We live in an age of astonishing technological advances, ones which have irrevocably changed our relationship to the art that we enjoy. As we seem to be inexorably drawn towards a tipping point where all physical media either disappears entirely, or merely becomes the realm of aficionados who really feel that they need to have all the extras, while everyone streams everything, the time seems right to contemplate what this future will look like.
It is this desire that drives the latest episode of Shot/Reverse Shot, in which Joe Gastineau and I discuss the ways in which streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu have changed how we consume television, as well as how On-Demand services have impacted, and will continue to impact, the cinematic experience. We also digress considerably, getting distracting by talk of monkeys on Segways - WE'RE ONLY HUMAN! - and Joe's disturbing plan to get Mannequin a cinematic re-release.
A few program notes for this episode:
- I apologise for the static that appears on my mic throughout the episode. It was picked up on the original recording and while I was able to lessen it in editing, I wasn't able to remove it entirely, but I didn't think that it was bad enough to spoil the episode. Sorry if you feel differently.
- The article I talk about at the end of the episode about how few students of television students have actually seen the great HBO dramas because so few people have access to them can be found here at the L.A. Review of Books. (Thanks to Paul Coughlan for sending me the link, which I couldn't find prior to recording.) My apologies to Anne Helen Peterson; I had not written down her name prior to recording, so could not credit her and erroneously referred to her as "he" during the course of the podcast. A dreadful oversight on my part.
- The news that Netflix has overtaken HBO (or at least is close to overtaking them) in total subscriptions had not broken at the time of recording, so we were not able to discuss it in depth. However, it does back up the notion that giving the audience cheap and easy access to content is a key component of the brave new world of streaming.
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