debates and discourses around Netflix: how the service has been received by audiences, industry, and regulators in various countries. Since 2013, I have been closely following Netflix’s rollout, drawing on a range of public sources, including trade papers, technical documents, press releases, corporate filings, promotional videos and texts, online user discourse, government and third-party policy documents, and various other sources to piece together the story. I have also been fortunate to work with a number of talented, multilingual research assistants—Wilfred Wang, Ishita Tiwary, Renee Wright and Thomas Baudinette—who wrote reports on key territories (China, India, Russia, and Japan), providing vital context for the study. Netflix Nations, then, is a study of Netflix from the outside: a study of impacts, discourses, and debates, grounded in a tradition of critical media research. It makes no claim to get inside the black box or the boardroom.
I have written this book with several kinds of readers in mind. For students and scholars of television, it is first and foremost a book that tells a critical story about the world’s largest SVOD service and what its international rollout has meant for television distribution and media policy. At a conceptual level, the book is about the problem of media globalization and the rich history of intellectual debate around it. Finally, it is also a reflection on the state of television research in the internet age. It asks how scholars in this field might engage critically and productively with challenging new issues—such as localization and search technologies, and internet policy and regulation.
The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1, “What Is Netflix?,” provides a critical survey of current debates in television studies and internet studies as they relate to digital distribution. It also discusses the ontology of new television services, tracing connections to a range of different media forms. Chapter 2, “Transnational Television: From Broadcast to Broadband,” explores how debates about multinational and transnational television services have evolved over the years. Placing Netflix in a longer history of transnational television services, including broadcast and satellite channels, it explores how familiar anxieties about national sovereignty are returning in a different guise through internet distribution. Chapter 3, “The Infrastructures of Streaming,” takes an infrastructural approach to understanding Netflix. Here we examine some of the platform’s underlying systems, including its Content Delivery Network (Open Connect), and related policy issues such as net neutrality. Chapter 4, “Making Global Markets,” considers how Netflix has attempted to enter diverse national markets and adapt its offering to conform to local audience expectations. Case studies of Netflix’s experience in three key Asian markets—India, China, and Japan—reveal the challenges of localization and market entry. Chapter 5, “Content, Catalogs, and Cultural Imperialism,” focuses on cultural policy debates relating to Netflix catalogs, especially regarding local content, and examines how regulators in the European Union (EU) and Canada are attempting to develop local content policies for over-the-top services. Chapter 6, “The Proxy Wars,” tells the story of how Netflix sought to manage VPN use and geoblocking circumvention by users during the early years of its internationalization. I also consider how Netflix’s policies on copyright and piracy evolved over those years. The book concludes with some reflections on parallel models of evolution in television industries beyond SVOD, including recent developments in China, which reflect a different pattern of transformation.
As this structure suggests, my aim in this book is to use the controversies that have swirled around the Netflix service as a starting point for building a theory about the relationship between global television and internet distribution. In this way, the book develops a series of arguments and analyses that position Netflix within a longer trajectory of debate, reaching back through the history of transnational television. Each chapter begins with a particular analytical problem relating to global media, such as infrastructure, cultural imperialism, or localization; considers how this problem plays out in the case of Netflix; and then finally asks what Netflix can add to our understanding of these concepts. Netflix, in this sense, becomes a resource—or perhaps a platform—for revisiting enduring critical debates in global media studies.
1
What Is Netflix?
In the introduction to their book YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (2009), Jean Burgess and Joshua Green make an important point about the challenges of studying emergent digital media. For Burgess and Green, one of the most interesting and difficult things about writing a book on YouTube was the fact that it was still evolving. Late in the last decade, YouTube had a chameleonic character: it was a “distribution platform that can make the products of commercial media widely popular” while at the same time being “a platform for user-created content where challenges to commercial popular culture might emerge” (Burgess and Green 2009, 6). Its creators, investors, and users—not to mention media academics—had yet to agree on what YouTube actually was, meaning that there was still much uncertainty over what the platform could be used for, how it should be regulated, and how it could be understood in relation to other media. Burgess and Green argue that
because there is not yet a shared understanding of YouTube’s common culture, each scholarly approach to understanding how YouTube works must make different choices among these interpretations, in effect recreating it as a different object each time—at this early stage of research, each study of YouTube gives us a different understanding of what YouTube actually is. (6–7, emphasis in original)
Figure 1.1. Netflix mobile interface, as of January 2018. Screenshot by the author.
This basic ontological problem (what is a digital media service, and how do we interpret and theorize it?) applies to a range of phenomena that exist at the boundaries of television, cinema, and digital media. Scholars studying Netflix must therefore make certain choices about what kind of service it is and what the appropriate frames of analysis should be. These decisions work to re-create the object anew each time by opening up or closing off lines of comparison.
While Netflix is an established global brand with 20 years of history, there is still very little agreement about what Netflix is or how it should be understood by the public, scholars, or media regulators. Netflix—like many disruptive media phenomena before it, including radio and broadcast television—is a boundary object that exists between, and inevitably problematizes, the conceptual categories used to think about media. This definitional tension can be seen in the marketing slogans Netflix uses to describe itself, which reflect evolution in both the company’s distribution model and its discursive positioning in relation to other media. Presently, Netflix defines itself as a “global internet TV network,” but in the past it has preferred terms such as “the world’s largest online DVD rental service” (2002), “the world’s largest online movie rental service” (2009), and “the world’s leading Internet subscription service for enjoying TV shows and movies” (2011).1 Others have referred to Netflix as “a renegade player in the television game” (Farr 2016, 164), “a pioneer straddling the intersection where Big Data and entertainment media intersect” (Leonard 2013), a “monster that’s eating Hollywood” (Flint and Ramachandran 2017), and even “a company that’s trying to take over the world” (FX CEO John Landgraf, cited in Lev-Ram 2016). Other possible responses to the question “what is Netflix?” might include
a video platform,
a distributor,
a television network,
a global media
