Documentaries: Have Streaming Services Made Them More Popular?
Do you remember a time when Attenborough was just a friend of your gran’s whom she mentioned once in a while? He’s been around a lot longer than you would think, but streaming services really put him on the map. We’re looking at the rise of documentaries since streaming services became mainstream.
A change in attitude
If you cast your mind back to far before the days of Netflix, when the dial up sound was still etched into your mind, you might remember exactly what the industry thought of documentaries. They were what your grandparents watched. A slow, quiet, description of the animal world that was likely to go in one ear and out the other as you wound down for the weekend. They were played on Sunday evenings, which is still notoriously awful for TV, after Heartbeat. Let that sink in.
And yet, today, Louis Theroux, Professor Brian Cox and David Attenborough are all considered British entertainment royalty. We would probably anoint Attenborough as the next king if we could.
Depending on the genre, documentaries are still slow and quiet, but their hidden simmering tension is felt better, absorbed better and talked about in plenty of places beyond the bingo hall.
The merging of watching and commenting
Correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation, but it is interesting to see the rise in streaming and social media alongside the rise in documentary. It cannot be a coincidence that we all started watching and commenting about documentaries since streaming social media became mainstream. Streaming services, at least initially, were used on your computer or laptop, allowing for the chance to keep a tab open with Twitter next to it. And this in turn has led to some interesting fandoms.
The emergence of fandoms
There is no one size fits all documentary watcher. To say, “I watch documentaries” is like saying “I watch movies”. There are too many genres to create a snapshot impression of someone from that.
And with the emergence of social media, fandoms have indeed developed. Sure, individual members might dip into various genres, just like movies, but you’ve got the true-crime fans, the wildlife fans, the societal documentary fans, sports documentary fans who like the coverage found on GGPoker, music and movie documentary fans, and then those that just want to see something wacky, like the strange world of what was the Tiger King documentary.
This is almost certainly due to the rise in social media, but not the initial cause. With more people given access to documentaries via streaming services, fans then took to social media to comment on what they were watching. Given that the point of documentaries is to make you think, there was a lot to talk about.
Have streaming services made them better?
There has definitely been a noticeable uptake in documentaries since the rise in streaming services. With the fact that you can watch them at any point and you can get more out of them, depending on the genre, documentary makers have seen the potential and acted.
You can’t say the likes of the David Attenborough wildlife documentaries have changed much, but there is a noticeable addition to the budget and camera quality of the material. Meanwhile, just about any crime that occurs in the western world is swiftly followed by a docu-series, even if it doesn’t quite merit 6 hours of material.
And this is where you get a positive cycle when it comes to documentaries. No longer are they played while you’re trying to put the kids to bed, but instead, when you want a thrill a horror movie won’t replicate, or righteous justice, or a calm environment to study in, or something crazy to talk about. With more people watching documentaries and actually getting something from it, more and better documentaries are made, and the cycle continues, giving the documentary genre the kick it needed.
