Symposium: Streaming Video as a Cultural Form
Date: Thursday, June 12, 2025
Time: 10:00-17:30
Location: Utrecht University (room t.b.a.)
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 & 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 MI3 (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.
Preliminary Program Overview
| Time | Program |
| 10:00 | Welcome |
| 10.05-11.05 | 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. |
| 11:25 | Coffee break (15 min) |
| 11:40 | Perspective 1: Teaching Broadcasting TV in a Video on Demand (VoD) Context Judith Keilbach (Utrecht University) Markus Stauff (University of Amsterdam) |
| 12:15 | Lunch break |
| 13:30 | Perspective 2: Audiences Vilde Schanke Sundet (Oslo Metropolitan University)Perspective 3: Consumption – From “Watching TV” to “Binge Watching”? Karin van Es (Utrecht University) |
| 14:30 | Coffee break |
| 15:00-16:00 | Perspective 4: Content – Aesthetics & Narrative Form Deborah Castro Mariño (University of Groningen) – t.b.c.Perspective 5: Production Daphne Rena Idiz (University of Toronto, formerly Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) |
| 16:00 | Coffee Break |
| 16:15 | Roundtable discussion with John Ellis, William Uricchio, invited speakers & public |
| 17.25 | Concluding remarks |
| 19:00 | Drinks & dinner |
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.
