Streaming Video in the Global South

Shakti Jaising, Hadi Gharabaghi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765135884
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The essays in this volume provide a textured analysis of streaming video in the global South, revealing both the impacts of and challenges faced by Northern streamers in Southern markets, as well as new possibilities and constraints experienced by producers and performers from the South.

In recent years, major streaming video companies from the global North like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney + have begun expanding to international markets, which are increasingly in the global South. Yet, much scholarship on the streaming of film and television focuses primarily on North America and Europe. This volume contests the prevailing perspective by focusing on media environments across the vast, yet relatively understudied, contexts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and by tracking emerging trends in digitized audiovisual culture through their example.
Moving between political-economic and textual approaches, and exploring a variety of formats and genres (from serialized drama to feature-length documentary), the volume argues that the complexities of the global streaming landscape impel us to interrogate long-standing theories of Western cultural imperialism imposed on the non-Western world and to attend closely to shifting dynamics between the global North and South.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Shakti Jaising and Hadi Gharabaghi
• 1 The Global Netflix Documentary: Local Difference, Branding, and the Global South Vinicius Navarro
• 2 A Cold War Netflix: The US Information Agency as a Key Historiographic Model for the Transnational Streamer Bret Vukoder
• 3 Netflix’s Double-Edged Sword for Local Storytelling: A Brazilian Perspective Daniel Rios, Melina Meimaridis, and Daniela Mazur
• 4 Streaming Platforms in Lebanon: A Tale of Business and Politics Wissam Mouawad and Pamela Nassour
• 5 Streaming Feminism? South Asian TV Series by/about Women Valentina Vitali
• 6 Television Drama in Mexico: From Broadcast to Streaming Paul Julian Smith
• 7 Watching Old Egyptian TV Shows Online: YouTube and Nostalgia for Television’s Past Egor Korneev
• 8 Streaming the Nation: Salvaging the National Filipino Audience Daniel Rudin
• 9 Rethinking English-Translation Subtitles in the Age of Streaming: Decision to Leave (2022) and the Korean Wave Hiju Kim
• 10 Streaming the Transmedial and Transcultural: Contemporary African Cinemas and the Netflix Viewing Environment Alexander Fisher
• 11 Invoking the Shadow Archive: Three Documentaries That “Look Back” from 1970s Beirut Samirah Alkassim
• Contributors
• Index