Netflix Nations. Ramon Lobato

      Figures I.1 and I.2. Reed Hastings on stage at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 6, 2016, at The Venetian, Las Vegas. Photos by Ethan Miller/Getty Images.

      This announcement signaled a turning point for Netflix. Since the company first unveiled a streaming service for its U.S. customers in 2007, there had been speculation about when the company would offer this service to subscribers outside the United States. The rumors were confirmed when Netflix began its international rollout, first to Canada in 2010, then to Latin America in 2011, to parts of Europe in 2012 and 2013, and to Australia, New Zealand, and Japan in 2015. During this period, Netflix evolved from a national service (supplying American screen content to American audiences) into a globally focused business with greater ambitions. With the culmination of this process announced at CES, Netflix had become a global media company—available almost everywhere, with a potential foothold in almost all the major national markets.

      Much of the world has embraced Netflix, and series such as Stranger Things and Narcos have amassed cult followings in many countries. Yet Netflix’s metamorphosis into a global media provider has not been trouble-free. Shortly after Hastings’s announcement, newspapers in a number of countries started reporting angry reactions to the Netflix global switch-on. In Kenya, the chairman of the Film Classification Board threatened to block Netflix on the grounds of its “shockingly explicit eroticism,” arguing that “we cannot afford to be [a] passive recipient of foreign content that could corrupt the moral values of our children and compromise our national security” (Aglionby and Garrahan 2016). In Indonesia, access to Netflix was blocked by the state-owned telecommunications company (telco) Telekom Indonesia because of “a permit issue” and the “unfiltered” nature of its content (Gunawan 2016). In Europe, where there is a long history of cultural policy designed to keep Hollywood’s power in check, regulators planned a minimum European content quota for foreign streaming platforms. Meanwhile, Australians fretted that the arrival of Netflix would “break” the internet as streamers hogged the bandwidth on the country’s creaking internet infrastructure.

      Stories such as these give us a sense of the diverse ways that countries have responded to the entry of Netflix into their media markets. They also show how Netflix’s rise has revived some deep-seated tensions in international media policy. These tensions stem from differing views on the part of regulators, media companies, and audiences about the nature of video and its proper modes of distribution. They also involve disagreement about where video services should operate, which territories and markets they should be able to access, and whose rules they should obey.

      This book takes the international rollout of Netflix as the starting point for a wider investigation into the global geography of online television distribution. By geography, I mean the spatial patterns and logics that shape where and how internet-distributed television circulates and also where and how it does not circulate. The book is organized around two central questions: How are streaming services changing the spatial dynamics of global television distribution, and what theories and concepts do scholars need to make sense of these changes? In answering these questions—one descriptive and the other speculative—this book will move across several subfields of media and communications research, including global television studies, media industry studies, and media geography. Along the way, we also delve into the history of earlier systems for transnational television distribution (especially satellite) and consider how they raised similar questions in the past.

Understanding Internet-Distributed Television

      The rise of what Amanda Lotz describes in her book Portals (2017a) as “internet-distributed television”—professionally produced content circulated and consumed through websites, online services, platforms, and apps, rather than through broadcast, cable, or satellite systems—is an excellent opportunity to bring together two previously disconnected strands of television scholarship. The first of these is the rich body of literature about global and transnational television, which focuses on the connections (and irreconcilable differences) between institutions, practices, textual forms, and viewing cultures around the world (Barker 1997; Parks and Kumar 2003; Straubhaar 2007; Chalaby 2005, 2009; Buonnano 2007). The second is the literature on television’s digital transformations, which explores the recent history of television technologies and their cross-pollination with other media and internet technologies (Spigel and Olsson 2004; Bennett and Strange 2011; Murphy 2011; Lotz 2014, 2017a). The arrival of internet-distributed television requires a rethinking of the potential connection between these two fields and their underlying categories: space and technology.

      It is not merely that the future of television looks rather different in different places (Turner and Tay 2009, 8), although this is certainly true. Rather, internet distribution of television content changes the fundamental logics through which television travels, introducing new mobilities and immobilities into the system, adding another layer to the existing palimpsest of broadcast, cable, and satellite distribution. Internet television does not replace legacy television in a straightforward way; instead, it adds new complexity to the existing geography of distribution.

      The arrival of mature internet-distributed television services such as Netflix is significant in global media debates. Until direct-broadcast satellite systems arose in the 1980s, television signals were mostly contained within national boundaries.2 Even though programming was traded internationally, television distribution did not yet have a strongly transnational dimension. Recall Raymond Williams’s classic anecdote in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) about sitting in a Miami hotel room and watching American broadcast television, with its unfamiliar and disorienting “flow,” for the first time. While Williams was familiar with American television as an imported medium, its actual broadcast distribution was something he could only experience by traveling to the United States.

      One can only guess what Williams would make of today’s television landscape, with its dizzying array of platforms and on-demand content.