The Streaming Innovation Alliance’s Mission Continues
The Streaming Innovation Alliance turns a year old today. If you haven’t heard of SIA, you’ve certainly been impacted by its commitment to giving streamers a unified voice so they can keep creating the films and television series you love – and delivering them to audiences when, where, and how they choose to watch. Once viewed as an upstart to traditional entertainment, streamers have become a beloved part of the visual storytelling landscape. As the advent and deployment of digital film capabilities upended but did not replace the use of film on film and TV sets, the streaming world has also enhanced and enriched the industry. The large, disparate streaming community offers more storytellers from more diverse backgrounds a chance to tell their stories and find their audiences with more freedom and opportunity than ever before.
The SIA counts among its members big players, like Max, Disney+, Netflix, Paramount +, BET+, Discovery +, Telemundo, and Peacock, and smaller, crucial independent streamers like TV AfrolandTV and In The Black Network, which both highlights black voices and original stories, and Skinsplex Network, which features unlimited access to movies and media from Indigenous filmmakers, including original programming, documentaries, shorts, and animation. Streamers have opened the door to one new world after another, allowing millions of people to experience cultures and people they had little access to before or, just as crucially, see themselves reflected in the shows and films they watch for the first time. Whether it’s writer/director Issa López centering a Native American detective in her chilling, thrilling True Detective: Night Country for Max, Shōgun’s Emmy-winning editor Aika Miyake bringing a Japanese female’s perspective to one of the series’ most astonishing episodes, or Iwájú visual effects supervisor Marlon West bringing afro-futurism to Disney+, streamers enlarge our world.
While streaming has become the most popular way for Americans to find films, shows, music, and more they want, it’s also expanded opportunities for the people who make up the vast entertainment industry workforce. This creative explosion has been a boon for everyone who works on a film or TV set, whether it’s a showrunner building out her world on the beaches of Nantucket or the costume designers creating lush looks for worlds beyond worlds in a galaxy far, far away. The desire for more stories has opened up a space for producers and creators like Mann Robinson, a tireless filmmaker and TV creator whose sound and stage studios in Georgia are a creative production hub.
At The Credits, we’ve been covering the creatives working in the streaming industry since its inception (more or less), projects big and small, whether it’s how The Penguin production designer Kalina Ivanov turned New York City into a Gotham for the new Max series or how showrunner and editor Inbal B. Lessner and editor Kevin Hibbard helped construct Netflix’s haunting documentary series Escaping Twin Flames. As the streaming industry has grown, so has the number of incredible filmmakers and TV creators eager to share the craft behind the magic with us.
