Thinking about platforming with more traditional mediatization: Lessons from audiovisual analysis

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, film and television industries are more and more confronted with the appearance of new intermediation services which have created platforms. In a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), we try to analyze the place and role that these new services are taking in the audiovisual sector. Our corpus is composed of the platforms of four companies that have developed activities on a vast international scale, Netflix (with its service of the same name), Amazon (Prime Video service), Disney (Disney+) and Apple (Apple TV+). Based on our corpus, it seems to us that some changes have been the result of firms’ activities, but that it is not as linear as it may appear at first sight. Transformations are at work but there is also some “Old Media Persistence.” Thus, we find a certain “contamination” of old practices originating from the organization of industrial channels and forms in the mutations currently presented by these new intermediation services.