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Netflix Nations
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CRITICAL CULTURAL COMMUNICATION
General Editors: Jonathan Gray, Aswin Punathambekar,
Adrienne Shaw
Founding Editors: Sarah Banet- Weiser and Kent A. Ono
Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies The Makeover: Reality Television
in the Media and Reflexive Audiences
Isabel Molina- Guzmán Katherine Sender
The Net Effect: Romanticism, Authentic™: The Politics of
Capitalism, and the Internet Ambivalence in a Brand Culture
Thomas Streeter Sarah Banet- Weiser
Our Biometric Future: Facial Technomobility in China: Young
Recognition Technology and the Migrant Women and Mobile Phones
Culture of Surveillance Cara Wallis
Kelly A. Gates Love and Money: Queers, Class,
Critical Rhetorics of Race and Cultural Production
Edited by Michael G. Lacy and Lisa Henderson
Kent A. Ono Cached: Decoding the Internet in
Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Global Popular Culture
Transnational Media Cultures Stephanie Ricker Schulte
Edited by Radha S. Hegde Black Television Travels: African
Commodity Activism: Cultural American Media around the
Resistance in Neoliberal Times Globe
Edited by Roopali Mukherjee and Timothy Havens
Sarah Banet- Weiser Citizenship Excess: Latino/as,
Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Media, and the Nation
Race and Representation after 9/11 Hector Amaya
Evelyn Alsultany Feeling Mediated: A History of
Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, Media Technology and Emotion in
and the Optics of Thoughtlessness America
Valerie Hartouni Brenton J. Malin
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The Post- Racial Mystique: Media Wife, Inc.: The Business of
and Race in the Twenty- First Marriage in the Twenty- First
Century Century
Catherine R. Squires Suzanne Leonard
Making Media Work: Cultures of Dot- Com Design: The Rise of a
Management in the Entertainment Useable, Social, Commercial Web
Industries Megan Sapnar Ankerson
Edited by Derek Johnson, Derek Postracial Resistance: Black
Kompare, and Avi Santo Women, Media, and the Uses of
Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Strategic Ambiguity
Spanish- Language Radio and Ralina L. Joseph
Public Advocacy Netflix Nations: The Geography of
Dolores Inés Casillas Digital Distribution
Orienting Hollywood: A Century Ramon Lobato
of Film Culture between Los
Angeles and Bombay
Nitin Govil
Asian American Media Activism:
Fighting for Cultural Citizenship
Lori Kido Lopez
Struggling for Ordinary: Media
and Transgender Belonging in
Everyday Life
Andre Cavalcante
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Netflix Nations
The Geography of Digital Distribution
Ramon Lobato
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2019 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of
writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible
for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was
prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lobato, Ramon, author.
Title: Netflix nations : the geography of digital distribution / Ramon
Lobato.
Description: New York : New York University Press, [2018] | Series:
Critical cultural communication | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021508| ISBN 9781479841516 (cl : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781479804948 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Netflix (Firm) | Video-on-demand. | Streaming video. |
Television broadcasting. | International broadcasting.
Classification: LCC HD9697.V544 N48495 2012 | DDC
384.55/502854678—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021508
New York University Press books are printed on acid- free paper, and their
binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use
environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent
possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Also available as an ebook
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Contents
Preface ...................................... ix
Introduction ...................................1
Understanding Internet- Distributed Television ....4
Internet- Distributed Television as an Ecology......7
Why Netflix?.................................11
1. What Is Netflix? ...............................19
Television Studies and the Future- of- TV Debate ...22
Digital Media Studies and the
Platform Perspective........................35
Toward a Synthesis............................43
2. Transnational Television: From Broadcast to
Broadband....................................47
From National to Transnational Television—
and Back..................................50
Spatial Logics of Television Distribution .........54
Rethinking the Transnational...................67
3. The Infrastructures of Streaming.................73
The Infrastructural Optic ......................74
Digital Divides and Download Speeds ...........81
Politics of Bandwidth..........................85
Netflix and the Net Neutrality Debate............90
Clouds and CDNs ............................93
The Long View ..............................100
vii
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viii | Contents
4. Making Global Markets........................107
Global Television, Local Markets...............110
Long- Distance Localization ...................114
The Unavoidable Labor of Localization .........116
India.......................................121
Japan.......................................126
China ......................................130
5. Content, Catalogs, and Cultural Imperialism......135
Revisiting the One- Way Flow..................138
Netflix Catalogs and Media Policy in Europe ....144
The Canadian Situation.......................151
Do Audiences Actually Want Local Content
(on Netflix)?..............................155
6. The Proxy Wars...............................163
User Practices and Platform Policies............164
Historicizing Netflix’s Shifting Policies on
Geoblocking..............................168
Making Sense of the Policy Shifts ..............174
Cultural Consequences of the Proxy Wars.......178
Conclusions..................................181
Old and New Lessons ........................182
Streaming Beyond Netflix.....................185
Acknowledgments ............................189
Notes.......................................191
Bibliography.................................199
Index.......................................217
About the Author ............................235
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Preface
International television flows (“travelling nar-
ratives” in my re- definition) can be seen in a
new light . . . as flows of symbolic mobile and
mobilizing resources that have the potential to
widen the range of our imaginary geography,
multiply our symbolic life-w orlds, familiarize
ourselves with “the other” and “the distant”
and construct “a sense of imagined places”: in
short, to travel the world and encounter “oth-
erness” under the protection of the mediated
experience.
— Milly Buonnano, The Age of Television:
Experiences and Theories, 108– 109 (emphasis
in original)
As Milly Buonnano reminds us, watching television always
involves some kind of imagined interaction with faraway
places, situations, and symbols, in a way that recalls the
word’s etymological origins (“tele- vision”: seeing at a
distance). This idea of television, as an inherently inter-
national medium characterized by a particular way of
ordering space, is at the heart of this book. In what follows,
I revisit some long-s tanding debates in television and global
media studies to see how they can help us understand the
rapid transformations that are taking place as television
morphs unevenly into an online medium.
ix
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