Netflix Nations

The Geography of Digital Distribution

Ramon Lobato

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479895120
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Medien- & Kommunikationsbranche

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.

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 corporation,
• a technology company,
• a software system,
• a big-data business,
• a cultural gatekeeper,
• a lifestyle brand,
• a mode of spectatorship, or
• a ritual.

Clearly, Netflix means different things to different people. Part of the issue here is that there are a number of incompatible interpretive frames in use. Each frame brings with it a set of assumptions and invokes a particular history of industrial and technological evolution. As we move through these various descriptors, Netflix’s location within industry sectors also seems to shift around—between the television, video, technology, internet, digital media, entertainment, and information industries. The conceptual frameworks we use to understand Netflix are important because they shape the kind of thinking we bring to the analysis. Consequently, these frameworks require some critical reflection.

This chapter traces out two different analytical perspectives that can be applied to Netflix and in so doing critically synthesizes two related fields of scholarly literature. The first of these can be found within television studies, in the form of research on TV’s digital and postbroadcast transformations. The second comes from outside television studies, via new media theory, internet studies, and platform studies. As I will argue, it is helpful to move between and across these two ways of knowing so as to avoid the intellectual lock-in effects that result from following one line of thinking too closely. For example, if we study Netflix in terms of its similarities to and differences from television, we can miss its connections to other digital media. Similarly, focusing exclusively on the software dimension obscures Netflix’s structural relationships with established screen industries. We need to be aware of the natural pull of particular ways of thinking and what they reveal and obscure when applied to different kinds of media objects.

Television Studies and the Future-of-TV Debate

Today, the academic field of television studies is in a state of flux as it undergoes another round of self-reflection. In recent years, a rich corpus of postconvergence research and theory has emerged to explore how digital technologies of various kinds have variously transformed, extended, and sustained existing television industries. This literature asks questions such as: What is television now? What might it become? Is what we used to call the “idiot box” dead, dormant, or as dominant as ever? In the age of televisual “expansion and overflow” (Gray 2009, 85, citing Brooker 2001), where do the boundaries around a medium, a distribution system, or an individual text lie?

Questions such as these have been carefully examined by scholars, including William Uricchio, Milly Buonanno, Chuck Tryon, Amanda Lotz, Lynn Spigel, and Graeme Turner, among others. A number of influential anthologies have appeared, including Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Spigel and Olsson 2004), Television Studies after TV (Turner and Tay 2009), Television as Digital Media (Bennett and Strange 2011), and After the Break (de Valck and Teurlings 2013), as well as numerous monographs and trade books. Television studies journals, including Television and New Media, Flow, and View, have played host to vibrant debates about these issues. A wider body of technical and policy literature also exists, much of it authored by telecommunications experts; for example, Columbia University media economist Eli Noam has been writing about internet-distributed television since the 1990s, before it was of mainstream interest to media scholars.

Broadly, this literature maps an ongoing but uneven set of transitions in the history of television that are collectively working to transform it from a mass medium to a niche one through technological and institutional developments that “fragment the previously mass audience of television into a series of personalized choices” (Bennett 2011, 2). Kelsey (2010, 231) writes that, “We don’t just watch TV, we send and receive it, gather and organize it on our personal touch screens, meanwhile interacting with sites to produce, wittingly or not, the consumer feedback that helps broadcasters determine a season’s programming (if TV still even thinks in terms of seasons).” Tryon (2013, 14) argues that “contemporary media platforms actively solicit an individualized, fragmented, and empowered media consumer, one who has greater control over when, where, and how she watches movies and television shows,” warning that “this offer of liberation from the viewing schedule is often accompanied by increased surveillance.” In response to these shifts, alternative periodizations of television technology are also emerging. Some experts now refer to TVI (broadcast only), TVII (cable era), and TVIII (digital distribution), terms that draw our attention to the successive waves of transformation that have swept through television technology and the television industry (Todreas 1999; Pearson 2011; Johnson 2007).

The work of U.S. television scholar Amanda Lotz offers a richly textured account of these transformations. Across a number of books—especially the second edition of The Television Will Be Revolutionized (2014), Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television (2017a), and We Now Disrupt This Broadcast (2017b)—Lotz provides a forensic examination of the changes in the underlying economic models of television when it moves online, and how these models shape programming, production, and circulation. Lotz begins by explaining how the fundamental logic of television has been predicated on linearity: “Almost all the conventions of television—a flow of content, program length, expectations of weekly episodes—derive from practices developed to cope with the necessity of the linear schedule” (Lotz 2017a, 15). In contrast, the on-demand character of internet-distributed television, and its precedents in earlier on-demand services (such as pay-per-view movies delivered by cable), presents a different mode of distribution that has more in common with the record store, bookstore, or library. In this way, internet-distributed television “allow[s] behaviors that were peripheral in an age of analog, physical media such as time shifting, self-curation, and à la carte access to become central and industrialized practices” (17).

Lotz sees Netflix as a central part of this story, not only because the company “disrupted the long acculturated sense that television content should be viewed on a television set” (Lotz 2014, 71) but also because it introduced new kinds of filtering, aggregation, and recommendation systems that have since become widespread. She points to the Netflix Queue (now called a List) as a key site through which users negotiated the shift to nonlinear television, noting that “the queuing that Netflix introduced provided its subscribers with a different paradigm for thinking about and organizing viewing behavior, and one that substantially challenges the long dominant, linear, ‘what’s on’ proposition” (74). In other words, Lotz regards the online distribution of content as highly significant because it marks a transformation in the underlying structure and business models of television by freeing content from a linear schedule and by introducing new pricing models (including all-you-can-stream subscription packages) and audience expectations about the content, novelty, and value of TV services. As she writes, “The affordance of internet protocol technologies to deliver personally-selected content from an industrially curated library is the central difference introduced by this new distribution mechanism” (Lotz 2017a, 4).

Within the various contributions to the future-of-TV debate, we can see different degrees of emphasis on change as opposed to continuity. Lotz foregrounds the transformative dimensions of internet distribution in her work, while other scholars focus on the continuities. In this second category, we often find the work of media historians, who are—by training and temperament—ambivalent about diagnoses of radical change. William Uricchio, for example, stresses that notions of personal TV and interactive TV go back much further than the internet era and can be traced right through the history of the medium, with precursor concepts to be found throughout the twentieth century:

Television offers a striking case where both the technological platform and its deployment protocols have shifted radically and more or less continually since the late 19th Century. We’ve seen the project of the televisual ally itself with platforms such as the telephone, radio, film, and networked computer; and we’ve seen its protocols include person-to-person communication, entertainment and news, surveillance, telepresence and so on (not to mention legal and regulatory rule sets). (Uricchio, forthcoming, 11)

Uricchio reminds us that if we wish to understand the future of television we do not have to start with the internet. Instead, we can look back to early video game technologies, the introduction of cable and satellite systems, the VCR and TiVo, and even the remote control—all of which have contributed in different ways to television’s personalized, postbroadcast present by variously expanding the range of content available, increasing viewer control over the flow of images, and introducing elements of interactivity (Wasser 2002; Boddy 2004; Uricchio 2004; Thomas 2008). Following Uricchio, we can look back even further, to a range of visionary early twentieth-century experimental television technologies that prefigured “what in today’s terms might be understood as Skype, surveillance video, large screen public display, and domestic news and entertainment” (Uricchio 2004, 7–8). This is why many scholars who use terms such as postbroadcast and postnetwork are careful to emphasize that they signify not epochal change (from X to Y) but rather the sedimented layering of different technologies, systems, institutions, and viewing cultures, such that cable, satellite, internet, and mobile technologies coexist with and are structurally integrated into broadcast television (Turner and Tay 2009; Parks 2004; Lotz 2014).

A second lesson from this literature is that we should not write off the institutional power of television just yet. Toby Miller lucidly argues that television as an industry sector is far from dead—and anyone who claims otherwise is likely to be proven wrong by history. Miller is highly critical of the death-of-TV discourse and mocks the assumption that “the grand organizer of daily life over half a century has lost its pride of place in the physical layout of the home and the daily order of drama and data” (Miller 2010, 11). Instead, he emphasizes the industrial continuities (especially in production and advertising) that persist into the internet age. Miller offers a series of counterarguments in response, noting that a lot of internet media is basically television; that television institutions are still structurally central to digital media markets; that broadcast television is still strong and important globally; that there are more TV stations opening up worldwide than ever before, especially in emerging economies; and that audience ratings suggest we are actually watching more television content than ever before (it is just distributed differently).

This is indicative of one response to the future-of-TV debates, which is to affirm the centrality and vitality of television institutions in the face of their digital dethronement. As Tim Wu (2015) reminds us, “Overestimating change in the television industry is a rookie mistake.” A different formulation of the argument can be found in media business commentator Michael Wolff’s book Television Is the New Television (2015). Setting out to destroy what he sees as the Silicon Valley myth of television’s disruption at the hands of the digital, Wolff argues that the recent history of media is better understood the other way around—that television has ultimately tamed and absorbed digital media. For Wolff, Netflix is a classic example of this reverse engineering of the digital. The service is much more television-like than internet-like, Wolff argues, because it shuns many of the interactive affordances of internet media in favor of established narrative structures, aesthetics, and experiences. In Wolff’s account, as Netflix morphed from a DVD rental company to a digital studio, it actually moved closer to television by “bringing television programming and values and behavior—like passive watching—to heretofore interactive and computing-related screens” (Wolff 2015, 91). He adds:

Other than being delivered via IP, Netflix had almost nothing to do with the conventions of digital media—in a sense it rejected them. It is not user generated, it is not social, it is not bite size, it is not free. It is in every way, except for its route into people’s homes—and the differences here would soon get blurry—the same as television. It was old-fashioned, passive, narrative entertainment. (93–94)

In this argument, we can see a variation on the future-of-TV arguments: the idea that television has already shaped the future of digital media in its own image and will continue to exert influence on audience expectations and industrial norms. In Wolff’s view, internet television servic...