Mission

The Mission here at Outstream basically comes down to two major constructs, convenience and respect. It is intended that the service provides convenient, safe, and affordable access to premium media content, whilst respecting your privacy, wallet, and palette. To be sure, the kinks are being worked out, so the ‘Mission,’ as it were, is hardly reflected, but the spirit holds!

Storytime!

This particular version of the intended service is not necessarily reflective of what ought to be considered the final product, so it is a bit difficult to apply much in the way of context, sort of like trying to explain a zebra by way of a patch of skin under a colored light. But one supposes that a little might at least make for some mild entertainment. The ‘firm,’ as it were, was founded in 2024 by a ‘health care guy,’ with a penchant for mass media. He founded it, somewhat hilariously, because he was trying to watch a series (a Passage, one might say) of Jane Austen adaptations, and found that one of the major films was not included in an extant subscription. And naturally, rather than pay a nominal fee, why not formulate a business plan for how one can account for a niche concern and ultimately generalize a concept?

Now that sounds perfectly awful, if nonetheless humorous. And it did quite bother him that here, a storyteller (he’s a self-proclaimed writer too, sheesh with this guy, and not that this should cast any aspersions upon the veracity of statements therein), had for this rather interesting notion almost no personal basis (aside from a regard for Ms. Austen); that is bad product design, if still perfectly acceptable and frankly far more common a circumstance than anyone might care to realize. And so it nagged, until he found himself somewhat zoned out during an immersive sound-bath-cum-yoga session. Oddly, as he stared alternately into an unexpected patch of deep-darkness where a dim light fixture’s umbra met the shadow of a ceiling rafter, and into a three-quarters full water bottle to see if the reverberating ambient sound might create any ripples in the surface tension, reclined on a series of pillows in a rather comically comfortable stance, and floated in a sea of resonant harmony, he started reciting to himself Hamlet’s monologue. You know the one, from Act III Sc. i, specifically the part about the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ And in keeping with the notional yogic tendency for twists and turns to resolve themselves, hence began a series of mental gymnastics that solidified into a line of reasoning, of sorts.

‘Slings and Arrows,’ was a Canadian televised comedy-drama that aired roughly twenty years ago, that the ‘founder,’ watched several years ago over the course of the loss of a parent. It is not a terrifically popular show, but on the strength of a critical recommendation, he watched it and found it quite good. Needless to say, the memory of this particular piece of media became somewhat tied to the memory of that particular time, a sort of totem that accounted for a necessary diversion. And hence considered, this guy began to look back and realize that quite a few notable memories, of notable times, were in some way intertwined with little pockets of associated media. When he first moved in with his older brother into their rather dingy Boston apartment and the cable/internet had not yet been hooked up but they had a DVD player and a Blockbuster around the corner. The video store had a special that allowed you to rent a free old movie with every new release, and so they, hardly on particularly good personal terms at that point, went about building out movie nights, these themselves an evocation of their younger days when they would do something similar, and would in the future continue to do. Each night usually consisted of takeout, the very Ikea couch, and two films, totaling a little Passage (of course), that amounted to a temporary truce. And, oh by the way, they were always quite good films because this guy knows how to pick ‘em. He would go on to set up similar movie nights with his younger brother; whenever the parents were away they would order in and find some movies, as he attempted the notoriously impossible task of trying to vibe with a teenager. And way back at the beginning there were the memories of the little stacks of pirated Bollywood movies, with their neon, lengthwise VHS labels, that were apparently a part of the grocery shop. Each bundle a separate Passage into late family nights and making fun of hilariously bad action sequences.

He wanted to evoke something along those lines, that media does not have to always be this crazy endless stream. That you can take a little packet of it, turn it into your own Passage, and then leave it be without signing your life away.