At Great Mall’s Cinemark theater, a ticket costs $15, which is the same as the average price for a one-month subscription to a streaming service, according to the Wall Street Journal. For the same price, streaming services offer thousands of titles that can be accessed at any moment on many different devices.
It is easy to see why streaming services such as Netflix, Max, and Disney+ have gained widespread popularity since their inception. But how have these services impacted the entertainment industry?
Each streaming service has its unique library of films, shows, and documentaries. For example, Netflix claims to include 6,621 different titles. Max, another service, boasts more than 35,000 hours of content. Just one of these apps has enough content for decades of viewing, and these libraries are being constantly updated. These expansive libraries become convenient when you own a streaming service with your favorite show or an exciting new release you can watch whenever you want. The wide variety of content permits people with many different tastes and interests to find content they love on the same platform.
The way we consume content has changed as well. Watching a television show meant waiting for a new episode to be released every week. Worse, episodes sometimes premiered at a time when viewers were unavailable, meaning that some people had to wait for reruns and avoid spoilers. If you did not watch a show as soon as it was coming out, you had to watch the reruns out of order. With streaming, however, viewers can stream a show in its entirety in one weekend as soon as it releases and watch episodes whenever it is most convenient.
Streaming companies like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ also tailor their platforms to each one of their users. The main page of one student’s Netflix account is different from their classmate’s main page. This is because streaming platforms use artificial intelligence to tailor your account to recommend content that it thinks you might enjoy. They record viewers’ preferred genres, actors and actresses, and can even recommend shows based on your age and location. This allows streaming platforms to hook users much more easily than cable providers can.
Still, not all effects of streaming have been positive. One group that has been negatively affected by the rise of streaming platforms has been the actors playing parts in the platform’s shows and movies. Before, actors got paid each time their movie or an episode of their show was played on television, even years after its release, Variety Magazine reported.
“An actor on a one-hour episode of an Amazon show would make no more than $2,000 in the first year of reuse,” Variety magazine stated. “The same episode on a broadcast network could pay up to $3,600 for each rerun, with the potential for multiple reruns in a year.”
Streaming platforms can be bad for the actors and actresses working for them, but they are also detrimental for the viewers. Streaming platforms’ overwhelming content has shown to have psychological symptoms, the article “Investigating Binge-Watching Adverse Mental Health Outcomes During Covid-19 Pandemic” in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) found.
Higher screen time exposure can sometimes lead to sleep deprivation, depression and anxiety symptoms, the NLM study stated. Therefore, there is a need to warn people prolonged screen time.
People who binge-watch appear more likely to experience multiple mental health problems, leading to personal suffering and increased health care expenditures, the NLM article “Binge-watching and mental health problems” stated.
Streaming platforms have had a huge impact on the way we consume content, but whether streaming platforms have changed the industry for better or worse, it is safe to say that they are here to stay.