Netflix Nations

How streaming services and internet distribution have transformed global television culture.Television, once a broadcast medium, now also travels through our telephone lines, fiber optic cables, and wireless networks. It is delivered to viewers via apps, screens large and small, and media players of all kinds. In this unfamiliar environment, new global giants of television distribution are emerging—including Netflix, the world’s largest subscription video-on-demand service.Combining media industry analysis with cultural theory, Ramon Lobato explores the political and policy tensions at the heart of the digital distribution revolution, tracing their longer history through our evolving understanding of media globalization. Netflix Nations considers the ways that subscription video-on-demand services, but most of all Netflix, have irrevocably changed the circulation of media content. It tells the story of how a global video portal interacts with national audiences, markets, and institutions, and what this means for how we understand global media in the internet age.Netflix Nations addresses a fundamental tension in the digital media landscape – the clash between the internet’s capacity for global distribution and the territorial nature of media trade, taste, and regulation. The book also explores the failures and frictions of video-on-demand as experienced by audiences. The actual experience of using video platforms is full of subtle reminders of market boundaries and exclusions: platforms are geo-blocked for out-of-region users (“this video is not available in your region”); catalogs shrink and expand from country to country; prices appear in different currencies; and subtitles and captions are not available in local languages. These conditions offer rich insight for understanding the actual geographies of digital media distribution. Contrary to popular belief, the story of Netflix is not just an American one. From Argentina to Australia, Netflix’s ascension from a Silicon Valley start-up to an international television service has transformed media consumption on a global scale. Netflix Nations will help readers make sense of a complex, ever-shifting streaming media environment.

Netflix Nations is an important and timely addition to the existing scholarly literature on the digital distribution of television and how it is changing the digital landscape. It is one of the first studies of the global geography of online television distribution that explores the digital media landscape and how the internet’s capacity for world distribution of television clashes with national media trade, and taste and moral values. Ramon Lobato explores how the digital distribution of the television reshaping modern civilization. This well-researched, nuanced and brilliantly-written will [change] the way you think of media, globalization, and power., In exploring how internet-distributed television services are reshaping the national boundaries of the industry, Lobato offers a cutting-edge study that advances our understanding of Netflix and cultural globalization and reconceptualizes the relationship between 'old' and 'new' media. Netflix Nations will change the way we think about infrastructure, globalization, power, and the television we know and love., In this most valuable book, Lobato gives us a highly nuanced account of the global spread of Netflix that emphasizes how extraordinarily diverse are the infrastructural, policy, and consumption conditions within which it finds is place. The breadth of the research is impressive, and its insistence on a comparative approach across (at least) four continents brings a much-needed dimension to our understanding of the Netflix phenomenon., Lobato’s ability to synthesize complex and wide-ranging discussions within the field and offer fruitful definitional attempts makes Netflix Nations a very valuable contribution to rethinking the current state of (Internet) television affairs, specifically as it pertains to Netflix as a case study., Netflix Nations is theoretically rich and comprehensive. Displaying a deep knowledge of history and scholarship, Lobato skillfully brings to light underlying philosophies of platforms and expands upon intricate studies in television and media from around the world.

Ramon Lobato is Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is the author of Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution and Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution.