Netflix's Speculative Fictions: Financializing Platform Television

133 Pages·2021·0.892 MB·English

by  Colin Jon Mark Crawford

Netflix’s Speculative
Fictions

Netflix’s Speculative
Fictions
Financializing Platform Television
Colin Jon Mark Crawford
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Act I: What Is Past Is Prologue (1997–2007) 27
Act II: Hope Streams Eternal (2007–2011) 47
Act III: Networking the “Global Original” (2011–) 71
Coda 105
Bibliography 111
Index 119
About the Author 123
v

Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated to the innumerable friends, family members, col-
leagues, and most importantly mentors who have guided, encouraged, and
challenged me over the years. I would like to specifically thank first and
foremost Dr. Marc Steinberg for his unwavering dedication to helping me
develop and push this project in new and unexpected directions. I would also
like to thank Raphaele Hubert, Maral Sotoudehnia, Lex Konnelly, Keiko
Hart, Elena Pnevmonidou, and CindyAnn and Reuben Rose-Redwood for
your endless generosity and support over the years. None of this would have
been possible without each of you.
vii

Introduction
NETFLIX’S SPECULATIVE FICTIONS:
FINANCIALIZING PLATFORM TV
What is a show worth to Netflix? Really, what is the value of any given title
in Netflix’s catalogue? How does Netflix’s debt-intensive, vertically inte-
grated model for platform TV work? Does it actually work? These were the
questions from which this book has emerged as a journey into the intersect-
ing worlds of technology, culture, and finance industries. I quickly realized
that any possible answers to such questions must simultaneously consider a
dizzying constellation of factors. On the one hand, there are technically mea-
surable factors such as licensing and/or production, labor, marketing, content
delivery infrastructure maintenance, localized subscriber pricing, debt financ-
ing structures, and viewership data. But on the other less measurable hand,
qualitative industrial factors such as title-specific brand power and longevity,
“free-promotion” from fan discourses and content, industry literature and
criticism, various international market pressures, and so on are much more
difficult to account for or ascribe value to. The truth is, the “value” of any
given title to Netflix is incalculable because of platform television’s complex
matrix of affective, financial, technological, and sociocultural characteristics.
The company rather views its titles as enterprising investments—risks—of
varying sizes and its content library as a portfolio, all of which serve the
project of the Netflix brand; the Netflix story. Users and investors alike thus
subscribe, not only with their capital but with their faith in the value of Netflix
as a service and a stock.
Realizing my initial research questions were unanswerable has, however,
been deeply generative, forcing me to find new lines of approach and to
synthesize emergent methodologies in efforts to better understand the new
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