Symposium: Streaming Video as a Cultural Form
Date: Thursday, June 12, 2025
Time: 9:30-17:30
Location: Bovenzaal, University Museum Utrecht, Lange Nieuwstraat 106, 3512PN Utrecht
ECTS: 1,5 EC for RMa students and PhD candidates. See intructions below
Open to: RMa students and PhD candidates who are a member of RMeS or another Dutch Graduate Research School (onderzoekschool)
Organizers: Sandra Becker, Eggo Müller from the ‘Streaming Video’ Special Interest Group at Utrecht University in collaboration with The Netherlands Research School for Media Studies (RMeS), the Institute for Cultural Enquiry (ICON) and the research initiative ‘MI3: Media Industries, Infrastructures and Institutions’ (Utrecht University)
Registration: VIA THIS LINK
Over the past two decades, streaming video has fundamentally reshaped the production, distribution, and reception of audiovisual content. While the rise of online distribution was initially framed as a disruptive force — “the end of television as we know it”— it has since evolved into a significant, relatively stable component of the media landscape. Today, major streaming services and traditional broadcasters alike have established new infrastructures that stabilize production, distribution, and viewing practices. At the same time, streaming video remains in transition, shaped by evolving business strategies (SVOD, FAST, etc.), evolving policies (i.e. revision of the EU’s AVMSD in 2026), and content trends that warrant closer examination.
The ‘Streaming Video’ Special Interest Group at Utrecht University is hosting a one-day symposium featuring eminent television scholars John Ellis and William Uricchio, alongside leading scholars from a new generation of scholars investigating streaming video and television as a medium in constant transition. The symposium will explore whether streaming video can be understood as a “cultural form,” much like Ellis conceptualized broadcast television as a cultural form shaped by industrial constraints, aesthetic conventions, and audience practices in his seminal 1982 book Visible Fictions. In the tradition of Uricchio’s influential work on the evolving nature of television, the symposium will also ask whether streaming video today exhibits enough stability in its industry, infrastructure, and user practices to be considered a distinct manifestation of television’s changing, pluriform emanations.
What are the defining forms, patterns, and practices of streaming video today? Join us for a day of critical discussion and insight as we examine streaming video’s place in the media landscape together with John Ellis and William Uricchio along five different perspectives on teaching, audiences, consumption, content, and production.
Program & Abstracts
| 9.30 | Coffee & tea |
| 10:00 | Welcome |
| 10.05-11.30 | What Happened To My TV? The Disaggregation of Broadcast Television John Ellis (Royal Holloway University of London)Broadcast television had an extraordinary half century of cultural dominance in Americas, Europe and parts of Asia and Africa. Its particular affordances enabled it to take a central role in both everyday life and screen culture. In the past fifteen years (since about 2010) screen culture has become far more diversified, with the dominance of mobile screens, gaming and streaming. Many of the functions performed by broadcast TV in its period of dominance have transitioned to technologies and services that offer different, more attractive, affordances. At the same time, the process of change in screen culture has impacted on the patterns of everyday life that had already been decisively inflected by broadcast television in the 1950s. To understand streaming video, we need to understand its historical inheritance from (and continuing relationship with) broadcast TV, as well its place in everyday life and contemporary screen culture. The Semantic Slippage of Streaming: Bug or Feature? Pity the media scholar, forced to reckon with entities, processes, and concepts as imprecise as ‘media’, ‘film’, and ‘television’. Even when terms such as ‘television’ are pinned down to a single sense, say, the technological, they continue to evade precision (analog/digital? Live/recorded? Broadcast/cable/streamed? Emanated/projected? …). While the relatively constrained technological genealogy of ‘streaming’ might seem to spare it this fate (particularly when tied to the substantive ‘video’), we might press the term, and if it slips, assess what that slippage occludes or reveals. Cultural forms by no means imply stasis; but cultural moments – reified as snapshots of a sort – do. |
| 11:30 | Coffee break (15 min) |
| 11:45 | Perspective 1: Teaching Broadcasting TV in a Video on Demand (VoD) Context Judith Keilbach (Utrecht University) Markus Stauff (University of Amsterdam)Due to the radical technical, economic, and aesthetic transformations of television, the key concepts that once played a central role in establishing television studies as a discipline seem to have lost their pertinence. This problem becomes especially apparent in teaching, where the disciplinary desire to discuss canonical texts often conflicts with students’ media-agnostic practices. By comparing how we set-up our introductory television courses in the early 2000s with our current teaching, we aim to trace the changing utility of concepts such as “flow”, “cultural forum”, and “the structured communication of events”. Do these concepts merely describe a past historical moment which serves as a contrast to accentuate the dramatic changes in the field? Or can they be appropriated and translated to help students understand not only the genealogy but also the key characteristics of contemporary media power? We do not suggest a simple classification of approaches that are more or less outdated. Rather, we argue that insisting on a seemingly obsolete concept can illuminate analytical directions which are urgently needed but not yet fully developed. |
| 12:30 | Lunch break |
| 13:30 | Perspective 2: Audiences – Youth Audiences and Home Advantages in the Age of Streaming Vilde Schanke Sundet (Oslo Metropolitan University)Young people spend more time on screen entertainment than ever, yet they allocate their time differently across various types of entertainment. A significant concern for domestic media is that youth are shifting from traditional film and television industries to transnational streaming services and social media platforms. This presentation builds on collaborative work with Marika Lüders and the GLOBAL NATIVES project, examining screen entertainment through a combined perspective of industry and youth. It draws from nine interviews with industry professionals and a qualitative study involving 24 teenagers. The presentation revisits theories of cultural flows and proximity, exploring what home advantages signify for teenagers in today’s streaming landscape and how domestic media organisations utilise them to attract young audiences. A key argument is that proximity theories remain relevant in media and communication studies but require refinement. Furthermore, we argue that theoretical adjustments must consider not only the abundance of content and choices available but also how ‘home’ is understood, both within the media industry and among teenagers. Perspective 3: Consumption – From “Watching TV” to “Binge Watching”? Streaming platforms like Netflix circulate compelling narratives, or Barthesian myths, about how we watch television today. Ideas such as binge-watching, popular TV, and cultural diversity have shaped how we understand video-on-demand (VoD) services, but often rely on limited evidence due to the platforms’ lack of data transparency. While Netflix has begun releasing select viewership figures, these disclosures are largely strategic and offer little meaningful insight. This limits our ability to understand what it means to watch Netflix today. In this talk, I will present research based on data donations from 126 Netflix users in the Netherlands, analyzing 10,519 viewing sessions from 2023 to examine actual viewing behavior. This study leverages the EU’s GDPR, which allows individuals to access their personal data from data processors like Netflix. Through computational analysis of trace data and reflections on Netflix’s release strategy, business model, and content offerings, we interrogate the myths of binge-watching, popularity, and diversity and contribute to critical discussions on streaming video as a cultural form. |
| 14:30 | Coffee break |
| 15:00-16:00 | Perspective 4: Content – Continuity and Rupture in Aesthetic and Narrative Conventions: Exploring Spanish TV Drama Production Deborah Castro Mariño (University of Groningen)By 2020, video-on-demand (VOD) platforms had overtaken traditional linear broadcasters in the premiere of TV drama in Spain, signaling a broader shift in media consumption and industrial priorities. In this context, original drama has become central to the branding strategies and cultural positioning of (some) streaming platforms. In this presentation, I am to bring into discussion the extent to which VOD has transformed the production of domestic Spanish TV drama, attending to the continuities and ruptures in aesthetic and narrative conventions, and considering what is at stake.Perspective 5: Production – “Show and Tell, and Tell Again”: Insights into Netflix’s Viewer-Driven Production Logics Daphne Rena Idiz (University of Toronto, formerly Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) How is the “cultural form” (Ellis, 1992) of streaming shaped not only by how it is produced, but how we watch? Drawing from semi-structured interviews with fourteen European screenwriters, showrunners, directors, and producers of Netflix originals, this talk explores how evolving viewer practices—especially distracted or “second-screen” viewing—feed back into production, reshaping the aesthetic and industrial norms of specific series (Idiz, 2024; Idiz, 2025). Building on John Ellis’s (1992) notion of broadcast TV as a domestic medium structured around segmented flow, and William Uricchio’s (2013) work on television’s interpretive flexibility, I argue that streaming platforms are reviving and reconfiguring the aesthetics of casual viewing once associated with certain genres of broadcast. In contrast to prestige-era “cinematic” TV, many of today’s Netflix originals are built for distraction: shaped by data-driven commissioning, reliant on overly expository dialogue, and scripted to accommodate audiences half-watching while scrolling on their phones. These “second-screen shows” (Idiz, 2024) mark a striking continuity with Ellis’s “segment form” (1992, 122)—now adapted for a mobile, algorithmically-curated, on-demand environment. Yet, as this talk will demonstrate, there are also new implications for creative labor complicated by the data-driven logics and global reach of streaming. This talk contributes to the symposium’s inquiry into streaming as a cultural form by critically examining the production constraints—focusing particularly on notes given by streaming executives to screenwriters—which shape contemporary storytelling and the aesthetics of streaming content. |
| 16:00 | Roundtable with John Ellis, William Uricchio, invited speakers & public |
| 17.15 | Concluding remarks |
Information for RMeS RMa students and PhD candidates
Options for Participation (1.5 ECTS)
The symposium Streaming Video as Cultural Form with John Ellis and William Uricchio is open to RMeS members (registration required – link will be provided soon).
RMa students can earn 1.5 ECTS by completing the following:
- Preparation: Thoroughly study the required readings (see list below; ca. 2 days of reading).
- Active Participation: Engage actively in the discussions during the symposium (one full day).
- Written Assignment: Submit a position paper or essay (2,000 words) on one of the topics discussed at the symposium, inspired by the required readings. The deadline is June 26th, 17:00 (ca. 2 days of writing).
Essay Assignment Details:
To receive credits, RMa students are expected to write an original position or discussion paper focusing on a specific topic or question within the symposium’s theme. Alternatively, you may write a critical review of recent literature on the topic, making productive use of the theories and perspectives of John Ellis and/or William Uricchio.
The paper may serve as preparation for your RMa thesis or relate to another graduate-level project, but it must be an original piece of writing that clearly reflects insights gained from both the symposium and the required readings.
Specifications:
- Length: approx. 2,000 words (±10%, excluding footnotes and bibliography).
- AI tools may be used as a “critical friend” (e.g., for brainstorming or feedback), but the writing must be entirely original, with no AI-generated passages.
- Deadline: June 26th, 17:00 (strict deadline).
- Submission: Please send your paper as a PDF to RMeS@rug.nl.
- Important: There will be no possibility for a retake or deadline extension.
Required readings:
- Ellis, John (1992). Visible Fictions. Cinema, Television, Video. Chapter 7: Broadcast TV as Cultural Form, 111–126. London: Routledge, 1992.
- Ellis, John (2000). Scheduling: The Last Creative Act in Television? Media, Culture & Society 22(1), 25-38.
- Uricchio, William (2013). Constructing Television: Thirty Years that Froze an Otherwise Dynamic Medium. In After the Break: Television Theory Today, ed. by Marijke de Valck & Jan Teurlings, 65-78. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
- Uricchio, William (2015). Media Specificity and Its Discontents: A Televisual Provocation. In: From Media to Post-Media: Continuities and Ruptures, Martin Lefebvre & Nicolas Dulac, eds., Éditions L’Âge d’Homme.
- Castro Mariño, Deborah, and Cascajosa, Concepción (2023). Originals with a Spanish Flavor: Netflix’s Cable Girls and the Reinvention of Broadcast TV Drama for Video-on- Demand Services. In Streaming Video: Storytelling Across Borders, eds. Amanda D. Lotz & Ramon Lobato. 141-155.
- Es, Karin van, & Nguyen, Dennis (2025). Binge-Watching Netflix? Insights From Data Donations. Media and Communication 13, ” 1-19. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.i474Gripsrud, Jostein (1998). Television, Broadcasting, Flow: Key Metaphors in TV Theory. In The Television Studies Book, ed. by Christine Geraghty and David Lusted, 17–32. London: Arnold.
- Hesmondhalgh, David & Lotz, Amanda D. (2020). Video screen interfaces as new sites of media circulation power. International Journal of Communication, 14, 386–409. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/13261/2913
- Idiz, Daphne Rena (2024). Local Production for Global Streamers: How Netflix Shapes European Production Cultures. International Journal of Communication 18, 2129-2148.
- Keilbach, Judith, & Markus Stauff (2013). When Old Media Never Stopped Being New. Television’s History as Ongoing Experiment. In After the Break. Television Theory Today, eds. Marijke de Valck & Jan Teurlings, 79–98. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
- Lobato, R. (2019). Netflix nations: The geography of digital distribution. New York: NYU Press. [Selected chapters].
- Lüders, Marika, & Sundet, Vilde Schanke (2021). Conceptualizing the Experiential Affordances of Watching Online TV. Television & New Media 23(4), 335-351.
