Jumping in: How streaming washed over New Zealand and washed away physical formats

Streaming has fundamentally changed the entertainment landscape.

Streaming has well and truly dominated the way we experience everything from music, books, film and TV. Karl Puschmann takes a look at the key changes from the past decade and how it's affected the entertainment experience now.

The first things you see when you enter my house are bookcases. They lean heavily against each wall in this rectangular room, stretch to the ceiling and groan under the weight of my various obsessions.

To your immediate right is a bookcase crammed with Compact Discs and beside that is a bookcase filled with books, magazines and comics. To your left stands a bookcase stacked with DVDs and DVD boxsets of movies and TV shows and beside that is a bookcase stuffed with a vast collection of current and retro video games. Directly in front of you, records spill off a long bookcase overflowing with vinyl and floods the small amount of empty floorspace.

Like an angel pointing the way to heaven a shaft of light shines down from the staircase that's between the video games and the records. Its warm glow highlights the exit from this tomb of dead media to lead you up, up and away and into the clutter-free living area of the house.

All of this could be in your phone.

It's true that I love all this stuff, even while recognising that literally all of it has been rendered completely obsolete and unnecessary by the great advancements in technology. What were once my treasured collections of art are now simply relics of a bygone age that take up too much space.

All of the art contained on these endless stacks of bulky plastic, paper and cardboard is now available to me at the push of a button. In fact, nearly all of the art ever created is. It no longer requires that space consuming physicality, only a decent internet connection.

The revolution was not televised, instead it's being streamed.

A decade ago Stats NZ released the results of their Internet Service Provider (ISP) Survey. Looking back from today's always-connected future it paints a quaint picture. They excitedly reported that in July, 2009, the total number of broadband subscribers had exceeded one million Kiwis for the first time. These Broadband users, they stated, made up nearly three-quarters of all Internet subscribers. The rest, around 350,000 Internet browsers, were still dialling into the world wide web via slow, screeching, 56k modems. Oh, the horror.

Nestling in the survey's results was another harbinger of the future, the rapid growth of people getting online using "mobile data cards or satellite technology". Phones, in other words. The survey heralds the dawn of the Smartphone, specifically the revolutionary iPhone 3G which was released here in July 2008. That phone's "cool factor" and desirability an undeniable force in leading a reported mobile growth of 53 percent, and rocketing the amount of connected Kiwis to a whopping 220,000.

Natalie Portman in the Netflix movie ANNIHILATION.

From these seeds our modern streaming world would blossom in just 10 short years. Watching video and streaming music on a creaky dial-up modem, or your flip phone, was pretty much a pipe dream when even a simple photo would take seconds to load on a browser and downloading a single song would take over an hour for a low-quality mp3.

2009's Broadband surge changed all that. Yet it still took years for streaming to trickle into the mainstream ocean. In 2009 the only viable streaming option was YouTube, and Netflix didn't launch here until 2015. Now, we're all online all the time, juggling multiple streaming subscriptions and streaming the latest episode of our fave show on the bus.

Unfortunately, Stats NZ halted their long-running ISP survey last October. Yet, 2018's results amply demonstrate streaming's uptake. Only now Fibre is the new connection on the block, up a huge 54 per cent upon the previous year to increase to 598,000 users. The results also show that mobile users gobbled up 10,089,000 Gigabytes of data in June 2018, up 56 percent from 2017. Back in 2009 we lived comfortably within the confines of our 20GB data caps.

Streaming has taken over television.

Since Stats NZ stopped their surveys there have been two massive streaming incentives. The first was Spark kicking off the Rugby World Cup on their streaming sports service and the second was Disney throwing open their cherished vault of childhood classics and modern blockbusters, including Star Wars and Pixar, on their streaming service Disney Plus. It's reasonable to assume that the numbers in 2019 would have once again surged as more and more Kiwis dive headfirst into the streams.

It's no exaggeration to say that streaming is this decade's dominant pop culture trend. The only other thing which could come close would be the meteoric and dominating rise of Marvel's superheroes on the big screen - all of which can now be streamed on your small screen at home.

The Coen brothers movie The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was made for Netflix, not the cinema.

Streaming has completely transformed the way art is consumed. Major cinematic events now take place online instead of theaters; Netflix, for example, has released movies by the Coen Brothers (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), Alex Garland (Annihilation) and, most recently, Martin Scorsese (The Irishman).

It has also fundamentally altered the music landscape, decimating not just physical formats like CDs and Vinyl, but also digital stores like iTunes as people now overwhelmingly choose to stream music as opposed to purchasing it. Streaming subs now account for 62 per cent of our total music industry revenue.

Now, if you want to rewatch a flick from a Hollywood great, or crank up that album you love, rows and rows of bookcases in your house are no longer required to keep them on. There is an argument to be made that ceding this ownership leaves you at the mercy of the streaming giants who can - and do - remove content regularly. Even digital purchases aren't safe, as Amazon demonstrated when, in an ironic move, it deleted George Orwell's 1984 off people's devices even though they had paid for it.

A pile of compact discs.

But most people aren't too bothered. There's always something else to watch, something different to listen to.

Streaming's intangibility has also drastically altered our physical environment; video shops are extinct, bookshops dwindle and most shopping malls are now bereft of a dedicated music store. This is unquestionably a sad state of affairs. And yet ... and yet.

Who would go back? Much as I love owning a well-curated collection, streaming is just so damn convenient. And, in these expensive times, so much cheaper. Truth be told I haven't browsed my DVD bookshelf in years, and my CDs only keep their relevance thanks to my outdated, Blutooth-less car.

Nearly every album is at your fingertips.

All of this stuff is now hopelessly unnecessary and I often toy with the idea of getting rid of it and reclaiming the precious space it consumes in the house. Does it spark joy? Some does, but most of it now feels weighty and burdensome. I don't think I'd miss it and my partner would be overjoyed to see it all gone. I could go mad on TradeMe, I sometimes think, and flog my life off with a start price of $1, no reserve.

But then uncommon sense kicks in and I think, no. No. Not yet ... but soon.

Then I ascend up and into the light, sparing none of it a second thought as my phone automatically connects to the Blutooth stereo in the lounge to seamlessly start streaming the album I'm jamming on Spotify while I wonder if the new episode of The Mandalorian has dropped yet.