This should be a fascinating look at how streaming services evolved and the outsized impact they've had on our culture. Instead it is mostly a series of re-written press-releases and recycled analysis from other people.

Sadly, the book never dives in to the pre-history of streaming. There's a brief mention of RealPlayer - but nothing about the early experiments of livestreaming gigs and TV over the Internet. Similarly, it ignores how Big Brother created a generation of people who wanted to stream on their phones. Early pioneers like JenniCam are written out of history. The book is relentlessly focussed on American streamers, with only a brief foray into the UK, Africa, and other markets. There's nothing about Project Kangaroo and how it squandered an early opportunity for streaming dominance.

Steaming only started with Netflix, according to this book. Despite iPlayer launching at roughly the same time, it doesn't make an appearance until halfway though the book. It's also missing some of the interesting aspects of how Netflix built its algorithm, and the privacy impacts of it.

The analysis itself mostly quotes from reports from Enders and other firms like that. It doesn't seem like there was any original research done, and there aren't any new interviews done for the book. Instead it is just a surface-level analysis mixed in with clichéd prose about boiling frogs. It's also fairly uncritical - several sections are just press-releases from big streaming services with little discussion about whether they're accurate. It almost turns into a corporate biography / hagiography rather than a serious look at streaming.

There's very little about the production side. For example, how Netflix squashes cinematograph and how its lack of permanent props storage restricts accurate set-dressing to tent-pole shows.

Although this is a preview copy, the prose feels half-baked.

Overall, the iPlayer is a very high-quality product, providing access to both linear TV and a whole range of content in its extensive catalogue.

That's the sort of thing I'd expect from a student essay rather than a serious book.

Unlike Warez - The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy by Martin Paul Eve, there's almost nothing about piracy and how that drives the behaviour of consumers, producers, and distributors. There's a bit of discussion of Napster, but hardly anything about the more modern cultural impact.

It is maddeningly contradictory. In a couple of pages it goes from:

Consequently, we are closer than we have ever been to having something like global TV. Close, but not actually there.

To:

because of the amount of work available to view, there is no mono-culture anymore.

Which is it?

The book concludes by saying:

With that in mind, the ultimate winner of the streaming wars is the consumer. It is us.

Is it though? There's almost nothing about shows cancelled before they got going. Nothing about whether American cultural hegemony suffocates local media development. It briefly touches on the constant price rises, but never investigates whether it changes behaviours or if they drive customers away. There's not a single interview with viewers - and no attempt to understand whether they feel positive about the way streaming has changed the world.

There's a fascinating story to be told, but this isn't it.

Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy, the book is available to pre-order now.

Paul has published an essay about official photographs of politicians. In it, he expertly points out the various deficiencies of some of them and where they show a distinct lack of quality.

But, here's the thing, I don't think anyone other than a photographer would notice or care about those "problems".

If you're a website designer, you're always noticing "jank" on other sites. Your skin crawls at the poor kerning, the FOUT, the lack of keyboard navigation, improper contrast ratio, and a dozen other flaws. 99% of users just don't care. It doesn't impact them in any meaningful way.

A decade ago, I ranted about how designers were chasing a perfection which would never be noticed by non-experts. You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.

I include myself in this maddening desire for unnoticeable perfection. I've got several rants about things most people would find inconsequential. There are things which I know to be important in terms of technical correctness, but which most people couldn't give a shit about.

There's a brilliant essay by Will Tavlin called "Casual Viewing - Why Netflix looks like that".

In it, the author (correctly and fairly) skewers Netflix's model of producing huge amounts of low-quality content for an undiscerning audience. The creatives recoil in horror and the æsthetic choices, poor scripting, and lack of creative pizazz. Everything is mediocre at best and that's destroying the creative industries.

But, much like designers fretting about getting things Pixel Perfect or photographers complaining about background composition or musicians ranting about the loudness wars - the hoi polloi just don't care.

And, frankly, who can blame them? Take this quote from the Netflix essay:

The difference between Netflix and its predecessors is that the older studios had a business model that rewarded cinematic expertise and craft.

Bluntly, I don't think that's true. Look at the amount of movies Elvis was in. A couple of good ones, sure. But the majority are literally just "This demographic will pay a dollar to see Elvis on screen; so put him on screen". You only need to look at the various lists of highest grossing movies to see that the viewing public don't necessarily reward expertise and craft.

In an essay called "Fraught Pleasures: Domestic Trauma and Cinephilia in American Culture", the author points out that in the movie "Scream" (a movie ostensibly about movies) nobody goes to the cinema. Their entertainment is schlocky VHS tapes of low-budget and low-quality horror films. The nearest they get to discussing the quality of movie making is when one character recommends renting "All The Right Moves" because:

If you pause it at just the right place, you can see [Tom Cruise’s] penis!

Quality!

Netflix, so the essay argues, has perfected the art of designing content for "casual viewing". Something you can have on in the background while cooking, playing a game, or doom-scrolling.

Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

So? Not everything should be hard work. After a long day, most people don't want to work for their leisure. People don't want to expend cognitive energy on interpreting what a story means. Forget Subtext - People Don't Even Get Surtext.

We also have the problem that close to 100% of culture is now readily available to us. Why take a risk on something new when you could watch something guaranteed to be good? An executive at Amazon's streaming division recalls receiving an email which said:

‘here are the one hundred movies that people are watching most on Amazon SVOD today by the minute.’ It was always a lot of Tom Cruise sci-fi movies, action movies from the ’90s and aughts, and Talladega Nights.

You want to get everyone dancing at your party. Do you put on some experimental music that no one has heard of? No - you stick on ABBA and watch the dance-floor fill up.

Want something with a guaranteed number of chuckles-per-minute? Friends is there for you.

When you visit Paris, do you go to some little art gallery showcasing new artists or do you visit Le Louvre? You, like everyone else, bask in front of the Mona Lisa.

Finally, we reach the inevitble endgame of Netflix. Cut out the authors, actors, directors, make-up artists, sound designers, and the hundreds of other unionised parasites involved in making a modern show. Go straight to AI and create an infinite and endless stream of algorithmically-designed crowd-pleasing content.

Streaming platforms are the only place where this [AI Generated] garbage makes any sense — a place where it would never be watched at all.

Hard disagree. Not because I think AI slop is good; but because the audience doesn't care. Most people don't notice the wires on the special effects. They can't see that the lighting is wrong on the CGI shot. The lead actor's shitty accent passes without comment.

I'm not trying to slur people when I say that the majority are unsophisticated - because I include myself amongst them.

Audiophiles complain about MP3 compression and crappy headphones. Most of us just want to listen to our tunes, not listen to the equipment.

Cinephiles complain about poorly calibrated projectors and or motion smoothing on TVs. Most of us just want to crunch popcorn and see big explosions.

Fact-checkers complain about fictional quotes from famous people. Most of us just want a daily dose of something that sounds like wisdom.

Pornographers complain about the move from gorgeous celluloid to low fidelity videotape. Most of us just want to rent a VHS rather than visit a cinema for our extra-special-personal-time.

Fashionistas decry the homogeneity of modern dress. Most of us think jeans and a t-shirt are basically fine.

Is the quality of pizza better from a tiny restaurant hidden away in an Italian village using only fresh ingredients? I'm sure it is. But Domino's delivers something good enough, cheap enough, and hot enough.

Next year, your pizza will be topped with cheap 3D printed "meat" and, while chefs will decry it as an affront to culinary perfection, it'll be cheap and tasty. Besides, you're munching on it while chatting to friends and watching something dopey on Netflix. Call it the rise of "Casual Eating".

Despite all the hype about how transformative streaming would be for the industry - there's one thing which never really seemed to take off. It's almost impossible to find "foreign" TV on Netflix, Apple, Prime, and the BBC.

Outside of a few breakout movie hits - like "Space Sweepers / 승리호" - there's a dearth of non-English content for me to watch.

Take Der Tatortreiniger. A hugely successful German comedy⁰ which was remade by the BBC into "The Cleaner". Despite having half-a-dozen streaming options available to me, it is nowhere to be found. If I used a VPN and told Netflix I was in Germany, there are no English subtitles available.

The only way for me to watch it is to buy the US region DVDs.

Even if German comedies are too niche for mainstream Anglophone viewers, isn't that the whole fucking point of the "long tail"?

The extra storage costs for a couple of GB of video are a rounding error to Netflix. An extra entry in the database is nothing. So what's the problem?

In my naïvety, I assumed that streaming services only paid royalties on a per-minute basis. But it seems that it is a lot more complicated than that.

And even if streaming services could accurately report on how popular shows are, lots of media companies are bound up in territorial thinking. Shows are sold to countries and regions. They are explicitly locked behind geographic firewalls. That's what determines the shows you are allowed to view. The Internet is meant to obliterate borders. You can sell to customers all over the world! No barriers!

I know the Long Tail Theory has been mostly discredited. And I know that the ALGORITHM is going to suggest shows which are more profitable rather than more entertaining.

I just wish the world was more open. I want to watch an Iranian sit-com, a Kiwi Biopic, a Korean melodrama, a French documentary, and - yes - a weird German comedy.

I don't want my viewing choices to be artificially restricted.

In the background, a chorus of disgruntled viewers start chanting "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"