Netflix Nations. Ramon Lobato
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a new degree of complexity into the existing ecology. As a result, we are starting to see different kinds of relationships emerge between television’s fundamental spatial categories: territory, market, nation, and signal area.
Why Netflix?
Netflix is presently the major global subscription video-on-demand service. It is not, however, the first television service with global aspirations. Various transnational channels, including CNN, MTV, Al Jazeera, and CGTN,5 came before it, along with quasiglobal digital platforms such as YouTube. In calling this book Netflix Nations, then, I am not suggesting that Netflix is popular in every nation; my point is that Netflix, as a multinational SVOD service that spans national borders and operates in a large number of countries simultaneously, represents a particular configuration of global television that requires study and theorization.
I am also interested in Netflix for a different reason—because it draws our attention to unresolved questions about media globalization more generally. Specifically, the Netflix case provides an opportunity to test, advance, and refine our conceptual models of “global television” and to rethink what this term means in a context of digital distribution. As a company that has internationalized very quickly, Netflix’s story also tells us a lot about what happens when a digital service enters national markets, coming in over the top of existing institutions and regulations. Netflix, in other words, is a case study with larger relevance to ongoing debates in media studies about convergence, disruption, globalization, and cultural imperialism.
The early history of Netflix is well known. The company was founded in California in 1997 by a direct-sales executive (Marc Randolph) and a Stanford-educated entrepreneur (Reed Hastings). Its first offering was a mail-order DVD rental service that proved wildly popular with American movie-lovers. Netflix unveiled its own streaming service in 2007 and fought off archrival Blockbuster, which declared bankruptcy in 2010. Along the way, the company became famous for its data-driven strategy, lean management ethos, and Silicon Valley–style human resources policies, which combine new-economy working freedoms (including unlimited leave time) with extremely high performance expectations.6
Netflix’s staged international rollout began with its most strategically important markets—Canada and Latin America. These were the low-hanging fruit for Netflix: Canada is a high-income, majority English-language market adjacent to the United States, while most of Latin America has a single regional language (Spanish), a large middle class, decent cable infrastructure, and a strong familiarity with pay-TV. Having successfully trialed its SVOD model in these territories, Netflix then expanded into key markets in Western Europe (2013–2015), Japan (2015), and Australasia (2015). In most of these countries, Netflix established partnerships with local telcos and internet service providers (ISPs), licensed locally relevant content and prepared promotional activities to coincide with the launch. Finally, the global switch-on at CES in January 2016 took care of the other lower-value or otherwise difficult global markets that had not yet been covered.
Netflix is one of the few media brands of the internet era to penetrate so deeply into households and the broader popular consciousness that it has become a verb (“let’s Netflix it,” “Netflix and chill”). It is a quintessential Silicon Valley success story, bridging two of America’s signature fascinations—home entertainment and e-commerce. But Netflix is still a media company that trades in the established film and television industries’ intellectual property, and since 2013 it has also invested heavily in its own original content. Unlike YouTube and Facebook, Netflix distributes only professionally produced content rather than user-generated content.
More than half of Netflix’s subscribers now live outside the United States, and that figure is increasing. To cater to local tastes, the company has licensed thousands of non-U.S. titles—from Indian Bollywood movies to Turkish dramas—for its increasingly diverse user base, and it has invested billions of dollars in producing its own content in 30 national markets. As Netflix continues to reach a wider international audience, the service becomes more geographically differentiated and localized. Titles appear and disappear, and catalogs shrink and expand, as the platform is accessed from different parts of the world. Languages, currencies, and library categories are all customized for each country.
Just as Netflix is changing, users are changing Netflix. The platform learns from its new global audiences, tracking tastes and viewing habits. As a result, different “cultures of Netflix,” as Ira Wagman and Luca Barra (2016) describe them, are starting to emerge—different ways of using the platform, talking about it, and watching it.7 These user data feed back into the company’s strategic decisions about original programming, licensing, and marketing. Netflix, then, should not be seen as a static cultural object or one that is consistent from market to market. It is constantly evolving, acquiring new layers of use and association.
This book is not a corporate history of Netflix, nor is it an insider account. Instead, it studies the debates and discourses around Netflix: how the service has been received by audiences, industry, and regulators in various countries. Since 2013, I have been closely following Netflix’s rollout, drawing on a range of public sources, including trade papers, technical documents, press releases, corporate filings, promotional videos and texts, online user discourse, government and third-party policy documents, and various other sources to piece together the story. I have also been fortunate to work with a number of talented, multilingual research assistants—Wilfred Wang, Ishita Tiwary, Renee Wright and Thomas Baudinette—who wrote reports on key territories (China, India, Russia, and Japan), providing vital context for the study. Netflix Nations, then, is a study of Netflix from the outside: a study of impacts, discourses, and debates, grounded in a tradition of critical media research. It makes no claim to get inside the black box or the boardroom.
I have written this book with several kinds of readers in mind. For students and scholars of television, it is first and foremost a book that tells a critical story about the world’s largest SVOD service and what its international rollout has meant for television distribution and media policy. At a conceptual level, the book is about the problem of media globalization and the rich history of intellectual debate around it. Finally, it is also a reflection on the state of television research in the internet age. It asks how scholars in this field might engage critically and productively with challenging new issues—such as localization and search technologies, and internet policy and regulation.
The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1, “What Is Netflix?,” provides a critical survey of current debates in television studies and internet studies as they relate to digital distribution. It also discusses the ontology of new television services, tracing connections to a range of different media forms. Chapter 2, “Transnational Television: From Broadcast to Broadband,” explores how debates about multinational and transnational television services have evolved over the years. Placing Netflix in a longer history of transnational television services, including broadcast and satellite channels, it explores how familiar anxieties about national sovereignty are returning in a different guise through internet distribution. Chapter 3, “The Infrastructures of Streaming,” takes an infrastructural approach to understanding Netflix. Here we examine some of the platform’s underlying systems, including its Content Delivery Network (Open Connect), and related policy issues such as net neutrality. Chapter 4, “Making Global Markets,” considers how Netflix has attempted to enter diverse national markets and adapt its offering to conform to local audience expectations. Case studies of Netflix’s experience in three key Asian markets—India, China, and Japan—reveal the challenges of localization and market entry. Chapter 5, “Content, Catalogs, and Cultural Imperialism,” focuses on cultural policy debates relating to Netflix catalogs, especially regarding local content, and examines how regulators in the European Union (EU) and Canada are attempting to develop local content policies for over-the-top services. Chapter 6, “The Proxy Wars,” tells the story of how Netflix sought to manage VPN use and geoblocking