(Apple TV, Playstation, Amazon Fire stick, generic Android streamer boxes, Kodi boxes) that aggregate content from various sources, further blurring the line between distributors, aggregators, channels, and hardware providers.
Recent scholarship in media and television studies draws our attention to different parts of this ecology for different analytical purposes. For example, Stuart Cunningham and David Craig (2019) and Aymar Jean Christian (2017) emphasize the centrality of open platforms (especially YouTube) and networked sharing practices to contemporary television industries, thus advancing an expanded definition of internet television that includes social media platforms. Lotz’s (2017a) category of internet-distributed television is defined more narrowly to refer to portals for professionally produced content (“the crucial intermediary services that collect, curate, and distribute television programming via internet distribution,” such as CBS All Access, Netflix, and HBO Now). Catherine Johnson uses a distinct term, “online television,” to refer to a larger category of “closed and editorially managed” services that distribute “actively acquired/commissioned content” (Johnson 2017, 10)—a definition that would include public-service broadcaster portals as well as commercial SVODs and AVODs, but not open video platforms. These different ways of defining internet television are all instructive because they bring into focus particular parts of the ecology. This book focuses specifically on SVOD, but it does so with the understanding that SVOD represents only one line of development within a wider ecology.
The present instability within television distribution is remarkable, although historical precedents do exist. Recall that broadcast television evolved as a hybrid medium combining prerecorded material, live programming, movies, short-form programming, and advertisements. Early television was an empty container into which existing art forms and business models could be poured. The internet is now doing something similar for television, absorbing its existing textual forms and associated business models and putting them together in new combinations. Present distinctions between some of these categories may soon be rendered obsolete, a question addressed further in Chapters 1 and 2.
While I am interested in these historical questions, my primary focus is on the international geography of online television distribution—the spatial patterns that determine the availability and unavailability of television content to audiences in different parts of the world. These patterns are highly complex and volatile. This book describes a number of different phenomena that may sometimes appear contradictory. For example, while internet distribution has created new forms of mobility for content and audiences, it has also served to reduce mobility in other cases (e.g., via geoblocking), leading to increased territorialization. The relationship between television and its intended “zone of consumption” (Pertierra and Turner 2013) is variously stretched, dissolved, and reinforced. I want to emphasize that this is not the same thing as saying television is now everywhere, that it has been spatially liberated or deterritorialized, that space does not matter, or that content now circulates in a totally friction-free manner. This is not the case at all. Television is still bounded and “located” in all kinds of ways, as we will see in later chapters. The more accurate claim would be that internet distribution has introduced a new degree of complexity into the existing ecology. As a result, we are starting to see different kinds of relationships emerge between television’s fundamental spatial categories: territory, market, nation, and signal area.
Why Netflix?
Netflix is presently the major global subscription video-on-demand service. It is not, however, the first television service with global aspirations. Various transnational channels, including CNN, MTV, Al Jazeera, and CGTN,5 came before it, along with quasiglobal digital platforms such as YouTube. In calling this book Netflix Nations, then, I am not suggesting that Netflix is popular in every nation; my point is that Netflix, as a multinational SVOD service that spans national borders and operates in a large number of countries simultaneously, represents a particular configuration of global television that requires study and theorization.
I am also interested in Netflix for a different reason—because it draws our attention to unresolved questions about media globalization more generally. Specifically, the Netflix case provides an opportunity to test, advance, and refine our conceptual models of “global television” and to rethink what this term means in a context of digital distribution. As a company that has internationalized very quickly, Netflix’s story also tells us a lot about what happens when a digital service enters national markets, coming in over the top of existing institutions and regulations. Netflix, in other words, is a case study with larger relevance to ongoing debates in media studies about convergence, disruption, globalization, and cultural imperialism.
The early history of Netflix is well known. The company was founded in California in 1997 by a direct-sales executive (Marc Randolph) and a Stanford-educated entrepreneur (Reed Hastings). Its first offering was a mail-order DVD rental service that proved wildly popular with American movie-lovers. Netflix unveiled its own streaming service in 2007 and fought off archrival Blockbuster, which declared bankruptcy in 2010. Along the way, the company became famous for its data-driven strategy, lean management ethos, and Silicon Valley–style human resources policies, which combine new-economy working freedoms (including unlimited leave time) with extremely high performance expectations.6
Netflix’s staged international rollout began with its most strategically important markets—Canada and Latin America. These were the low-hanging fruit for Netflix: Canada is a high-income, majority English-language market adjacent to the United States, while most of Latin America has a single regional language (Spanish), a large middle class, decent cable infrastructure, and a strong familiarity with pay-TV. Having successfully trialed its SVOD model in these territories, Netflix then expanded into key markets in Western Europe (2013–2015), Japan (2015), and Australasia (2015). In most of these countries, Netflix established partnerships with local telcos and internet service providers (ISPs), licensed locally relevant content and prepared promotional activities to coincide with the launch. Finally, the global switch-on at CES in January 2016 took care of the other lower-value or otherwise difficult global markets that had not yet been covered.
Netflix is one of the few media brands of the internet era to penetrate so deeply into households and the broader popular consciousness that it has become a verb (“let’s Netflix it,” “Netflix and chill”). It is a quintessential Silicon Valley success story, bridging two of America’s signature fascinations—home entertainment and e-commerce. But Netflix is still a media company that trades in the established film and television industries’ intellectual property, and since 2013 it has also invested heavily in its own original content. Unlike YouTube and Facebook, Netflix distributes only professionally produced content rather than user-generated content.
More than half of Netflix’s subscribers now live outside the United States, and that figure is increasing. To cater to local tastes, the company has licensed thousands of non-U.S. titles—from Indian Bollywood movies to Turkish dramas—for its increasingly diverse user base, and it has invested billions of dollars in producing its own content in 30 national markets. As Netflix continues to reach a wider international audience, the service becomes more geographically differentiated and localized. Titles appear and disappear, and catalogs shrink and expand, as the platform is accessed from different parts of the world. Languages, currencies, and library categories are all customized for each country.
Just as Netflix is changing, users are changing Netflix. The platform learns from its new global audiences, tracking tastes and viewing habits. As a result, different “cultures of Netflix,” as Ira Wagman and Luca Barra (2016) describe them, are starting to emerge—different ways of using the platform, talking about it, and watching it.7 These user data feed back into the company’s strategic decisions about original programming, licensing, and marketing. Netflix, then, should not be seen as a static cultural object or one that is consistent from market to market. It is constantly evolving, acquiring new layers of use and association.
This
