22409 Paper 204: Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies 

From Cinema Halls to Streaming Platforms: How Netflix and OTT Have Changed Film Culture

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Name: Vanita Baraiya 

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Paper Name: Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies 

Paper No: 204

Paper Code: 22409

Units: 4

Topic:From Cinema Halls to Streaming Platforms: How Netflix and OTT Have Changed Film Culture

Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University 

Submitted date: , 2026

Abstract

This paper examines the transformation of film culture brought about by the rise of Netflix and other over-the-top (OTT) streaming platforms, tracing the shift of cinematic experience from the collective, ritualized space of the cinema hall to the individualized, on-demand environment of the screen at home. Drawing on contemporary theories of media industries, platform studies, and cultural policy, the paper investigates how streaming has restructured the production, distribution, exhibition, and reception of film. It considers three interlocking dimensions of this transformation: first, the industrial and textual logic of Netflix's content strategy, including its reliance on recycled and adapted narratives; second, the disruption of national cinema value chains and festival ecosystems as OTT platforms blur the boundary between film and television; and third, the reconfiguration of global film audiences through algorithmic curation and opaque, geopolitically inflected metrics such as the Netflix Top 10. Synthesizing scholarship by Cuelenaere, Burgess and Stevens, Ribke and Wayne, Jin, Yu, and Lubin, the paper argues that streaming has not simply relocated cinema but has altered the ontology of film itself, converting it into a continuously flowing, data-driven form of "content." The paper concludes that while OTT platforms have democratized access to a wider range of national and independent cinemas, this democratization is bound up with new forms of institutional conservatism, cultural flattening, and corporate control over taste.

Keywords: Netflix, streaming, OTT, film culture, cinema, platform studies, media industries, algorithmic curation

Research Question

How have Netflix and other over-the-top streaming platforms transformed the production, distribution, exhibition, and cultural meaning of film, and what are the consequences of this transformation for national cinemas, film aesthetics, and the collective experience of cinephilia?

Hypothesis

This paper hypothesizes that the shift from cinema halls to streaming platforms has not merely changed the location and mode of film consumption but has restructured film culture itself along industrial, aesthetic, and geopolitical lines. Specifically, it is hypothesized that (1) Netflix's institutional logic of data-driven content strategy produces a content library that is simultaneously more diverse in national origin and more conservative in narrative form than traditional Hollywood cinema; (2) the classification of Netflix as either "television" or "cinema" is not a neutral descriptive question but a policy and value-laden one, with material consequences for national film industries; and (3) algorithmic curation and platform metrics such as the Global Top 10 construct new, geopolitically uneven global audiences that reproduce rather than resolve older asymmetries of cultural power between English-language and non-English-language cinema.

Introduction

For most of the twentieth century, cinema was inseparable from the cinema hall. To watch a film meant to travel to a designated public space, to sit in the dark among strangers, and to submit to a fixed, collectively experienced schedule of screening times. This architecture of exhibition was not incidental to the meaning of "film" as a cultural object; theorists of classical film spectatorship, from apparatus theory to phenomenological accounts of cinema-going, treated the dark theater, the large screen, and the immersive sound system as constitutive of the cinematic experience itself. The rise of home video in the late twentieth century had already begun to loosen this architecture, but it was the emergence of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services in the 2010s, led by Netflix, that fundamentally reorganized the temporal, spatial, and economic logics of film culture.

Netflix began as a DVD-by-mail rental service in the late 1990s before pivoting to streaming, and by the mid-2010s it had become not merely a distributor but a major commissioner and producer of original film and television content, releasing hundreds of "Netflix Original" films and expanding into more than one hundred and ninety countries. This paper takes Netflix as its primary case study while situating it within the broader ecology of OTT platforms including Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and various regional and national services that have collectively displaced the theatrical release window as the default site of first-run film consumption for large segments of the global audience.

The transformation this paper investigates is not simply a matter of where films are watched. It is a transformation of what a film is understood to be, who is understood to be watching it, and how value commercial, cultural, and national value is assigned to moving-image narratives. As Diane Burgess and Kirsten Stevens argue, the question of whether Netflix should be classified as "television" or as "cinema" is not an abstract taxonomic dispute; it has concrete implications for broadcasting policy, national cultural funding, and the survival of theatrically oriented film industries (Burgess and Stevens). Similarly, Eduard Cuelenaere's large-scale database analysis of Netflix Original films demonstrates that the platform's institutional logic of content acquisition, while distinct from that of traditional Hollywood studios, nonetheless reproduces recognizable patterns of risk-averse, recycled content production even as it markets itself on the promise of "originality" (Cuelenaere 992–95). And scholarship on Netflix's opaque audience metrics, such as the analysis by Nahuel Ribke and Michael L. Wayne of the platform's weekly Global Top 10, reveals how streaming constructs new and unevenly distributed conceptions of the "global audience" that carry geopolitical and economic consequences (Ribke and Wayne 2–4).

This paper proceeds in four main movements. It first reviews the relevant literature on streaming, platform studies, and the political economy of Netflix. It then examines, in turn, three dimensions of the transformation announced in the research question: the industrial and textual logic of Netflix's content strategy; the disruption of national cinema value chains, exhibition practices, and film festival ecosystems; and the reconstruction of global audiences through algorithmic curation and asymmetric metrics. A discussion section synthesizes these findings in relation to contemporary theories of platform capitalism and cultural commodification, before a concluding section addresses the implications of this transformation for the future of film culture and film studies as a discipline.

Literature Review

Scholarship on Netflix and streaming media has grown rapidly alongside the platform's expansion, and it can be usefully organized around three broad strands relevant to this paper: studies of Netflix's content and production strategy, studies of its disruption of national film industries and exhibition practices, and studies of its audience measurement and global cultural politics.

The first strand concerns what Netflix produces and how. Cuelenaere's 2024 study in Media, Culture & Society is among the most methodologically ambitious contributions to this strand. Analyzing a database of 658 Netflix Original films released between 2015 and 2022, Cuelenaere finds that while Netflix released a large number of ostensibly original, non-recycled films, the proportion of recycled content—sequels, remakes, and adaptations followed a steadily rising trajectory over the period studied, with adaptations of pre-existing intellectual property constituting the largest share of this recycled content (Cuelenaere 992–98). This finding is significant because it complicates Netflix's own marketing rhetoric, which foregrounds the word "Original" as a signifier of creative risk-taking and novelty. Cuelenaere's argument is that the streaming era does not eliminate the industrial logic of recycling that has long characterized Hollywood; rather, it transforms the institutional conditions under which recycling occurs, since SVOD platforms operate according to a subscription-retention logic rather than a per-title box-office logic, which alters without eliminating—the incentive to rely on pre-tested intellectual property (Cuelenaere 993–94). Complementing this industry-level analysis, Zhiying Yu's review of Mattias Frey's Netflix Recommends: Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste situates Netflix's curatorial logic within a longer history of taste-making institutions, arguing that Frey's book positions Netflix's recommendation algorithm as the latest in a lineage of taste arbiters that stretches back through film criticism and festival juries, even as the algorithm displaces human critical authority with statistical inference about viewer behavior (Yu 1269–70).

The second strand addresses the disruption of national film industries, value chains, and exhibition. Burgess and Stevens's analysis of Canada and Australia is the key reference here. They argue that policymakers and industry commentators have too readily classified Netflix as a form of television, a classification that sidesteps difficult questions about how feature films will sustain themselves economically and culturally in a streaming-dominated marketplace (Burgess and Stevens). By examining the ways in which national cinema policy mechanisms designed around theatrical release, box-office reporting, and public funding tied to domestic exhibition—struggle to accommodate a transnational platform that neither reports detailed viewership data nor commits to theatrical windows, Burgess and Stevens demonstrate that the disruption caused by OTT services is not only aesthetic or experiential but structural, threatening the financing and festival-driven value-creation mechanisms that have historically sustained national cinemas outside Hollywood (Burgess and Stevens). This concern is echoed and extended in Dal Yong Jin's special issue on Netflix and East Asian audiovisual culture, which frames the Korean, Japanese, and other East Asian production ecosystems as sites where the disruptive and generative effects of Netflix's entry are especially visible, given the platform's simultaneous role as funder, distributor, and gatekeeper of East Asian content for global audiences (Jin 1).

The third strand concerns audience measurement and the cultural politics of the global. Ribke and Wayne's study of Netflix's weekly Global Top 10 rankings between 2021 and 2023 argues that Netflix's presentation of its own audience data is not a neutral technical exercise but a discursive and economic construction that produces a distorted picture of global viewership, in which a small number of non-English-speaking countries account for a disproportionate share of non-English viewing hours while English-language content continues to command the largest overall share of viewing time (Ribke and Wayne 3–8). Diane Burgess and Kirsten Stevens's institutional focus and Ribke and Wayne's audience-metric focus are usefully triangulated by Jack Lubin's more polemical account, published in the Systemic Justice Project's journal, which argues that Netflix and its streaming peers have effected a broader corporate capture of cultural life, replacing the serendipity and risk of traditional cultural consumption with an algorithmically optimized, addictive, and ultimately homogenizing content loop designed to prevent subscribers from disengaging rather than to cultivate aesthetic experience for its own sake (Lubin).

Taken together, this literature suggests that the transformation of film culture under streaming cannot be reduced to a single causal story of either liberation (more access, more diversity, more national cinemas visible to global audiences) or domination (corporate capture, algorithmic homogenization, the erosion of national industries). Rather, the literature points toward a more dialectical account, in which the same platform logic that expands access to previously marginal national cinemas simultaneously subjects those cinemas to new forms of institutional conservatism and metric-driven visibility. This paper builds on that dialectical framing to organize its own analysis.

From Cinema Halls to Living Rooms: A Historical Reorientation of Film Exhibition

The cinema hall historically performed several functions simultaneously: it was an economic mechanism (the site where box-office revenue was generated and where distribution windows were enforced), a social ritual (a shared, scheduled, and often communal experience), and an aesthetic environment (calibrated for scale, darkness, and immersive sound). The transition to streaming disaggregates these three functions. Economically, subscription revenue replaces per-ticket revenue, decoupling a film's financial success from its individual performance and tying it instead to its contribution to subscriber acquisition and retention across an entire catalog. Socially, the fixed screening schedule is replaced by on-demand access, and the communal experience of the audience is replaced by data about individual and household viewing behavior. Aesthetically, films are increasingly produced with an awareness that they may be viewed on screens far smaller than a theatrical screen, under viewing conditions the filmmaker cannot control, and often with the possibility of viewer distraction or multitasking factored into pacing and exposition.

This reorientation did not occur instantaneously, nor was it experienced identically across national contexts. Burgess and Stevens's comparative study of Canada and Australia is instructive precisely because it shows how the theatrical exhibition sector in mid-sized national film markets was already precarious before Netflix's arrival, dependent on public subsidy and festival visibility to compete with Hollywood imports; the entry of a well-capitalized transnational streaming platform did not create this precarity but rather intensified it, by offering domestic filmmakers an alternative source of financing that came without the traditional obligations such as theatrical release commitments or domestic content quotas that had previously tied production financing to the health of the national exhibition sector (Burgess and Stevens). In other words, Netflix's disruption of exhibition is inseparable from its disruption of production financing: a filmmaker who can secure a global streaming deal has less structural incentive to secure a theatrical distributor, which in turn reduces the volume and diversity of theatrical product, which in turn accelerates the closure of independent and arthouse cinemas that depend on that product.

The consequence, as this paper's hypothesis anticipates, is not a simple replacement of one exhibition space by another but a bifurcation of film culture into two increasingly distinct circuits: a shrinking theatrical circuit oriented around tentpole blockbusters, prestige awards contenders, and festival premieres, and an expanding streaming circuit oriented around continuous catalog turnover. Film festivals, which Burgess and Stevens identify as critical arenas for negotiating the symbolic and economic value of national cinema, occupy an increasingly ambiguous position within this bifurcated system: they remain gatekeepers of prestige and critical legitimacy, yet an increasing share of the films they premiere are destined for streaming rather than theatrical release, which raises unresolved questions about whether festival curation can continue to perform its historic function of building sustained theatrical audiences for national and independent cinema (Burgess and Stevens).

Netflix's Content Strategy: Originality, Recycling, and Institutional Logic

If the previous section addressed the where of film consumption, this section addresses the what: the textual and industrial character of the content that streaming platforms actually produce and distribute. Netflix's public rhetoric has long emphasized the term "Original" as a marker of creative distinctiveness, positioning the platform as a patron of bold, risk-taking storytelling unconstrained by the box-office anxieties of traditional studios. Cuelenaere's empirical study complicates this rhetoric considerably. By constructing a database of 658 Netflix Original films released globally between 2015 and 2022 and coding each film according to whether its narrative content was newly created or recycled from a prior source through sequel, remake, or adaptation Cuelenaere finds that a full third of Netflix's Original film output was recycled content, and that this proportion rose in a roughly linear fashion across the period studied, with adaptations of pre-existing intellectual property constituting the single largest category of recycled material (Cuelenaere 992–98).

Cuelenaere's theoretical contribution lies less in the raw statistic than in the explanation offered for it. Traditional Hollywood recycling, in accounts such as those Cuelenaere synthesizes, has historically been driven by acute economic risk at the level of the individual title: a single film's failure at the box office can bankrupt a production, so studios have strong incentives to rely on pre-tested franchises, sequels, and adaptations to hedge against that risk. Netflix, by contrast, operates according to what Cuelenaere calls a different "institutional logic," in which individual titles do not need to recoup their costs directly through ticket sales but instead contribute to the perceived value and "stickiness" of an entire subscription catalog (Cuelenaere 993–95). One might therefore expect Netflix's incentive to recycle content to be weaker than that of a traditional studio, since a single underperforming original title poses less existential risk to the platform. Cuelenaere's data suggest the opposite trend is emerging: recycling has increased over time, which the study interprets as evidence that even in the absence of per-title financial catastrophe, the subscription logic still rewards content that can be marketed using pre-existing audience familiarity and brand recognition, particularly as global competition among SVOD platforms has intensified since the mid-2010s (Cuelenaere 995–98).

This finding bears directly on the aesthetic and cultural stakes of streaming's effect on film culture. Zhiying Yu's review of Mattias Frey's Netflix Recommends situates this pattern within a broader argument about taste and curation: if Netflix's recommendation algorithm increasingly functions as the primary mechanism by which viewers discover and select films, then the algorithm's demonstrated preference for content that resembles what a viewer has already watched precisely the recycling logic Cuelenaere documents at the level of production produces a curatorial environment that rewards familiarity over risk not only in what gets made but in what gets seen (Yu 1269–70). The two studies, considered together, suggest a feedback loop: algorithmic recommendation favors familiar content; familiar content performs well within that recommendation system; and this performance data then informs Netflix's subsequent commissioning decisions, reinforcing the incentive to recycle. The result is what several scholars have characterized as an algorithmically reinforced conservatism operating beneath a marketing discourse of originality and creative risk.

It is important not to overstate this conservatism, however. Cuelenaere's own data show that a majority of Netflix Original films—440 of 658 in the period studied were non-recycled, and the study explicitly credits Netflix with a demonstrated "commitment to offering a high quantity of niche films" that a traditional studio, constrained by theatrical distribution costs, might never have greenlit (Cuelenaere 992). This is a genuinely important qualification for any account of streaming's effect on film culture: the same platform logic that produces recycling also produces an unprecedented volume of smaller, nationally and linguistically diverse films that would likely never have secured theatrical distribution in a pre-streaming market. The transformation of film culture under Netflix is therefore not adequately described as either purely liberating or purely homogenizing; it is a transformation that expands the sheer quantity and diversity of available film while simultaneously altering the underlying logic by which any individual film is selected for production and subsequently surfaced to viewers.

Disrupting National Cinema Value Chains: Policy, Classification, and Festival Ecosystems

Burgess and Stevens's central intervention is to insist that the question of how to classify Netflix as cinema or as television is never merely descriptive. Broadcasting and cultural policy regimes in most countries were built around a clear institutional separation between film (financed, in part, through public subsidy tied to domestic production and theatrical exhibition) and television (regulated separately, often with different content quotas and funding mechanisms). Netflix does not fit comfortably into either category: it commissions and distributes content that formally resembles both feature films and episodic television, it operates transnationally rather than within a single national regulatory jurisdiction, and it declines to release the kind of detailed viewership data that has historically underpinned both television ratings systems and box-office reporting (Burgess and Stevens).

The consequence of this classificatory ambiguity, Burgess and Stevens argue, is that policymakers in mid-sized national film markets such as Canada and Australia face a difficult choice. If Netflix is classified as television, it becomes subject to different (and in some jurisdictions, more permissive) content and investment obligations than feature-film financing bodies impose on theatrical productions; this classification risks allowing a dominant transnational platform to compete for local production talent and intellectual property without contributing proportionally to the public funding infrastructure that sustains domestic cinema. If Netflix is instead classified as a form of cinema, it becomes eligible for cultural subsidies and co-production treaties designed to support national film industries, but this raises the further question of whether a platform with no obligation to theatrical release should benefit from mechanisms designed to sustain theatrical exhibition (Burgess and Stevens). Burgess and Stevens do not resolve this dilemma so much as demonstrate its structural inescapability: any classificatory choice has redistributive consequences for who receives public support and under what conditions.

This policy-level disruption has a corollary at the level of festival ecosystems, which Burgess and Stevens identify as a critical, often underexamined, site where the symbolic and economic value of national cinema is negotiated. Historically, a festival premiere functioned as a value-creating event: it generated critical attention, sales agent interest, and theatrical distribution deals that allowed a film to build an audience incrementally across markets. When a film's ultimate destination is a global streaming release rather than a staggered theatrical rollout, the economic function of the festival premiere is altered; the festival increasingly serves a purely reputational function, conferring prestige on a title (and its Netflix or Amazon backers) without generating the same chain of subsequent theatrical transactions (Burgess and Stevens). Dal Yong Jin's framing of East Asian audiovisual culture under Netflix's influence extends this concern to a different regional context, suggesting that the platform's role as financier of high-profile East Asian productions—many of which achieve significant global visibility—has reshaped regional production incentives in ways that are not yet fully theorized, generating new opportunities for East Asian content to reach global audiences directly through the platform while simultaneously making that content's success newly contingent on Netflix's own internal, largely undisclosed commissioning and promotional decisions (Jin 1).

Algorithmic Curation and the Construction of the Global Audience

The third dimension of streaming's transformation of film culture concerns how audiences themselves are conceptualized, measured, and addressed. Ribke and Wayne's analysis of Netflix's weekly Global Top 10 rankings is especially valuable here because it treats Netflix's audience metrics not as neutral data but as what the authors call a "geo-political, economic, sociolinguistic construct" a category produced through specific, contestable methodological choices that Netflix makes in converting internal viewing-hours data into a public-facing ranking (Ribke and Wayne 1–3). Because Netflix does not disclose individual viewer counts, Ribke and Wayne must reconstruct estimated viewership by converting aggregate viewing hours into an approximate number of individual viewers, a conversion that rests on simplifying assumptions—for instance, that each viewer watches an entire season only once and in isolation that Netflix's own published methodology does not fully clarify (Ribke and Wayne 3–4).

The substantive finding of Ribke and Wayne's analysis is a persistent asymmetry between English-language and non-English-language content, even as non-English content has become an increasingly prominent feature of Netflix's promotional identity following the global success of titles associated with Korean, Spanish-language, and other non-English production ecosystems. English-language film and television continue to account for the majority of total global viewing hours, while the non-English viewing hours that do occur are highly concentrated in a small number of non-English-speaking production centers, meaning that Netflix's celebrated "globalization" of content consumption is, on closer inspection, the globalization of a narrow set of national industries' output rather than a broad-based redistribution of viewing attention across the full range of the world's language communities (Ribke and Wayne 6–10). This finding directly speaks to this paper's third hypothesis: that algorithmic curation and platform metrics reproduce, rather than resolve, older asymmetries of cultural power between English-language and non-English-language cinema, simply relocating that asymmetry from the terrain of theatrical distribution to the terrain of platform-internal ranking and recommendation.

Jin's special issue on East Asian audiovisual culture offers a productive counterpoint to this asymmetry thesis, showing that at least one non-English production ecosystem the South Korean film and television industry has achieved a level of sustained global visibility on Netflix that appears to exceed what earlier theatrical distribution models would have permitted, suggesting that the platform's algorithmic recommendation system, whatever its documented biases, can under certain conditions amplify a national cinema's global reach in ways that traditional distribution gatekeepers historically constrained (Jin 1). Reconciling this observation with Ribke and Wayne's asymmetry finding requires a more granular account than either study alone provides: it appears that streaming platforms can produce dramatic, highly visible instances of non-English content achieving global success, even as the aggregate structure of global viewing attention remains heavily weighted toward English-language content and a small number of non-English production centers. In this sense, Netflix's construction of the global audience produces both new success stories and reinforced structural asymmetries simultaneously, a duality that is easily obscured if either the celebratory or the critical account is taken in isolation.

Cultural Commodification: Passive Consumption and the Corporate Capture of Culture

A further strand of the literature approaches streaming's transformation of film culture less through industrial or policy analysis and more through a critique of the phenomenology of streaming consumption itself. Jack Lubin's essay, published in the Systemic Justice Project's journal, argues that Netflix's business model is structured around minimizing active viewer choice rather than maximizing it, noting that the platform's subscription structure requires a subscriber to actively cancel rather than actively renew, and that its recommendation and autoplay features are designed to keep viewers engaged in a state of low-effort, continuous consumption rather than deliberate, purposeful selection (Lubin). Lubin's argument extends this observation into a broader claim about cultural value: if the market logic that governs film selection increasingly optimizes for continued engagement rather than for the qualities that have historically been associated with artistic ambition or risk, then the resulting content ecosystem will tend, over time, toward what Lubin terms a "cheap and stale culture" of algorithmically informed repetition (Lubin).

This critique resonates with, and provides a more explicitly normative gloss on, the empirical findings already discussed. Cuelenaere's documented rise in recycled content and Yu's account, via Frey, of algorithmic taste-making as a successor to human critical judgment can both be read as instantiations of the pattern Lubin identifies at the level of business strategy: a platform whose profitability depends on subscriber retention rather than on the success of any individual title has a structural incentive to produce content that is comfortable and familiar rather than content that challenges or unsettles a viewer's expectations, since discomfort carries the risk of disengagement (Cuelenaere 993–95; Yu 1269–70; Lubin). Where Lubin's account differs from the more measured academic literature is in its degree of normative certainty: Lubin treats this dynamic as an unambiguous "corporate capture" of a domain of culture that ought to remain outside the logic of the market, whereas Cuelenaere's data-driven study is careful to note the countervailing evidence of increased content diversity and volume.

This paper takes a position between these two poles. The evidence reviewed here does not support a wholesale claim that streaming has destroyed cinematic art or replaced it with pure algorithmic repetition; the continued existence of critically acclaimed, formally ambitious Netflix Original films, and the platform's demonstrated willingness to finance niche and nationally specific projects that would likely never have secured theatrical financing, complicates any such totalizing claim. At the same time, the structural incentives Lubin identifies are corroborated by Cuelenaere's own data on the rising share of recycled content and by the broader pattern, visible across the literature reviewed here, in which algorithmic recommendation systems reward familiarity. The most defensible synthesis is that streaming has not eliminated risk-taking or artistic ambition from film culture, but it has changed the economic and curatorial conditions under which risk-taking must compete for attention, shifting the balance incrementally but measurably toward the recycled, the familiar, and the algorithmically legible.

Discussion

Bringing these three dimensions of transformation together content strategy, national industry disruption, and global audience construction supports the dialectical account anticipated in the literature review. Streaming platforms like Netflix have genuinely expanded the range of films that reach global audiences, financing content from national industries and niche genres that traditional theatrical distribution economics would have marginalized, and in specific cases (as with the global success of Korean content documented by Jin) enabling visibility that exceeds what prior distribution regimes permitted. At the same time, this expansion occurs within an institutional and algorithmic framework that systematically favors recycled and familiar content over risk-taking (Cuelenaere), that disrupts the policy and financing mechanisms that have historically sustained national and independent cinema outside the platform's own commissioning decisions (Burgess and Stevens), and that reproduces older asymmetries of English-language cultural dominance even while marketing itself as a globally inclusive service (Ribke and Wayne).

This duality maps closely onto broader theoretical debates in platform studies about the relationship between access and control. Scholars of platform capitalism have long argued that digital platforms tend to present themselves as neutral infrastructures for connecting supply and demand while in fact exercising considerable, often opaque, control over what content is produced, promoted, and rendered visible. The case of Netflix and film culture, as reconstructed through the literature examined in this paper, is a clear instance of this pattern: the platform expands nominal access to a global catalog of film while exercising near-total, largely undisclosed control over the recommendation architecture, audience metrics, and commissioning incentives that determine which films within that catalog actually reach meaningful audiences. Lubin's critique of the platform's engagement-maximizing business model, while more polemical in tone than the peer-reviewed literature, correctly identifies this underlying structural feature: expanded catalog access does not straightforwardly translate into expanded viewer agency, because the platform's algorithmic mediation of that catalog is itself a significant and non-neutral exercise of cultural power (Lubin).

A further implication concerns the discipline of film studies itself. If, as Burgess and Stevens argue, the classification of a given title as "cinema" or "television" carries significant policy and economic weight, then film studies as a discipline faces a related methodological challenge: its traditional analytical tools, developed for a medium defined by fixed theatrical run-times, collective spectatorship, and a relatively stable canon constructed through critical and festival gatekeeping, may require substantial adaptation to account for a media object that is continuously variable in length, consumed in fragmented and interruptible viewing sessions, and selected substantially through algorithmic mediation rather than through critical or festival curation. This paper's findings suggest that such an adaptation cannot simply extend existing film-theoretical categories to a new delivery mechanism; it must reckon with the possibility that streaming has produced not merely a new distribution channel for films but a partially new cultural form, one that shares significant continuity with cinema and television alike while being reducible to neither.

Conclusion

This paper set out to examine how Netflix and other OTT platforms have transformed the production, distribution, exhibition, and cultural meaning of film, and to test the hypothesis that this transformation operates simultaneously along industrial, aesthetic, and geopolitical lines. The evidence reviewed substantiates each element of that hypothesis. Cuelenaere's database analysis demonstrates that Netflix's institutional logic of content commissioning produces a catalog that is both more diverse in national origin than traditional Hollywood output and increasingly reliant on recycled narrative content, a finding that complicates the platform's own marketing rhetoric of originality (Cuelenaere). Burgess and Stevens demonstrate that the seemingly technical question of whether Netflix should be classified as television or cinema is inseparable from concrete policy consequences for the financing and survival of national film industries (Burgess and Stevens). And Ribke and Wayne demonstrate that Netflix's own presentation of its global audience, far from being a neutral technical artifact, is a geopolitically and economically inflected construction that reproduces persistent asymmetries between English-language and non-English-language content even as it enables specific, high-profile instances of non-English cultural success, as Jin's account of East Asian audiovisual culture illustrates (Ribke and Wayne; Jin).

The broader significance of these findings, read together with Yu's account of algorithmic taste-making and Lubin's critique of engagement-maximizing platform design, is that the shift from cinema halls to streaming platforms should not be understood as a simple relocation of an unchanged cultural object from one exhibition space to another. It is better understood as a reconstitution of film culture around a new set of institutional incentives subscription retention rather than box-office performance, algorithmic recommendation rather than critical or festival curation, and platform-internal metrics rather than publicly auditable box-office or ratings data that reshape what kinds of films get made, which national cinemas gain visibility, and how audiences encounter and evaluate the films available to them. Future research, building on the empirical foundations laid by Cuelenaere and by Ribke and Wayne, would benefit from more granular, comparative studies of how these dynamics play out across a wider range of national contexts beyond the North American, Australian, and East Asian cases examined here, and from continued critical attention to the normative question, raised most directly by Lubin, of whether a cultural form increasingly optimized for continuous engagement can still perform the aesthetic and social functions historically associated with cinema.

Works Cited

Cuelenaere, Eduard. “How ‘original’ are Netflix original films? mapping and understanding the recycling of content in the age of streaming cinema.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 46, no. 5, 31 Jan. 2024, pp. 991–1009, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377863221_How_original_are_Netflix_Original_films_Mapping_and_understanding_the_recycling_of_content_in_the_age_of_streaming_cinema

Jin, D., (2024) “Special Issue Topic: Netflix and East Asian Audiovisual Culture”, Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images 4(2): 1. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/gs.6905

Lubin, Jack. "Stream a Little Dream: How Netflix Turned Our Culture into Content." Systemic Justice Project Journal, vol. 1, 2021, systemicjustice.org/article/stream-a-little-dream-how-netflix-turned-our-culture-into-content/.

Ribke, Nahuel, and Michael L. Wayne. "Deconstructing Streaming Global Audiences: Netflix's Global Top 10 as a Geo-Political, Economic, Sociolinguistic Construct." The Communication Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 2026, pp. 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2024.2442207

Yu, Zizheng. “Netflix recommends: Algorithms, film choice, and the history of the taste             Netflix recommends: Algorithms, film choice, and the history of the taste             , by Mattias Frey, California, University of California Press, 2021; 282 pp., $29.95 (PBK), ISBN: 9780520382046.” Information, Communication & Society, vol. 27, no. 6, 28 Aug. 2023, pp. 1268–1271, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2023.2252485.