first taste of satellite TV, watching The Simpsons in French, courtesy of my friend’s rooftop satellite dish. These were instructive experiences for someone used to Australia’s five-channel TV environment—an environment that now seemed rudimentary compared to the denser distribution landscapes available overseas.
All this got me thinking about the relationship between television distribution, space, and culture. These issues would stay with me as a background fascination for many years while I researched in other areas, including film distribution and piracy, before returning to the topic of television when I started teaching classes on global media. Conversations with my students—who had many fascinating views to share on evergreen topics such as local content and cultural identity, and who themselves watch TV in the most diverse and interesting ways—prompted me to think once more about the difference that space makes to television culture. This book is the outcome of those many class discussions, filtered through the debates about streaming that were exploding around us when Netflix came to Australia, belatedly, in 2015.
The impact of Netflix in Australia was immediate and profound. Within a year, Netflix had attracted as many subscribers as our pay-TV service, Foxtel, which has been operating for more than 20 years (Roy Morgan Research 2016). Roughly one in three Australians now have access to Netflix at home (Roy Morgan Research 2017). Even before the service had officially arrived, thousands of Australians were using VPNs (virtual private networks) to illicitly access the U.S. Netflix library. Overall, the demand for Netflix in Australia has been remarkable.
This is certainly not the case everywhere—indeed, this book is substantially about Netflix’s failure rather than its success in various markets around the world. Nonetheless, I found the experience of seeing a national television market so rapidly and thoroughly transformed by a foreign entrant affecting on many levels. This encouraged me to think more about the political, economic, and cultural impacts of streaming services. It also made me curious about connections between these services and the longer history of transnational television distribution via satellites. These were the fascinations that stayed with me as I wrote this book—a work of theory and analysis, based on a case study of a single platform, that explores the conceptual implications of internet distribution for global television studies.
There are many aspects of the topic that I have not been able to cover in depth here—including Netflix’s original production strategy, which really deserves its own book. I am also aware that much of what I have discussed may have shifted by the time this book appears in print. Given these constraints of space and time, the book does not claim to offer a comprehensive account of Netflix—and it is certainly not an insider account (c.f. Keating 2012). Instead, it offers a selective analysis of what I see as the most important issues raised by Netflix’s internationalization. The landscape will continue to change around us, but I hope these underlying issues will endure as central concerns for critical media scholarship.
NETFLIX NATIONS
Introduction
Every year in January, thousands of technology executives, geeks, and journalists make their annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). This massive four-day trade fair, one of the largest in the world, is where major brands such as Samsung and Sony show off their latest smart TVs, wearables, and other gadgets. In 2016, CES attracted over 170,000 people, including representatives from more than 3,000 technology companies. One of the keynote speakers was the CEO and cofounder of Netflix, Reed Hastings.
Hastings—joined on stage by Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos and a number of Netflix stars—delivered the promotional spiel for Netflix’s latest user-experience improvements and its new slate of original programming, playing clips from The Crown and The Get Down. At the end of the 48-minute showcase, Hastings made a surprise announcement: Netflix, long known for its patchy availability from country to country, was now a fully global television service, unblocked and accessible (almost) everywhere. “Today,” said Hastings, “I am delighted to announce that while we have been here on stage here at CES we switched Netflix on in Azerbaijan, in Vietnam, in India, in Nigeria, in Poland, in Russia, in Saudi Arabia, in Singapore, in South Korea, in Turkey, in Indonesia, and in 130 new countries.… Today, right now, you are witnessing the birth of a global TV network.”1 Reading from his teleprompter against a backdrop of world maps and national flags, Hastings went on to describe how this “incredible event” would make the Netflix experience available in the farthest reaches of the globe—everywhere, that is, except China (“where we hope to also be in the future”), North Korea, Syria, and Crimea (the latter three being countries where Netflix could not legally do business because of U.S. trade sanctions). “Whether you are in Sydney or St. Petersburg, Singapore or Seoul, Santiago or Saskatoon, you now can be part of the internet TV revolution,” he promised. “No more waiting. No more watching on a schedule that’s not your own. No more frustration. Just Netflix.”
Figures I.1 and I.2. Reed Hastings on stage at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 6, 2016, at The Venetian, Las Vegas. Photos by Ethan Miller/Getty Images.
This announcement signaled a turning point for Netflix. Since the company first unveiled a streaming service for its U.S. customers in 2007, there had been speculation about when the company would offer this service to subscribers outside the United States. The rumors were confirmed when Netflix began its international rollout, first to Canada in 2010, then to Latin America in 2011, to parts of Europe in 2012 and 2013, and to Australia, New Zealand, and Japan in 2015. During this period, Netflix evolved from a national service (supplying American screen content to American audiences) into a globally focused business with greater ambitions. With the culmination of this process announced at CES, Netflix had become a global media company—available almost everywhere, with a potential foothold in almost all the major national markets.
Much of the world has embraced Netflix, and series such as Stranger Things and Narcos have amassed cult followings in many countries. Yet Netflix’s metamorphosis into a global media provider has not been trouble-free. Shortly after Hastings’s announcement, newspapers in a number of countries started reporting angry reactions to the Netflix global switch-on. In Kenya, the chairman of the Film Classification Board threatened to block Netflix on the grounds of its “shockingly explicit eroticism,” arguing that “we cannot afford to be [a] passive recipient of foreign content that could corrupt the moral values of our children and compromise our national security” (Aglionby and Garrahan 2016). In Indonesia, access to Netflix was blocked by the state-owned telecommunications company (telco) Telekom Indonesia because of “a permit issue” and the “unfiltered” nature of its content (Gunawan 2016). In Europe, where there is a long history of cultural policy designed to keep Hollywood’s power in check, regulators planned a minimum European content quota for foreign streaming platforms. Meanwhile, Australians fretted that the arrival of Netflix would “break” the internet as streamers hogged the bandwidth on the country’s creaking internet infrastructure.
Stories such as these give us a sense of the diverse ways that countries have responded to the entry of Netflix into their media markets. They also show how Netflix’s rise has revived some deep-seated tensions in international media policy. These tensions stem from differing views on the part of regulators, media companies, and audiences about the nature of video and its proper modes of distribution. They also involve disagreement about where video services should operate, which territories and markets they should be able to access, and whose rules they should obey.
This book takes the international rollout of Netflix as the starting point for a wider investigation into the global geography of online television distribution. By geography, I mean the spatial patterns and logics that shape where and how internet-distributed television circulates and also where and how it does not circulate. The book is organized around two central questions: How are streaming services changing the spatial dynamics of global television distribution, and what theories
