess of a cyberpunk world. Moreover, the adaptation’s
vision strays so far away from that of Morgan’s novels that the end result is unrecognizably
bland.” All together this is another case of Money Heist and its loss of integrity seen from season
1 into season 2. Season 1 had racked up a number of dedicated fans due to its unique take on the
dystopian genre and the story it wanted to tell which was adapted from Altered Carbon by
Richard K. Morgan. Yet as season 2 aired on Netflix, the original interpretation of the
protagonist was lost in the adaptation and so was the story the books told, therefore many had
voiced their complaints about the lack of consistency from the quality and faithfulness of the first
season. There can’t be a genuine freedom of choice for the consumer if that ‘freedom’ is masked
with titles having the possibilities to leave your service at a moment’s notice or losing continued
support from the producers due to (their) either production issues or viewership consensus.
So, let me ask you this one more time. Since streaming services are now a (mainstay)
powerhouse in media consumption, how beneficial are they for the consumers? From the
stripping of quality from titles to cater to an entertainment medium of ‘more commercial than
story driven’ (Dennis Broe 208). A give-and-take policy that disregards consumer loyalties
(subscribing, limited/exclusive titles, consistent binge watching) by placing value on commercial
gain (retained viewership, membership population’s increase/decrease in adjacent to a title’s
release, monetary flux of the platform) rather than narrative, authenticity/accuracy, and all-in-all
quality. What about these screams benefits to us, the consumers if these platforms treat titles and
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the integrity of media as 1 and 0s, a 100 pennies over 4 quarters, and even expired goods at times
(viewership retention). Remember to always the consider the duality of the word service,
especially when a beloved show or movie you love is no longer there.
Works Cited
Dennis Broe Post Corona Film and Television: Stream It, Skip It, or Revolutionize It?,
FrameWork, Vol.61, No.2 (Fall 2020)
Allègre L. Hadida, Joseph Lampel, W. David Walls, & Amit Joshi, Hollywood studio
filmmaking in the age of Netflix: a tale of two institutional logics, Vol.45, No.2 (2021)
Debopriya Dutta, Why Netflix Canceled Altered Carbon, (June 2025)