How streaming services and internet distribution have transformed global
television culture.
Television, once a broadcast medium, now also travels through our
telephone lines, fiber optic cables, and wireless networks. It is
delivered to viewers via apps, screens large and small, and media
players of all kinds. In this unfamiliar environment, new global giants
of television distribution are emerging--including Netflix, the world's
largest subscription video-on-demand service.
Combining media industry analysis with cultural theory, Ramon Lobato
explores the political and policy tensions at the heart of the digital
distribution revolution, tracing their longer history through our
evolving understanding of media globalization. Netflix Nations considers
the ways that subscription video-on-demand services, but most of all
Netflix, have irrevocably changed the circulation of media content. It
tells the story of how a global video portal interacts with national
audiences, markets, and institutions, and what this means for how we
understand global media in the internet age.
Netflix Nations addresses a fundamental tension in the digital media
landscape - the clash between the internet's capacity for global
distribution and the territorial nature of media trade, taste, and
regulation. The book also explores the failures and frictions of
video-on-demand as experienced by audiences. The actual experience of
using video platforms is full of subtle reminders of market boundaries
and exclusions: platforms are geo-blocked for out-of-region users ("this
video is not available in your region"); catalogs shrink and expand from
country to country; prices appear in different currencies; and subtitles
and captions are not available in local languages. These conditions
offer rich insight for understanding the actual geographies of digital
media distribution.
Contrary to popular belief, the story of Netflix is not just an American
one. From Argentina to Australia, Netflix's ascension from a Silicon
Valley start-up to an international television service has transformed
media consumption on a global scale. Netflix Nations will help readers
make sense of a complex, ever-shifting streaming media environment.
