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.

Introduction

Over the past two decades, tech companies like Netflix and Amazon have become central players in screen industries around the world. These streaming services (or “streamers”) harness global distribution infrastructures, big data analytics, and algorithmic curation to provide personalized on-demand access to their content libraries. Simultaneously, they have established themselves as major commissioners, with Netflix alone spending $18 billion on content in 2025 (Shaw 2026). Yet knowledge of streaming’s impacts on production remains limited, challenging to access, and largely dominated by US-based services (Netflix in particular) and English-language markets. This special issue responds with a series of distinct but interconnected production studies that advance the conversation in several critical ways.

Alongside the evolution of streaming, legacy players in the film and television sector, such as public service media (PSM), have also become more digital and data-driven (see, e.g., Iordache et al. 2025; Michalis 2022; Sundet 2021b). In parallel, online video platforms have altered how content is produced, distributed, and monetized, giving rise to the interconnected fields of platform studies and creator studies (e.g., Burgess and Green 2018; Cunningham and Craig 2019; Poell et al. 2021).

Scholars have long explored how digital disruption sends ripples through the distribution, consumption, and economics of screen content (see Jenner 2021; Lobato 2019; Lotz 2022 respectively). Researching streaming productions, however, raises several challenges. Academics often encounter obstacles around access and ethics: among other things, production spaces are tightly controlled, making ethnographic observations near-impossible. This is compounded by strict non-disclosure agreements that can leave screen workers and executives reluctant to engage in interviews with researchers, a methodological tension we have explored elsewhere (Idiz and Rasmussen 2025; see also Sundet 2021a). As our contributions prove, however, researchers are charting inventive routes around these barriers while carefully balancing access with the ethical demands of confidentiality and consent. Importantly, streaming continues to change at a pace that raises pressing macro-level questions, and we do not claim that the lived experiences of screen workers somehow resolve them. Rather, they offer complementary perspectives that sit alongside political economy approaches, adding texture to a picture still in formation.

Drawing on Caldwell’s (2008) “production cultures” framework and its elaboration in two edited collections (Banks et al. 2016; Mayer et al. 2009), this special issue brings together research on streaming productions in diverse sectors and settings. As Herbert et al. (2020: 50) note, “production cultures is less interested in how people serve industrial functions but rather in the cultural values and logics that orient these people as industrial workers.” Guided by this premise, we define “streaming production cultures” as the cultural practices and belief systems of screen workers in the streaming industry. This involves examining how media workers—who create screen content for streaming services and closely related online platforms—form professional communities organized around shared beliefs, meanings, practices, values, and rituals. By attending to the ambivalence and complexity in how streaming workers articulate their experiences, we gain insight into the many ways structural forces unfold on the ground. Any production study will naturally be a partial account that is deeply influenced by the researcher’s reflexivity and positionality (see Idiz and Rasmussen 2025). For that reason, we present the findings of this special issue not as a comprehensive picture, but as a series of situated perspectives that enrich our understanding of streaming production cultures.

Like earlier production cultures scholarship, we take an interest in workers occupying roles throughout the production hierarchy, from “above-the-line” creative positions (such as showrunners, directors, producers, screenwriters, and actors) to “below-the-line” technical and craft workers (including editors, set designers, camera crew, extras, etc.). However, we also look at roles emerging outside of this formal distinction in “hosted media” (see Idiz and Poell 2025; Lotz 2026), such as live streamers, online content creators, digital studios, and others.

Existing publications have already offered valuable insights into the effects of streaming on production across national contexts (e.g., Castro and Cascajosa 2020; Cunningham and Scarlata 2020; Haddad and Dhoest 2021). However, these primarily focus on US-based streamers, especially Netflix. With this special issue, we provide the first dedicated examination of “streaming production cultures,” bringing together and building upon production-focused scholarship that has so far been dispersed across different publications. As such, our aim is to build on the long tradition of production cultures research to address streaming’s distinctive characteristics.

Reconsidering the Platform Logics of Streaming

As Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder and former CEO, said in 2022: “Our real competitors are YouTube and TikTok” (Niola 2022). This acknowledgment points to an incremental process of platformization within the streaming sector, which we see as an ongoing shift that invites media industries researchers to revise their analytical frameworks. Poell et al. (2019: 1) define platformization as “the penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganization of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms.” Incorporating concepts, methods, and empirical insights from platform studies allows production cultures scholarship to better tackle this transformation in the screen sector. For that reason, this collection also tells the stories of workers based in adjacent industries, such as live streamers and content creators on platforms like Twitch and YouTube.

A key objective of this special issue is to identify and analyze the platform logics that increasingly drive streaming production cultures. While streaming services like Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video do not meet Poell et al.’s (2021) definitional criteria for “platforms,” these services still exhibit several platform traits, particularly in their infrastructural dependencies and data-intensive operations. As some of the articles in this issue illustrate, however, several platforms also reproduce production logics that are closer to formalized legacy practices in film and television. This signals a two-sided convergence between production practices tied to legacy media and a wider media ecology that is shaped by the dynamics of “platform capitalism” (Srnicek 2016). We thus move beyond the platform/streaming binary to more broadly conceptualize a contemporary screen ecosystem that includes a range of media services, content formats, contractual arrangements, production practices, and cultural producers. At the same time, several articles examine how datafication and platformization intersect with longstanding industrial and cultural practices, revealing how disruption goes hand-in-hand with continuities in the online screen industry.

Situated Research in the Online Screen Industry

The special issue spans diverse production contexts: from PSM in Belgium to local streaming services in Iran and the Netherlands, video-sharing platforms in China (Douyin, Kuaishou) and India (YouTube), live streaming on Twitch in Australia, and global streamers operating in Turkey and South Korea. With its diverse industrial and geographical scope, this special issue sheds much needed light on the plurality of production experiences in the online screen industry. It comprises nine articles, each offering empirical perspectives on a distinct and under-examined streaming production culture. These have been organized under four interconnected themes: precarious streaming labor, emerging production cultures, beyond data, and genres and content strategies.

Precarious Streaming Labor

Several contributions expand current debates about precarity in the creative industries, exploring how the rise of streaming reconfigures and, in many cases, intensifies unstable working conditions. Focusing on two local streaming services in Iran, Blake Atwood examines how screenwriters navigate data opacity and precarious labor in this highly regulated and censored context. He usefully extends Szczepanik’s (2024) notion of “streamer imaginaries” by coining the term “speculative labor.” It captures the intricate dimensions of speculation and anticipation experienced by creative workers who are subject not only to streaming and platform logics, but also political regulation and censorship. These constraints often converge for Atwood’s participants. His findings demonstrate the need to widen our analysis of streaming production cultures to account for the regulatory and cultural dynamics that enable and constrain production in various ways. Atwood’s emphasis on such contextual forces mirrors recent work on localized precarity in the creator economy, which similarly highlights how precarious labor conditions are exacerbated by certain geographic, regulatory, and/or cultural contexts (Bidav 2025).

Sandra Becker and Daphne Rena Idiz present another perspective on precarious labor by examining the rise and fall of European streamer Viaplay in the Netherlands. By mobilizing frameworks that theorize “failure” (Redvall 2023) and “unproductions” (Fenwick et al. 2020), they provide rare insight into a part of the streaming industry that often gets overlooked in research, perhaps due to its inherent methodological challenges. Yet the scale of the phenomenon demands attention: the screen industry generates far more projects that perish on the drawing board than ever reach production, making failure the norm rather than the exception. Through their case study into Viaplay’s failed productions, they propose the concept of “streaming precarity,” arguing that the unpredictability and opacity of streaming intensifies the already precarious work of screen production.

Emerging Production Cultures

The next cluster of papers offers related insights into the labor of screen production by focusing on nascent production cultures in the online screen industry. Chengyao Liu turns to the fast-growing micro-drama industry in China, mapping the largely unknown production structures and processes within this industry. Like Atwood, Liu draws attention to state censorship, which is equally embedded in production workflows in the Chinese context. Extending Idiz and Poell’s (2025) conceptual framework of dependence in the online screen industry, Liu delineates a model that sits between hosted and commissioned video: platforms like Kuaishou and Douyin that commission dramas while also hosting user content. Her analysis of these hybrid arrangements elucidates the complex power dynamics of the platform commissioning model, opening up new avenues for comparative studies that can assess how variations in institutional arrangements, labor relations, and content strategies either reflect or diverge from dominant platform logics.

In line with our objective of situated empirical research, Srikanth Nayaka explores the “hyperlocal” production cultures of content creators in rural India. These “village-based YouTube creators” have established professionalized and sustainable businesses, producing videos that garner millions of views. A production studies approach proves essential here, revealing distinct “DIY filmmaking practices” that are built on collective media labor. As such, Nayaka’s findings provide a vital counterpoint to prevailing accounts of creator cultures and social media entertainment, which largely center on individual creators.

Next, Mark R. Johnson and James Baguley utilize the framework of production cultures for their research into Twitch live streamers. Like for the YouTube creators in Nayaka’s article, practices of community-knowledge sharing once again prove vital for these cultural producers. Johnson and Baguley offer rich insights into the beliefs and practices of creative workers in this “decentralized model of cultural production.” Though the authors emphasize the distinctiveness of live streaming platforms from on-demand streaming services, they also demonstrate the need for understanding live streaming as a major form of cultural production within the broader online screen ecosystem.

Beyond Data

The following two papers advance current debates on streaming data, another pressing concern for the field of streaming production cultures. They do so by shifting attention from issues of access to the historical, cultural, and industrial specificities that inform the interpretation of data. Drawing on thirteen interviews with screen workers who produced content for Netflix and HBO Max, Ergin Bulut argues that global streaming establishes new “Orientalist production logics” in Turkey. Bulut moves beyond a narrow observation of streamers’ use of data in production, showing instead how these practices are entangled with historical logics of Orientalism. Thus, he points to a construction of place that caters to transnational markets through multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and “exotic” narratives.

Providing another valuable case study “beyond global streamers,” Hanna Surma and Judith Keilbach focus on Dutch local streamer Videoland and its data practices. In direct contrast to the data secrecy characteristic of global streamers (see Idiz 2024; Rasmussen 2025), Surma and Keilbach detail Videoland’s sharing of metrics with creatives. In addition to documenting what types of data get shared and how, this article identifies continuities with longstanding practices in the screen industry. Among other things, Surma and Keilbach show how creatives deploy data in ways that refine or validate their “gut instincts,” exhibiting the complex interpretative processes at play. Their findings caution us not to overstate the importance of “access” to data. Instead, we gain far richer insights from examining the many direct and indirect ways data-driven insights inform production practices.

Genres and Content Strategies

Our final two articles move from analyzing production infrastructures to examining their effects on the content that emerges from them. Axelle Asmar and Tim Raats explore the knock-on effects of streaming on local PSM seeking to engage with young audiences. They illustrate how the popularity of streaming has led Belgian PSM to launch on-demand services, with content for young audiences seen as integral to this strategy. This includes shorter formats, casting new actors and influencers, and representing diversity on-screen. Their findings thus concretize the ripple effects of streaming on legacy players.

Finally, Taeyoung Kim investigates Netflix’s impact on genre conventions in South Korea. He demonstrates how Netflix’s increasing content investment in this locale has shifted away from K-dramas, the traditional genre of South Korea. Kim also shows how Netflix’s experimentation with new genres and formats has led other players to mimic these practices. Finally, this article illuminates the ways in which Netflix’s contractual arrangements around intellectual property rights can weaken the bargaining power and sustainability of local creative workers. As with Asmar and Raats’s piece, we see the benefit of paying attention to the outputs of streaming production cultures: it allows us to trace how evolving priorities and industrial logics materialize in the stories, formats, and screen aesthetics that ultimately reach audiences.

Conclusion

Taken together, the articles in this special issue provide a window into the diverse forms of cultural production—both established and emerging—in the contemporary online screen industry. This ecosystem is not a monolith, and any analysis should avoid painting with a brush that is too broad. Rather, it is made up of a huge variety of online distributors, each offering their own challenges and opportunities to cultural producers. Yet we also highlight overarching logics in this space, including platformization and datafication, as well as persistent global-local tensions. Research into streaming production cultures exposes how labor, creativity, and community continue to evolve under these pressures.

At the same time, the contributions collected here push beyond global narratives of technological disruption to show how streaming is reinterpreted, resisted, and remade in place—from rural Indian YouTubers building community-based knowledge systems to live streamers whose individual visibility depends on shared networks of support. We emphasize the importance of situated research by foregrounding studies on lesser-known and under-examined local and regional players, the responses of legacy broadcasters, and formalized production for video-based platforms beyond the creator paradigm. Each article is deeply context-specific, demonstrating how particular regulatory, industrial, and cultural factors intersect with platform and streaming logics to shape production cultures. We hope this special issue encourages further empirical research into the changing cultural practices, belief systems and communities of streaming production cultures.