Streaming Production Cultures: Labor, Creativity, and Community

Abstract

Streaming has transformed the landscape of screen production since Netflix launched its video-on-demand service in 2007 and later moved into commissioning content. Rather than treating streaming as a universal industrial logic, this special issue foregrounds the contextually-bound practices, infrastructures, and technologies that condition the creative labor behind these productions. “Streaming production cultures” emerges as a subfield within production studies that deserves scholarly attention, and the featured articles surface empirical findings that help demarcate the debates fueling this area of inquiry. Despite challenges in accessing streaming production networks, we argue for a bottom-up approach that attends to the lived experiences of workers in the online screen industry. The contributions apply this lens to a range of production cultures, spanning diverse media services that operate at national, regional, and global scales. As such, this special issue provides a kaleidoscope of streaming production research in order to advance this critical field.