In 1976 two Hollywood studios, Universal and Disney, sued Sony over its new Betamax video recorder, arguing that taping television broke copyright law. They lost. In the 1984 "Betamax case," the Supreme Court ruled that taping television at home to watch later was fair use. Within a few years the studios that had tried to kill home video were earning more from cassettes than from theaters. The lesson repeats through this level: new ways of watching frighten the film industry, then remake it.

From discs to streams

Netflix began in 1997 by renting DVDs through the mail, started streaming in 2007 and launched its first major original series, House of Cards, in 2013. Streaming delivers films over the internet on demand, usually for a monthly subscription. Amazon, Disney, Apple and others followed, while YouTube, founded in 2005, let anyone upload video. Cheap digital cameras and even phones put filmmaking tools in more hands: Tangerine (2015) was shot on iPhones. Fewer gatekeepers decide who may make a film, though being seen among millions of titles has become its own challenge.

The business has a familiar shape. The 1948 Paramount decision (Level 3) kept studios from owning theaters, and a court ended those rules in 2020. Meanwhile streaming companies combine production and distribution, a new form of vertical integration: they make the film, own the platform and control the screen in your living room.

Windows and theaters

A release window is a period when a film is available in only one channel, such as theaters, before reaching home viewers. For decades the theatrical window ran about three months. The COVID-19 pandemic closed cinemas in 2020, and Warner Bros. released its whole 2021 slate on its streaming service the same day as in theaters. Windows have since shortened. Theater owners argue that watching with strangers in the dark is part of what film is, and some festivals agree. In 2018 the Cannes Film Festival required films in competition to have a French theatrical release, which kept Netflix out.

Algorithms and data

Recommendation algorithms suggest titles based on what a viewer and similar viewers have watched, and Netflix has said that most viewing on its service starts from a recommendation. Defenders say algorithms help audiences discover films they would never have found. Foreign-language work has reached huge audiences: the Korean series Squid Game (2021) became Netflix's most watched series at the time, and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019) became the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Critics reply that platforms keep their viewing data private, so the public and even filmmakers cannot check what succeeded, and that commissioning by data favors the familiar.

Labor and preservation

Streaming changed how creative workers are paid. Under the old system, writers and actors earned residuals when films were rerun or sold on disc; streaming services often paid flat fees regardless of a hit's size. The 2023 Hollywood writers' and actors' strikes centered on streaming pay and limits on artificial intelligence, and both unions won new protections after months on picket lines.

Ownership raises another worry. A Library of Congress study in 2013 found that about 70 percent of American silent feature films are believed lost, mostly through neglect and decaying film stock. Digital files do not burn, but titles that exist on only one platform can be removed and vanish when a company drops them to cut costs or taxes, as several did in 2022 and 2023. Preserving films still depends on someone deciding they are worth keeping.

Worked example: Roma

Alfonso Cuarón's Roma (2018) is a black-and-white film in Spanish and Mixtec about Cleo, an Indigenous domestic worker for a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s. Cleo was played by Yalitza Aparicio, a first-time actor who was nominated for Best Actress. Netflix bought the film. Kept out of competition at Cannes, it premiered at Venice and won the Golden Lion. Large theater chains refused to show it because Netflix would not respect the usual window, so it played briefly in a small number of cinemas before reaching subscribers in roughly 190 countries. It won three Academy Awards, including Best Director.

Now apply the whole course. Cuarón's long takes and deep focus, especially in a beach rescue filmed in a single unbroken shot, recall Bazin and the neorealists (Level 4). Cleo is the kind of person who usually stands at the edge of the frame carrying a tray; here she is the center (Level 7). And the film's path from festival to living room shows the streaming era's trade: a tiny theatrical audience, then a global one chosen partly by an algorithm.

A film that treats a domestic worker as a full human being, worth two hours of attention, makes an argument about dignity without stating it. Seeing how it does that, through framing, sound, editing and distribution, is what it means to watch a film well.