Understanding Internet-Distributed Television
Internet-Distributed Television as an Ecology
Television Studies and the Future-of-TV Debate
Digital Media Studies and the Platform Perspective
2. Transnational Television: From Broadcast to Broadband
From National to Transnational Television—and Back
Spatial Logics of Television Distribution
Rethinking the Transnational
3. The Infrastructures of Streaming
The Infrastructural Optic
Digital Divides and Download Speeds
Politics of Bandwidth
Netflix and the Net Neutrality Debate
Clouds and CDNs
The Long View
Global Television, Local Markets
Long-Distance Localization
The Unavoidable Labor of Localization
India
Japan
China
5. Content, Catalogs, and Cultural Imperialism
Revisiting the One-Way Flow
Netflix Catalogs and Media Policy in Europe
The Canadian Situation
Do Audiences Actually Want Local Content (on Netflix)?
User Practices and Platform Policies
Historicizing Netflix’s Shifting Policies on Geoblocking
Making Sense of the Policy Shifts
Cultural Consequences of the Proxy Wars
Old and New Lessons
Streaming Beyond Netflix
PREFACE
International television flows (“travelling narratives” in my re-definition) can be seen in a new light … as flows of symbolic mobile and mobilizing resources that have the potential to widen the range of our imaginary geography, multiply our symbolic life-worlds, familiarize ourselves with “the other” and “the distant” and construct “a sense of imagined places”: in short, to travel the world and encounter “otherness” under the protection of the mediated experience.
—Milly Buonnano, The Age of Television: Experiences and Theories, 108–109 (emphasis in original)
As Milly Buonnano reminds us, watching television always involves some kind of imagined interaction with faraway places, situations, and symbols, in a way that recalls the word’s etymological origins (“tele-vision”: seeing at a distance). This idea of television, as an inherently international medium characterized by a particular way of ordering space, is at the heart of this book. In what follows, I revisit some long-standing debates in television and global media studies to see how they can help us understand the rapid transformations that are taking place as television morphs unevenly into an online medium.
Think of this book as an internet-era update to the rich literature on international television flows—a book for cord-cutting students and scholars who are interested in this longer history. Our central case study is Netflix, the world’s largest subscription video-on-demand service. We will examine how Netflix morphed from a national media company to an international one between 2010 and 2016 and consider what this case means for existing debates about global television on the one hand and digital distribution on the other.
Both topics are of personal interest to me. I grew up in Melbourne during the 1980s and 1990s, watching a lot of television. Australia is a country where the local is always experienced alongside and through the imported—mostly American and British popular culture, but also some European and Asian content. Television has always been an international medium here. Local sitcoms share the schedule with U.S. network series, Hollywood movies, BBC telemovies, and (on our public-service channels) the occasional Japanese cooking show or German police drama.
Australian television was broadcast-only until the 1990s. Even now, most Australians do not have cable or satellite subscriptions (though they are prodigious users of digital services, including pirate networks). In the late 1990s, I traveled overseas for the first time and observed the many ways that people watch television in other countries. Staying with relatives in Spain, I watched episodes of Ally McBeal in a dual-language track
