The Epistemology of Streaming Services
Introduction
Streaming services have grown dramatically over the past decade and a half. In the past, most people got their video entertainment from movie theatres and cable television. This, however, has been steadily changing throughout the world. Consumers want what they want, when they want it.
This want from consumers grew into the streaming services that we know today. Services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Sling have recently rocketed into the popularity because of the incredible convenience that they bring. This convenience is not to be understated, as many businesses are turning to speed and convenience over quality. With a seemingly limitless catalogue of entertainment at their fingertips, how does this impact the average person’s ability to acquire knowledge?
This specific epistemic evaluation will be aimed towards how the existence of streaming services has changed how the average person acquires knowledge about current events, as well as pieces of history.
Streaming Services Defined
Streaming services, according to “PC Magazine” are “an online provider of entertainment (music, movies, etc.) that delivers the content via an Internet connection to the subscriber’s computer, TV, or mobile device.”
This is a great working definition for that which will be epistemically evaluated in this blog post.
The first interesting piece of this definition is that it must be online, and that the entertainment that it provides must be transmit through the internet. This is different from cable or satellite entertainment in the way that it can be accessed anywhere that a consumer has an internet connection. It is also different from an MP3 player or a WALKMAN as any music on the platform is available at all times to the user.
Another way in which these services differ from their predecessors is that they do not require the purchase of specific pieces of their library, they simply offer an overall subscription fee that gives users access to every single item in their library. This is an incredible step in entertainment distribution, and seems as if it is such a good deal that the streaming services could not possibly be turning a profit with these prices.
Streaming Services and Social Media
The main, and most important, aspect of streaming services is that they give their uses extreme ease of use. Users can access these services from almost anywhere, and they have to simply select exactly what they wish to see.
In this way, they operate similarly to social media services. Social media is accessible from anywhere and also gives the ease of use that makes streaming services ever so popular.
The two are similar in their history as well. As shown in the article “Media Consumption in the Age of COVID-19,” the two information technologies rise and fall together in popularity. Recently, they have risen in popularity due to the pandemic, but in the future it is possible that we could see them fall together as well.
This shared level popularity begs the question, why does this happen? One theory might be that the two are simply similar in what they provide to their consumers, but a more convincing theory would be that the two complement each other nicely. A sample behavior pattern to support this would work as follows.
- Person invests in a streaming service
- Person enjoys said streaming service enough to invest in a few others and decide that paying for cable television is no longer worth the cost
- Person then, as they have no source of news, turns to their phone, and social media, for instant news
- Person then becomes content with acquiring their news from their phone, as it is in essentially the same format as their entertainment
Benefits
The epistemic benefits of streaming services are that they are fast, and easy to use. That much is clear. Is there more to them than that which is just on the surface?
Most streaming services offer documentaries, podcasts, and informational programs in addition to their normal entertainment-based selection. These informational programs can teach people a great deal about a certain topic, and are usually incredibly reliable. As they take so much time and effort to make, it would be a waste for someone to create something that is intended to inform people, but inform them of the wrong information. If this was found out, that specific piece of informational content would be completely useless.
Streaming services also benefit from the ability to have little to no ads depending on the service. If one pays to remove the ads from a streaming service, then they will be able to completely dodge the false beliefs that they may have acquired from said ads.
Streaming services have only a few epistemic benefits, but they clearly have specialized themselves into these few fields.
Costs
The epistemic costs of a streaming service differ a bit from the benefits. These costs include that they are slow and lacking in information.
Many streaming service’s only available information is through documentaries or podcasts, in which one would have to listen to an entire episode or installment to acquire the knowledge that they are looking for. This makes the process of acquiring detailed and complete information take a bit longer than it may take with other methods.
Streaming services also pose a similar threat to normal cable and satellite television in that they do provide a decent amount of false beliefs. While it is reasonable to suggest that most people would not necessarily acquire false beliefs from something they perceive to be entertainment, it would be foolish to believe that the media that one consumes would not have an impact on their way of thinking.
Analysis
Using the five epistemic objectives given by Alvin Goldman, I will evaluate streaming services.
- Power: The amount of acquirable true beliefs is average. While there are some streaming services that can have quite a few informational podcasts, they are not the norm and most streaming services will have more specialized informational content like documentaries.
- Reliability: Because of the nature of entertainment, it is possible for consumers to acquire many false beliefs from streaming services, but this does not differ greatly from what normal cable or satellite television would do to consumers. The beliefs acquired through informational content, however, would normally be incredibly reliable.
- Speed: The speed is definitely slow for a streaming service. They are incapable of giving out any beliefs, whether true or not, within a reasonable time frame.
- Fecundity: Streaming services are one of, if not, the most popular entertainment outlets currently. While they are not typically used to acquire true beliefs, many people have access to their information.
- Efficiency: The benefits are relatively equal to the costs, as there are not a great deal of benefits, but because there is not a great deal of true beliefs to be acquired, the available false beliefs have the same struggle in their spread.
I really appreciate Goldman’s criteria for evaluating the epistemic value of a technology. His general terms allow for a more specified description of how each term will apply to the technology in question.
All in all, I believe that streaming services do not help or hinder our ability to acquire knowledge over their replacements. I do believe that they can be epistemically improved, but currently they struggle in their ability to portray their information at all. Most of their information that they would provide about current events has moved to social media, which is maybe less epistemically valuable than we would like. While it is possible for cable and satellite television to have the same epistemic problems as social media, it just has not historically encountered those issues before now. Streaming services have simply distanced themselves from the idea that television should be a “do it all” platform, and specialized itself into almost an entirely entertainment based platform.
References
Bloom, David. “Simon Says AI Tool Turns Text Transcript Into Video-Editing Platform.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 8 Dec. 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2020/12/08/simon-says-unveils-tool-that-turns-text-transcript-into-video-editing-platform/?sh=3d38175f7efe.
Definition of Streaming Service. www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/streaming-service.
ECI. “How Video Streaming Services Are Forcing the TV Industry to Transform.” ECI Media Management, 2020, www.ecimediamanagement.com/tv-industry-forcing-to-transform/.
Hasan, Md Rajibul, et al. “Excessive Use of Online Video Streaming Services: Impact of Recommender System Use, Psychological Factors, and Motives.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 80, Mar. 2018, pp. 220–228., doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.11.020.
JP Morgan. “Media Consumption in the Age of COVID-19.” Jpmorgan.com, 1 May 2020, www.jpmorgan.com/insights/research/media-consumption.
Nelson, Angela. “What Streaming Services Mean for the Future of Television.” Tufts Now, Tufts University, 12 Dec. 2019, now.tufts.edu/articles/what-streaming-services-mean-future-television.
Thompson, Rodney. “The Trends Changing Broadcasting: The Future of Broadcast TV: The Weather Company, an IBM Business.” The Trends Changing Broadcasting | The Future of Broadcast TV | The Weather Company, an IBM Business, 16 June 2020, www.ibm.com/weather/industries/broadcast-media/trends-that-will-change-broadcasting.
Goldman, A. (1986). Epistemology and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goldman, A. I. (1992). Liaisons: Philosophy meets the cognitive and social sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.