Collection of Streaming Content

Today, the media companies that rely on streaming services are constantly publishing new versions of their software, and thereby altering the user’s experience. This is part of a highly competitive market, which is evolving as quickly, if not faster, than the web and app ecologies that support it. The Internet Archive, as well as national libraries in countries with mandatory deposit legislation, document the cultural industries online and receive or collect their published content. However, no National web archive nor the Internet Archive hold a copy of the Netflix catalogue for research purposes. Nor its websites or its many apps that frame users’ access points to the Netflix catalogue across different devices. This paper presents findings from a survey of web archiving of streaming services, in the form of published content, metadata, and user interfaces as collected in the Danish web archive 2005-2021. I apply a broad yet flexible definition of streaming (Spilker & Colbjørnsen, 2021; Herbert et al., 2019), which states that streaming has various dimensions and is best understood comparatively. Utilizing an open explorative approach proposed by Fage-Butler et al. (2022), I map the evolution of the term ‘streaming’ (incl. semantic variants: stream*) in the Danish Web Archive. First, this will show when and how often the term ‘streaming’ occurred on the Danish Web. Second, which actors (websites) on the Danish Web used the term ‘streaming’ the most, and how their use has evolved. Third, I review to what extent 50 prominent streaming services in Denmark have been collected. I measure the number of elements archived per streaming service: websites, web players, the published media content, its metadata, and device-specific apps. The existing collection and documentation of streaming services and their elements are lacking. These findings point to an urgent need to optimize how we document and collect streaming and its elements to research the impact of streaming across national and international web domains. This paper further unlocks the archived Web as a source with its own particular features and as empirical data (cf. Brügger et al., 2020).