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.

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.

A Dictionary of Film Studies covers all aspects of its discipline as it is currently taught at undergraduate level. Offering exhaustive and authoritative coverage, this A-Z is written by experts in the field, and covers terms, concepts, debates, and movements in film theory and criticism; national, international, and transnational cinemas; film history, movements, and genres; film industry organizations and practices; and key technical terms and concepts. Since its first publication in 2012, the dictionary has been updated to incorporate over 40 new entries, including computer games and film, disability, ecocinema, identity, portmanteau film, Practice as Research, and film in Vietnam. Moreover, numerous revisions have been made to existing entries to account for developments in the discipline, and changes to film institutions more generally. Indices of films and filmmakers mentioned in the text are included for easy access to relevant entries. The dictionary also has 13 feature articles on popular topics and terms, revised and informative bibliographies for most entries, and more than 100 web links to supplement the text.

This edited collection is the first book to offer a wide-ranging examination of the interface between American independent film and a converged television landscape that consists of terrestrial broadcasters, cable networks and streaming providers, in which independent film and television intersect in complex, multifaceted and creative ways. The book covers the long history of continuities and connections between the two sectors, as seen in the activities of PBS, HBO or Sundance. It considers the movement of filmmakers between indie film and TV such as Steven Soderbergh, Rian Johnson, the Duplass brothers, Joe Swanberg, Lynn Shelton and Gregg Araki; details the confluence of aesthetic and thematic elements seen in shows such as Girls, Breaking Bad, Master of None, or Glow; points to a shared interest in regional sensibilities evident in shows like One Mississippi or Fargo; and makes the case for documentaries and web series as significant entities in this domain. Collectively, the book builds a compelling picture of indie TV as a significant feature of US screen entertainment in the 21st Century. This interdisciplinary landmark volume will be a go-to reference for students and scholars of Television Studies, Film Studies and Media Studies.