For more than a year now, much of the discourse around popular culture has focused on one thing: the streaming wars. With the launches of Apple TV+ and Disney+—and amidst the continued production of huge slates of content from behemoths like Netflix and Amazon—streaming services, taken as a whole, became a massive source of cultural output. No one ever expected they’d soon become the only source of it. Now, as the coronavirus pandemic spreads and social distancing becomes essential (please everyone, stay home if you can), streaming may become, for the foreseeable future, the main site of collective cultural experience. Schools are closing; movie theaters and performing arts spaces are shutting their doors; sports are on hold. Suddenly, the large libraries of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Disney+, Spotify, and so on, are the nexus of humanity’s artistic consumption as everyone attempts to contain the spread of Covid-19 in their communities.
The effect of this on the entertainment industry so far is two-fold. On one hand, movie multiplexes, concert halls, Broadway theaters, and other venues are rapidly closing, impacting the revenues of those industries. On the other, the coronavirus outbreak has left people home-bound, with little else to do but binge-watch (and, OK, read; reading is good). Hollywood in particular began seeing the effects of the virus months ago; qua