“It’s not that they don’t give notes," he says. "It’s that they tend to be less willing to make radical changes once they have bought your series, which is much more common in the broadcast space.”

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There's also a difference in how stories are accepted. Broadcast television has rigid expectations of episode and season lengths, but streaming services like Netflix have more freedom, according to Peter Friendlander, the company's vice president of original series.

“We really let the narrative find its best form here, as opposed to saying we're looking for X,” Friedlander says.

“A storyteller can come in with an idea and it can be a pitch about a particular story, and we can decide in that moment with the storyteller if the best version is as a film, as a series, as a documentary. We really like to look at what is the best expression of this type of storytelling.”

On the technology side, streaming services are, as you may expect, a step ahead of some of the more traditional players. The company's director of studio technology, Amie Tornincasa, says the setup on most Hollywood film sets still stuck in the 1980s.

She recalls being shocked the first time she went to a production office and watched a producer physically fax a printed script to an actor, scan the receipt and put it on his laptop, with each device housed in a different room.

“And I'm listening to this and I'm like, you want me to help you solve this, right? But he actually wasn't looking for a solution, this is just what he does,” she says. “When we’re building solutions, we have to make sure that we’re thinking about this environment and this reality. And when it comes to content creation, we don't want to come in and actually disrupt any of the creation.”

Tornincasa took what she learned in that office and built a suite of apps called Prodigle.

Prodigle, or Production Chronicle, is made up of seven apps which handle scheduling, distribution, scripts, contacts, calendars and locations, which productions can use, or not, at their discretion.

With more streaming services coming to screens this year, it’ll be interesting to see if powerhouses like Disney and Apple go with similar creative processes.

The author travelled to Los Angeles as a guest of Netflix.