Escaping the “Iron Cage” of Movie/TV Streaming Providers

Although marketing scholars and media experts have championed the digitalized access to filmed entertainment, recorded music and books for the past 25 years as a disruptive technology that is revolutionizing and ‘democratizing’ how consumers would now read books, listen to recorded music and watch movies and TV shows, the persistent popularity of printed books and the recent resurgence of vinyl records have called this dominant discourse into question. But while the deep resonance of vinyl records with consumers has received some scholarly attention in recent years, hardly any research looked at whether similar trends occur in relation to other entertainment industries such as movies/TV shows. Drawing on the author’s autoethnographic insights and phenomenological interviews with 12 informants, this ethnographic study draws on Weber’s conflict theory to explore whether consumers may increasingly experience filmed entertainment providers’ streaming subscription services as an(other) ‘iron cage’ limiting their access to filmed entertainment. We found that filmed entertainment streaming providers are in the powerful position of producing their own movies and TV shows that they increasingly use as exclusive ‘subscription bait’. Hence, consumers increasingly feel trapped an ‘iron cage’ of multiple streaming subscription services they are no longer able to escape from.