As Hollywood creatives brace for a merger between Netflix and Warner Bros., an old adage comes to mind — “the medium is the message.” Coined in the 1960s by Canadian philosopher and media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, the phrase warned against new technologies that don’t merely deliver content, but reorganise perception and cultural priorities. Mr. McLuhan’s perspective was shaped by the arrival of television in the post-WWII world. It was the time when TV sets were finding prominent positions in people’s living rooms. This new media was reframing how people viewed the world and made sense of it.
While the 60s might seem like a long time ago, the imprint new forms of technology leave on us continues to remain. The rise of streaming platforms like Netflix, in that sense, demands scrutiny not for what they show us, but for how they quietly reshape the conditions under which culture is produced and consumed.
The recent turbulence around Netflix’s expanding dominance, including its deepening relationship with legacy studios like Warner Bros., has reignited anxieties about the future of cinema.
While much of the public debate around this merger seems to centre around the fate of movies in theatres, I think a much deeper transformation is underway. And this goes beyond distribution of content.
Cinema, for most of its history, was structured around scarcity and collectivity. Films arrived at fixed times, in designated spaces, and demanded attention from a gathered audience. This architecture shaped not only the economics of filmmaking but also its aesthetics and social meaning.
The act of going to the movies was communal, ritualised, and public. Streaming dissolved these constraints. It replaced shared time with on-demand access, public space with private screens, and narrative immersion with perpetual availability.
And such a medium that prioritises convenience, speed, and personalisation would inevitably alter how stories are experienced. Binge-watching collapses narrative pacing; algorithms flatten discovery into prediction; and constant access erodes the sense of anticipation that once framed cultural events.
In this setting, content becomes less an occasion and more a background condition — always present, rarely central. This is why the Netflix-studio convergence unsettles cinema owners and cultural workers alike.
When films are conceived primarily for living rooms and mobile screens, scale, duration, and visual language adapt accordingly. The medium exerts pressure long before the audience presses play.
There is also a subtler consequence. Streaming platforms encourage solitary consumption. Each viewer inhabits a personalised catalogue, shaped by data and preference rather than shared cultural urgency. Over time, this fragments the common reference points that once allowed films to function as public conversation.
What was once collectively encountered became individually curated experience.
While streaming has clearly expanded access, diversified storytelling, and weakened long-standing gatekeepers in cinema, this medium also excels in diluting attention and creating viewing siloes.
This will in turn will erase the social centrality of cinema and remove the assumption that stories are encountered together.
This won’t lead to a death of movies, but a quiet reconfiguration of how culture fits into daily life. And these are changes we will barely notice. That’s because the viewer will remain fixated on the doom-scrolling effect of a content catalog curated by an algorithm. And by the time the content becomes visible to the viewer, the medium has already done its work.
Beyond this deal, Netflix’s real legacy will not be measured by subscriber counts or awards, but by how thoroughly it has normalised a new way of consuming media — one that trades shared experience for on-demand access, and collective attention for personalised flow.
Published – December 19, 2025 08:00 am IST
