Could aliens use streaming signals to study Earth?

Yes—if a nearby alien civilization had extremely sensitive equipment, they could in principle detect some human radio-frequency leakage and learn limited things about us. But modern streaming itself is not a strong “broadcast into space” signal.

Most streaming video travels through fiber-optic cables, undersea cables, local networks, and tightly aimed cellular/Wi‑Fi links. Those signals either do not leave Earth at all or leak weakly and messily. Older high-power TV and radio broadcasts were more likely to escape into space, though even those become very faint with distance.

What aliens might learn depends on distance and technology:

• From nearby stars: they might detect artificial radio emissions or broad patterns of human technology.
• With extremely advanced instruments: they might separate some signals from Earth’s background noise and infer things like rotation, population activity cycles, radar use, or communication systems.
• Actually watching Netflix-style content from space would be much harder, because the data is compressed, encrypted, fragmented across networks, and not broadcast outward as a single clean signal.

So the practical answer is: aliens could potentially study our civilization through electromagnetic leakage, especially radar and older broadcast signals, but everyday streaming services are a poor target compared with stronger, more directional, or more persistent emissions.