Internet-distributed Television Research Articles

An audience studies’ contribution to the discoverability and prominence debate: Seeking UK TV audiences’ ‘routes to content’

Despite discoverability and prominence emerging as crucial to contemporary industry and policy debates in relation to online and internet-distributed television, there remains relatively little rich, qualitative data about how contemporary audiences discover content. This article addresses this gap through empirical audience research focused on the ‘routes to content’ through which UK audiences find and decide what television to watch. Defining television broadly to include all forms of video content accessed in the home, we argue for the importance of thinking about discoverability as an audience activity, not just an industrial strategy. Building on TV audience studies’ longer history and more recent literature on engagement, media literacy, algorithms and technological affordances in contemporary media platforms, we argue for new understanding of the imaginaries shaping people’s habitual viewing activities. The article proposes four new concepts for thinking about discoverability as an audience activity. First, we explore technological affordances and default behaviour, developing the concept of the negotiated-null affordance to explain how technological affordances can be rendered invisible by habitual behaviours. Second, we focus on algorithmic literacies and propose a new dissonant algorithmic imaginary to explain our participants’ ambivalences towards algorithmic personalisation. Third, we unpack the dynamics of access that emerge in our participants’ negotiations of television technologies, services and content. Fourth, we examine the role of word of mouth and promotional paratexts, theorising a second-order algorithmic imaginary to help us understand how these forms of communication can often, themselves, be subject to algorithmic processes. In doing so, we argue for the need for further qualitative research that looks beyond the ‘savvy’ consumers that dominate audience research in order to unpack the technological, industrial, cultural and social processes that shape people’s routes to content in a platform-dominated media landscape.

‘Terebi banare’: Historicising internet-distributed television and the ‘departure from television’ in Japan

This article historicises and examines the implications of internet-distributed television for televisual culture and viewing in Japan. It challenges the simplistic media discourse of ‘ terebi banare’ (i.e. the audiences’ departure from television), which overlooks the complexities of evolving viewing practices. It explains why, largely due to the dominance of major terrestrial broadcasters in the media ecosystem, online consumption of television was slower to take hold in Japan than in other developed countries. It also demonstrates how, while Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have popularised pay online viewing from the late 2010s, the content Japanese viewers consume online remains inclined towards local outputs from terrestrial broadcasters. By elaborating on how terrestrial broadcasters have continued to play an important role in shaping audience experiences with their evolving content, frames, and services, this article provides a critical account of the meaning of terebi banare in the age of streaming.

TV Cloning as Transcultural Adaptation: The Reformatting of the Medea Myth via Doctor Foster

Abstract This special issue asks the question of what new digital technologies bring to the re-telling of old stories. In our contribution, we discuss how the practice of TV cloning on transnational digital streaming platforms has affected almost a decade of remixing and reformatting the Medea myth. In 2015, British playwright Mike Bartlett, best known for his work in theatre, adapted Medea to British television. The resulting BBC production Doctor Foster was a hit and spawned a second series in 2017. Subsequently Doctor Foster became a global phenomenon as it was remade in a variety of surprisingly diverse cultural milieus. The localized adaptations of Doctor Foster are cases of franchise diversification and expansion that gave new traction to the tradition of ‘programme adaptation’ (Keane/Moran) and has been dubbed ‘TV formatting’ (Moran/Malbon, Miller) or ‘TV cloning’ (Fung/Zhang). They are not a new phenomenon, as early 21st century precursors predate the world of television streaming or what Amanda Lotz has called ‘internet-distributed television’, but the diversified world of platform TV seems ideally suited to the practice of TV cloning. According to Michael Keane and Albert Moran (6) the format is ‘the total package of information and know-how that increases the adaptability of a program in another place and time’. Possession of the format enables producers to grant licenses and enforce copyright. The context for this study that seeks to address both the emerging textualities and practices of these digitally transformed TV industries is the fluid redistribution of television consumption zones across the planet.

Toward the Platformization of African Film Distribution? Netflix in Nigeria

Abstract This essay provides an analysis of the impact of Netflix on the African screen media sector, by focusing on the Nigerian film industry (Nollywood). It follows the invitation to study Netflix in specific socio-historical and national contexts that several scholars have formulated over the past few years as a way to respond to the complexity of the emerging landscape of internet-distributed television. In order to achieve this objective, the essay focuses on the impact of Netflix’s involvement on the production and distribution of Nigerian content, offering also a few insights on the equally important topic of Netflix’s impact on African audiences. The overall aim is to historicize Netflix’s intervention, detailing the phases of its involvement in Nigeria, its specificities in relation to the intervention of previous local and international actors in the field of content production and distribution (on both streaming and digital television networks), and the controversies its arrival triggers among film professionals in the largest African screen media industry.

Netflix all’italiana: The Netflix Experience as Narrated by Italian Users

ABSTRACT The present paper contributes to Internet-distributed television research by illustrating the results of a qualitative empirical study carried out in October 2019: by originally combining the tools of social research and ethnosemiotics, the study investigated how a panel of sixty Italian Netflix viewers perceived the platform’s recommender system and its impact on their autonomy of taste and choice. The ethnosemiotic analysis confirmed, through direct observation of user practices, the generally favourable perception of the ‘Netflix experience’ as an adequate balance between personalised recommendations and freedom of choice. At the same time, it also highlighted its problematic features, showing that synchronised and collective experiences remain important values in ‘streaming culture’ and that subscribers adopt a variety of tactics to circumvent the recommender system.

Televisão e plataformas: um estudo de caso sobre dataficação nos serviços SVoD Netflix e Amazon Prime Video

Nos últimos anos, é notável a proliferação de empresas de televisão distribuídas via internet, especialmente as orientadas pelo modelo de assinatura (SVoD). No campo acadêmico, diversas incursões já foram feitas para abordar esses serviços dentro do contexto televisivo. Contudo, ainda há uma lacuna no que tange o enquadramento enquanto plataformas, regida por lógicas semelhantes a outras empresas de tecnologia, como Facebook e Google. Dessa forma, este artigo tem como objetivo traçar um panorama teórico combinando os estudos de televisão com as discussões atuais sobre os processos de dataficação e plataformatização da internet. Para tanto, é feita uma análise preliminar em três plataformas SVoD: Netflix, Amazon Prime Video e Globoplay, observando como cada uma delas se comporta quanto aos aspectos de estrutura da plataforma, personalização algorítmica e tratamento de dados sobre a audiência. Argumenta-se que, tendo em vista a acentuada intersecção de modelos televisivos com o meio digital na atualidade, não se pode mais encarar termos como catálogo e audiência sem levar em consideração elementos como a interface do sistema, os algoritmos de personalização e a maneira como os dados são trabalhados. Palavras-chave: Dataficação. Estudos de televisão. Plataformização. Vídeo Sob Demanda.

Unpopularity and cultural power in the age of Netflix: New questions for cultural studies’ approaches to television texts

Although Internet-distributed television bears much in common with the television long studied and theorized using cultural studies-based approaches to analysis, several of its features profoundly deviate from earlier television norms and require reassessment and adaptation of theoretical frames. This article focuses on the issue of textual popularity in relation to these services and identifies key challenges to using the same frames of cultural power that have been used for studying television in the past. The underlying problem of audience fragmentation does not originate with streaming services, but this profound contextual change, in concert with industrial aspects that further distinguish internet-distributed television from television’s past norms, must be addressed. The article concludes by identifying several ways the cultural power of streaming services can be investigated despite the challenges that emerging norms of Internet-distributed video provide. This article is based on a paper presented at the Media in Transition symposium (Utrecht, June 28, 2018), in the Industries and Infrastructures panel organised by Judith Keilbach. Also published in this issue of ECS are Vicki Mayer, ‘From peat to Google power: communications infrastructures and structures of feeling in Groningen’ and Jennifer Holt & Michael Palm, ‘More than a number: the telephone and the history of digital identification’.

New forms of internationalisation? The impact of Netflix in Australia

This article examines the impact of multinational subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services in Australia, noting the degree to which a stalled policy response to the challenge of unregulated SVOD services has been shaken up by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We look at the phenomenon from a screen-ecological perspective – where dynamics of consumption, reviewing, production and regulation are interdependently and often contradictorily in play. We examine how these diverse, sometimes conflicted, perspectives can be approached as responding to new forms of internationalisation presented principally by the operations of Netflix in Australia (Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV+ are also mentioned when relevant). This article is part of a larger project (ARC Discovery DP190100978 Internet-Distributed Television: Cultural, Industrial and Policy Dynamics, chief investigators Ramon Lobato, Amanda Lotz, Stuart Cunningham) studying the cultural, industrial and policy dynamics of multinational SVOD globally and in situ locally.

Black Ships? Locating Netflix in Taiwan and Japan

Black Ships?Locating Netflix in Taiwan and Japan Yu-Kei Tse (bio) This article compares the discourses around Netflix's expansion in two East Asian markets, Japan and Taiwan. Specifically, it looks at how the term "black ship" (kurofune in Japanese)—a historical reference to the Perry expedition to Japan in the 1850s—is frequently used as rhetoric by both Japanese and Taiwanese media critics to discuss Netflix's possible impact on their respective domestic markets. It explains how and why, although media critics in both Japan and Taiwan used a common rubric (i.e., black ship) to discuss the introduction of Netflix, the ways Netflix is situated in each country are substantially different. As a video-streaming platform operating simultaneously in more than 190 countries, Netflix persistently proclaims itself as a service capable of deterritorializing our television experience by offering content that comes from around the world to audiences across the globe.1 The future of online television, in Netflix's vision, seems to be both borderless and postnational. In practice, however, Netflix continues to abide by national and regional regulations, as other transnational television systems do. Its role as a business and a cultural form varies significantly across the globe. Such variations, nevertheless, [End Page 143] are often overlooked in journalistic and scholarly discussions of Netflix. This tendency limits scholars' account of Netflix and the ecology of internet-distributed television in diverse global contexts. It is imperative to examine Netflix's specific cultural role comparatively across different national contexts, in the understanding that Netflix, similar to television, is a set of cultural practices, technologies, and markets that "can only be studied as located."2 By contextualizing the black-ship discourses in Japan and Taiwan, this article not only accounts for the introduction of Netflix in these two East Asian markets but also shows the importance of a comparative approach for studying internet-distributed television in increasingly transnational contexts. Originally, kurofune referred to US Navy Commodore Matthew Perry's gunboat diplomacy and military expedition, which forced Japan to open its borders to foreign trade in the 1850s, after two centuries of isolation. In contemporary Japanese contexts, the term is often used by the public to describe the launch of a Western (usually American) product, service, or enterprise, as well as its impact on the domestic market. Depending on the intentions of the people employing the term, kurofune may imply a wary or defensive tone of uncertainty about the unpredictable impact, or it may be used in a descriptive sense. To examine the kurofune discourses around Netflix, it is important to consider how the arrival of transnational satellite broadcasting was understood in Japan during the 1990s. Transnational satellite broadcasting was one of the first media phenomena analogized as kurofune by Japanese media. According to Koichi Iwabuchi, the kurofune discourse on Japanese media suggests that, with the rise of transnational satellite broadcasting, the Japanese industry "can no longer enjoy a self-contained domestic market, but rather is now under threat of being forced to open its doors to the world."3 However, different from the Perry Expedition, in which the foreign forces had profound influence on Japanese society, Iwabuchi points out that in practice, the presence of foreign television in Japan did not seem to pose a real threat to the domestic market, as audiences strongly preferred domestic content. By comparison, he argues that in Japan in the 1990s, there were doubts over the ability of the famously inward-looking Japanese producers to create content that would be appealing to international markets, where they faced considerable competition. For Iwabuchi, concerning the impact of transnational broadcasting on the domestic industry, "what is at stake this time is less a foreign invasion of Japan than a Japanese advance into global media markets."4 How, then, can we understand the resurgence of kurofune discourses when Netflix Japan launched in September 2015, the company's first venture into East Asia? While Japanese media critics tended to employ kurofune to describe, quite defensively, the arrival of transnational satellite television as a threat to the domestic industry in the 1990s, they have tended to use the term in a looser and more ambiguous manner when it is...

Streaming intersectionality: Queer and trans television aesthetics in post-medium transformation

Following the first Trans TV dossier, this dossier shifts the focus from transformations of television industries, institutions, fans and audiences to questions of queer and trans* aesthetics and representation in contemporary television. It entails an intersectional approach, but one that looks at what happens to intersectional genealogies in the era of streamed, internet-distributed television. Do the post-network or even post-medium transformations identified in the first dossier facilitate the opening of queer and trans spaces in the contemporary television landscape? Or is the evolution of television more cyclical than linear, offering both moments of transgression and emergence, as well as reaction, in relation to new technological and institutional configurations? While the focus of most of the work is on the level of representation and aesthetics, the questions raised are pertinent to understanding the new configurations of technologies, production, distribution and consumption that characterise internet-distributed television, which, in turn, need to be positioned in relation to the complex intersectional genealogies of televisual content presented in this dossier.

Book Review: Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television

This book review analyses Amanda Lotz's work on the evolution of the television industry and the rise of streaming platforms, or 'portals', like Netflix.

Teasing apart television industry disruption: consequences of meso-level financing practices before and after the US multiplatform era

The emergence of Internet-distributed television services such as Netflix has led viewers and legacy television companies to rethink the norms of television. Internet distribution is often presumed as the source of Netflix’s market differentiation, but the contemporary competitive field has simultaneously been adjusted by shifts in revenue model and ownership regulations. This article examines the multiple shifts in the US television industry to illustrate how adjustments in the underlying financing practices of series production and revenue sources also structure the multiplatform environment. Distribution technology is not reshaping the boundaries and norms of television texts and industries alone, but adjustments to industrial practices such as financing must also be examined. Comparison of the financing practices of subscriber-funded, linear, HBO, and nonlinear Netflix ground the analysis.

Television Reshaped by Big Data: Impacts and implications for Netflix-like platforms in the age of dataism

Television was born analogue, almost 100 years ago: first broadcast across airwaves, then delivered via analogue cable and satellite, to reach millions and millions of people around the world. Like many other industries, television has been under the process of digital transformation, integrating digital technologies in all parts of its value chain, from content production to content distribution. Today, inseparable from the digital transformation process is the large, diverse and ever-growing volume of data created, captured, analyzed and applied – also known as Big Data. Television is being reshaped by Big Data, with newcomers to the industry such as Netflix leading the way, for others to follow - and for others to fail. The concepts of Platform Capitalism, Surveillance Capitalism and Dataism may illuminate many of the challenges faced by the main stakeholders in the television industry, with implications that go much beyond this field. Lastly, Netflix’s impact on the production, distribution and consumption of audiovisual content is still to be understood in a small market such as Portugal: the current exploratory paper is also meant to be the basis of future research in Portugal about internet-distributed television.

The multifaceted policy challenges of transnational Internet-distributed television

As services such as Netflix and Amazon Video have overcome the business challenges that long stymied the technological potential of Internet-distributed television, they have also introduced a range of policy challenges. Not only do these services lack governance by a clear regulatory regime in many countries, but their entrance to the competitive field of audio-visual service providers refigures the policy established for broadcast, cable and satellite industries. These challenges are simultaneously opportunities, as Internet-distributed television also provides tools that might effectively achieve policy goals.

Locating SVOD in Australia and Mexico: Stan and Blim contend with Netflix

This study employs a comparative analysis of industrial practices and marketing campaigns utilised by subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) platforms, Stan and Blim. It evaluates Stan’s creation and launch prior to the advent of Netflix in Australia, and the introduction of Blim well after Netflix had already established itself as the preferred SVOD in Mexico. Despite the substantial differences between the histories and impacts of these respective national television markets, this study identifies that both platforms have experienced relative success by capitalising on Netflix’s problematic ‘global’ status, by focusing on the production and distribution of content that is uniquely reflective of their geographic audiences. The aim of this research is to encourage scholarly inquiry into internet-distributed television to look beyond multinational portals like Netflix, to localise studies of transnational media and SVOD platforms and to consider the many ways that competing with Netflix has impacted the future of national television production.

The new practices and infrastructures of participation: how the popularity of Twitch.tv challenges old and new ideas about television viewing

ABSTRACTA central theme in media research has been the transition from traditional broadcast media, like television and radio, to social media and streaming services. For both researchers and practitioners in the field, a crucial concern has been how to understand the emerging forms of flexibility and interactivity that characterize the use of new media platforms. This article adds to this work by analyzing new viewing and audience practices of the streaming platform Twitch, addressing how emergent ways of viewing and engaging with broadcasts both challenges and revitalizes established concepts from television audience studies. For some years, researchers and media analytics have been discussing to which extent Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and other on-demand streaming services represents the death of linear-TV [see, e.g., Lotz, A. D. (2014). The television will be revolutionized. New York, NY: New York University Press; Lotz, A. D. (2017). A treatise on internet-distributed television. Michigan, MI: Maize Books; Buonanno, M. (2016). (Not yet) the end of television: Editor’s introduction [Special issue]. Media and Communication, 4(3), 95–98]. Conventional wisdom dictates that only sports and other great events will uphold the flow, linearity and liveness of traditional television. However, our analysis shows how linear-TV is re-emerging in other, novel forms as well. Central to the analysis is the concepts of ‘spatial switching’ and ‘affective switching’, which is used to illuminate the ways in which Twitch practices and infrastructures introduces new dimensions of flexibility, convenience and user-control to flow, liveness and linear-TV.

Internet-Distributed Television Research: A Provocation

From Netflix and Hulu to iPlayer and iQiyi, the rapid growth of internet-distributed television services worldwide presents both opportunities and challenges for media industry scholars. Which business models are succeeding in different countries, and why? What frameworks help us explain and talk about television amid such a variety of industrial practices? This article provides a critical overview of the emerging research landscape and suggests future lines of inquiry. We offer seven provocations regarding specific issues in internet-distributed television research-theory, comparison, market definition, historiography, regulation, user experience, and industry transformation.

Creating Children’s Television for SVODs: The Alignment of Global Production Practices with National Screen Policies in the Netflix Original Bottersnikes and Gumbles

In many countries, domestically produced children’s television is believed to play an important role in national cultural representation. But national policy settlements and funding schemes designed to support its production are aging rapidly and do not apply to internet-distributed television services. Using the case study of one of Netflix’s first children’s Originals, the Australian animation Bottersnikes and Gumbles, this article analyzes the impact of subscription video on demand (SVOD) services on children’s screen production industries and their practitioners’ creative practice. It reveals how the global SVOD’s operations intersect with national policy instruments and explains the production collaborations developing between Netflix and public service broadcasters in the United Kingdom and Australia. The article’s findings reveal that despite the advantages Netflix’s large content budget and global distribution networks offer to children’s content producers, domestic content quotas and the involvement of linear broadcasters remain vital to the funding and production of local children’s television.;

Linking industrial and creative change in 21st-century US television

The US television industry began experiencing profound change in the early 21st century, change that likewise manifest in the programs of the era. This article explores how and why scripted US television series evolved so profoundly at the dawn of the 21st century and what this might tell us about the continued disruption introduced by Internet-distributed television. The article identifies the industrial practices that propelled and challenged this change and examines how the conditions of creative workers adjusted alongside textual possibilities. Drawn from interviews and archival research, the article relies on case studies of the production histories of milestone series in this evolution to assess the shifting competitive norms and the consequences of textual innovation for creative workers, commercial media industries, and audiences.

The Paradigmatic Evolution of U.S. Television and the Emergence of Internet-Distributed Television

Las industrias de televisión de todo el mundo han resistido al profundo cambio que las tecnologías avanzadas y los servicios desarrollados que facilitan la distribución de television por Internet suponen como competencia de la distribución de televisión abierta y por cable. Este artículo, partiendo del contexto de los Estados Unidos, explora la aparición de la televisión distribuída por internet como un mecanismo que habilita y ofrece la distribución no lineal. Evalúa la organización inicial de la televisión distribuida por internet a través del análisis de portales y explora las similitudes y diferencias entre estos portales y las redes y canales, poniendo el foco en la conceptualización de las prácticas y estrategias de negocio emergentes.