This book provides a transnational perspective on Netflix's changing role in the media landscape through chapters from leading international scholars in television and internet studies.

An international team of experts explores how streaming services are disrupting traditional storytelling. The rise of streaming has dramatically transformed how audiences consume media. Over the last decade, subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services, including Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+, have begun commissioning and financing their own original movies and TV shows, changing the way and the rate at which content is produced across the globe, from Mexico City to Mumbai. Streaming Video maps this international production boom and what it means for producers, audiences, and storytellers. Through eighteen richly textured case studies, ranging from original Korean dramas on Netflix to BluTV’s experimental Turkish series, the book investigates how streaming services both disrupt and maintain storytelling traditions in specific national contexts. To what extent, and how, are streamers expanding norms of television and film storytelling in different parts of the world? Are streamers enabling the creation of content that would not otherwise exist? What are the implications for different viewers, in different countries, with different tastes? Together, the chapters critically assess the impacts of streaming on twenty-first century audiovisual storytelling and rethink established understandings of transnational screen flows.

Algorithmic recommender systems, deployed by media companies to suggest content based on users’ viewing histories, have inspired hopes for personalized, curated media but also dire warnings of filter bubbles and media homogeneity. Curiously, both proponents and detractors assume that recommender systems for choosing films and series are novel, effective, and widely used. Scrutinizing the world’s most subscribed streaming service, Netflix, this book challenges that consensus. Investigating real-life users, marketing rhetoric, technical processes, business models, and historical antecedents, Mattias Frey demonstrates that these choice aids are neither as revolutionary nor as alarming as their celebrants and critics maintain—and neither as trusted nor as widely used. Netflix Recommends brings to light the constellations of sources that real viewers use to choose films and series in the digital age and argues that although some lament AI’s hostile takeover of humanistic cultures, the thirst for filters, curators, and critics is stronger than ever.

Netflix’s Speculative Fictions: Financializing Platform Television argues that Netflix’s scaled expansion has hinged upon its ability not only to create, but more importantly to communicate, new forms and flows of potential value in platform capitalism, wherein capital is mobilized not only from direct revenue streams but also the new value assigned to inputs and investments of data, debt, attention, behavior, taste, time, sociality, and speculation. To interpret and critique these new communications and projections of value, Colin Jon Mark Crawford performs a discursive analysis of the platform television industry leader Netflix and its ‘investor lore’: the multi-sited narrative of value found in the company’s investor relations materials and corporate communications, such as letters to shareholders, financial earnings reports, executive interviews, press releases, and blog posts. Netflix best represents the increasingly ubiquitous nexus of culture, tech, and finance industries that is platform television. To better understand the emergent financial logics of this relatively new media industry, we must first understand the speculative narratives and discourses of value which organize it. Scholars of media studies, television studies, technology studies, and economics will find this book particularly useful.

In 2020-21, the classic HBO show The Sopranos (1999-2007) saw a rapid increase in viewership and was proclaimed to be one of the “hottest shows of lockdown” by outlets like The Guardian and GQ. This resurgent popularity of The Sopranos raises important analytical questions for media scholars—how do audiences understand a complex text like The Sopranos in a radically different televisual and cultural context? Did they adapt the show to fit the particularities of the present moment or was it simply a nostalgic escape from the bleak conditions of the pandemic? Perhaps most importantly though, did the distinct televisual environment of the 2020s bring with it markedly new ways for audiences to understand ‘old’ shows? The New Audience for Old TV is the first book to investigate how audiences re-read and re-interpret resurgent shows when watching in new cultural contexts. Based on a series of original research interviews with young fans, it considers how new contexts of interpretation, including the COVID-19 pandemic, Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD), and post #MeToo gender politics, informed the unique experience of watching. Using the metaphor of the anamorphic painting, it introduces the analytical framework of a ‘retrospective reading’ to reveal the new meanings that are being made available for ‘old’ TV. Ultimately, The New Audience for Old TV uncovers fresh insights into audiences’ experiences with ‘prestige’ TV and the new avenues of meaning-making in the age of streaming.

This succinct title breaks down the complex mechanisms behind audio and video streaming and explains them in terms a middle-school-aged audience can understand. This volume introduces the concept of streaming and then explains how it works and what its uses are. Along the way, important digital terminology and concepts are introduced, such as bandwidth, codecs, plugins, and protocol. A discussion of Internet safety and how to produce and share streaming content wraps up this enlightening text.

Audiences for contemporary German film and television are becoming increasingly transnational, and depictions of German cultural history are moving beyond the typical post-war focus on Germany’s problematic past. Entertaining German Culture explores this radical shift, building on recent research into transnational culture to argue that a new process of internal and external cultural reabsorption is taking place through areas of mutually assimilating cultural exchange such as streaming services, an increasingly international film market, and the import and export of Anglo-American media formats.