If you’ve been enjoying the latest season of dystopian sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror on Netflix, you must have an opinion or two regarding the first couple of episodes, Joan is Awful and Loch Henry, both of which feature a lightly-fictionalised version of the Netflix platform itself, named Streamberry.
How lightly fictionalised is it? It even uses the “tudum” sound effect.
Streamberry is only briefly featured at the tail end of Loch Henry but it’s a pivotal part of Joan is Awful, which focuses on a woman (Annie Murphy) who discovers she’s inadvertently signed away all her data and life story rights to the streamer, and her story is now being told in excruciating detail in the titular series.
For anyone who has ever scrolled speedily though the T&Cs before hitting Accept, it’s a chilling bit of speculative fiction. But that fiction is now, at least in part, fact, thanks to Netflix launching a version of the Streamberry site.
If you have a click through, you’ll quickly see it’s mainly just rebranded landing pages for existing Black Mirror content on Netflix, but if you smash that Make Me Awful button, you can plug in your name and picture, and it’ll do you up as the star of your own Joan is Awful series.
But here’s the kicker—Like Joan, you might want to actually read those terms and conditions, because in order to participate in this little bit of promotional ephemera, you must agree to “…grant the Netflix entity that provides you with this Experience, its affiliates and respective successors and assigns and anyone authorized by any of them (collectively, “Netflix”), the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive right to record, depict, and/or portray you and use, and grant to others the right, but not the obligation, to record, depict, and/or portray you and use, your actual or simulated likeness, name, photograph, voice, actions, etc. in connection with the development, production, distribution, exploitation, advertising, promotion and publicity of this Experience, in all media, now known and later devised, and all languages, formats, versions, and forms related to such Experience without compensation to you or any other individual, unless prohibited by law.”
So, you’re giving your image rights to Netflix in seeming perpetuity. Righto.
Parsing whether that’s horribly cynical or a brilliantly satirical work of marketing genius is left as an exercise to the reader.
