Streaming from a digital periphery: Voyo as an East-Central European response to Netflix

Abstract

Voyo, owned by Central European Media Enterprises (CME) and operating across six national territories, is currently one of the only three prominent transnational SVoD services based in countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Under the new owner PPF, a Czech-based investment group which bought CME from AT&T, Voyo enjoyed unprecedented levels of investment in high-end original content, which resulted in a dynamic growth of subscribers from 2020 onwards, making it the second strongest streamer in Czechia and Slovakia after Netflix. The article labels CME’s digital strategy ‘deep localism’ and approaches it through the recent political-economic debates about the geography of platform economy. Despite its multi-territory corporate structure, CME has isolated each of its national Voyo services in terms of original production, licensing and audience targeting. This shows in the high percentage of local content as well as the virtual absence of its cross-border circulation between the national Voyo catalogues, which have been branded as purely national. The article interprets this compartmentalized strategy of deep localism as both a response to the changes in the global streaming market and an attempt to preserve the traditional linear audiences of CME in the new digital era. The research behind the article is based on interviews with CME executives and on comparative VoD catalogue analysis.