The emergence of the internet changed how we watch television, and technology has advanced to the point where we’ve thrown out the old immovable televisions and replaced them with Mobile/Portable televisions. In august 1997, Reed Hastings and his friend Marc Randolph founded the new movie-rental service called Netflix with the idea of mailing DVDs to paying customers. At the time, there were not lots of renting DVD rental services.

Today Netflix is one of the world’s leading entertainment services, with 223 million paid memberships in over 190 countries, and also has a selection of its productions theatrically. All ideas of Netflix had innovated the media industry, and the technological convenience made it easier to watch movies, but in the “Early belief of the “internet” as a form of “new media” and narratives of technological replacement concealed the reality of what has transpired—that the most desired application for distributing video via internet protocol has been accessing legacy television content outside its linear delivery.”( essential reading) Cable, along with video and DVD rental, have always been about niche markets and long tail economies, but Netflix has been able to adapt to new technologies better than its competitors. Despite being an outlier in the media and entertainment industries, Netflix ultimately achieved the economic power to acquire and deliver “premium” content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cwWiC6Gs80

From Dear White People Season 1 Episode 1, we can see that there’s more than only a series. It showed the extreme racism but also pictured the intensity of the movement for black lives Matter. “The black face” as a theme of a university party organised for white students shows that racism is super intense and the rivalry between white and black students because black students disrupted the party. There is also prominent narration in the form of a ‘non-threatening’ Morgan Freeman-style narrator and through Sam’s radio show. The representation of black life matters from the series is hard to watch and difficult to believe that happened in the past. Netflix engaged in the black life matters movement by having them on their platform series of it but also denouncing racism.

Aixi Fu