Netflix audience data, streaming industry discourse, and the emerging realities of 'popular' television (original) (raw)
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Netflix original series, global audiences and discourses of streaming success
Critical Studies in Television, 2021
This article examines the discourses of streaming success within the television industry by focusing on Netflix and two of the service's original series: Fauda and La Casa de Papel. Using publicly available secondary data through 2019, this analysis argues the transnational platform's efforts to redefine successful television while maintaining a high level of data secrecy necessitate the discursive construction of a global and undifferentiated audience. Yet, rather than representing a break with the past, the discourses of streaming success reveal Netflix to be a television institution attempting to address traditional industry challenges.
AUDIENCE CULTURE AND TV SERIES: NETFLIX AS A POPULAR CULTURAL PRACTICE
Begüm Tay, 2022
With the development of technology, television, which is the ultimate representation of mass media and indispensable for the domestic place has converged the digital media age. SVOD (Subscription video-on-demand) platforms and social media have become different mediums of mass communication in the contemporary world. With the entrance of Netflix, the most popular SVOD platform of the digital age, into daily life and domestic space, changes have occurred in the television culture of use by its audiences. This research aims to contribute to digital media approaches in the audience studies literature by examining the representation of Netflix culture of use in daily life, the changing television culture of use with Netflix, and the current position of television in the domestic space from an audiences' point of view. This is a qualitative and exploratory study, it is conducted by 14 participants by semi-structured in-depth interview technique. The critical discourse analysis method was used in data analysis to understand the audience's engagement with Netflix and television relationships.
International Journal of Film and Media Arts
Television was born analogue, almost 100 years ago: first broadcast across airwaves, then delivered via analogue cable and satellite, to reach millions and millions of people around the world. Like many other industries, television has been under the process of digital transformation, integrating digital technologies in all parts of its value chain, from content production to content distribution. Today, inseparable from the digital transformation process is the large, diverse and ever-growing volume of data created, captured, analyzed and applied-also known as Big Data. Television is being reshaped by Big Data, with newcomers to the industry such as Netflix leading the way, for others to follow-and for others to fail. The concepts of Platform Capitalism, Surveillance Capitalism and Dataism may illuminate many of the challenges faced by the main stakeholders in the television industry, with implications that go much beyond this field. Lastly, Netflix's impact on the production, distribution and consumption of audiovisual content is still to be understood in a small market such as Portugal: the current exploratory paper is also meant to be the basis of future research in Portugal about internet-distributed television.
Founded just 20 years ago, the Netflix brand has had an impact around the world and has changed our understanding of modern entertainment. The company made the move from analog to digital media in 2007, after 10 years in which its business had consisted of offering customers a flat rate for DVD rental by mail. The business model has not substantially changed (bringing films and television series into the home) but has now gone 100% digital, with a monthly subscription for streaming contents instead of downloading them to a playback device. Betting on the Internet seemed risky at the time given what was happening with home entertainment, which had been weakened by piracy and declining sales and rentals of content on a physical format. “Nobody is going to pay for something they can get for free” was often heard, especially among the traditional players in the industry, who were (and are still) mired in the dilemma of how to continue their analog business while exploiting the demand generated by the new digital ecosystem. Netflix proved that it was possible. It has been true to its philosophy of providing its product on demand with total access, including its original content. It is currently the leader by a wide margin in Internet television with nearly 110 million subscribers worldwide, and is available in more than 190 countries (according to statistics from the third quarter of 20171. This journey has not been without setbacks and mistakes. The company made the right adjustments to its business model when necessary, adapting its product to a world engulfed by the accelerated pace of innovation and constantly changing consumer habits. It also proved that providing digital content services could be profitable, offering an added value for which users would be willing to pay. In the process, it also radically transformed cultural consumption patterns in television viewing. THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018 - DIGITAL TRENDS IN CULTURE. CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE 3.0 https://www.accioncultural.es/es/ebook-anuario-2018
TV Got Better: Netflix’s Original Programming Strategies and the On-Demand Television Transition
Media Industries Journal
This paper analyzes the promotional strategies of Netflix, arguing that the company reinforces what Pierre Bourdieu has called the discourses of distinction. In particular, the streaming service highlights what Tryon calls the promises of plenitude, participation, prestige, and personalization. Netflix highlights these discourses in part through its ongoing engagement with subscription cable channel HBO, and in part through promotional materials such as its TV Got Better campaign, which sought to naturalize viewing practices such as binge watching as being part of a technological and narrative cutting edge.
Netflix, the Curation of Taste and the Business of Diversification
STUDIA HUMANISTYCZNE AGH, 2021
Netflix is considered as a global business invested in strategies of diversification, localisation and personalisation in light of several discourses about the streaming service. One presents Netflix as an evil corporation encouraging binge-watching and reducing individuals to data. A utopian discourse proclaims the democratising potential of digital media technologies, including Netflix's claims about its personalised, on-demand service. An industry discourse laments Netflix's disruption of the film and television business. Finally, a scholarly discourse maps the political economy and cultural impact of Netflix. Each discourse attaches a particular cultural value to Netflix. Some offer 'antidotes', including the niche streamers, with their 'curated' collections of specialised content. Both types of streamer are in fact gatekeepers regulating access to cultural experiences and promoting particular ideas of taste and diversity. Netflix's strategies of customisation and glocalisation, and its activities in the Middle East and North Africa, demonstrate in the end that diversity is good for business.
El profesional de la información
The growth in popularity of on-demand content consumption, boosted by large global agents such as Netflix, Amazon and HBO, has brought audience fragmentation even further. Exponential growth in the content available to users (which reduces viewer concentration based on a limited selection), its commercialisation through a subscription-based business model (removing advertising from content) and the boom in consumption on different receivers, many of them mobile or outside the home (thus complicating people meter monitoring), has generated a new ecosystem where success can no longer be assessed using traditional audience measurement systems. This article discusses audience behaviour in streaming platforms and the new dimensions used to measure the success of a television series, above and beyond data provided by television audience measurement (TAM) techniques. From this analysis, the article reviews the transformation in the concept of popularity and how new audience indicators affe...
Netflix and the Development of the Internet Television Network
2016
When Netflix launched in April 1998, Internet video was in its infancy. Eighteen years later, Netflix has developed into the first truly global Internet TV network. Many books have been written about the five broadcast networks – NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and the CW – and many about the major cable networks – HBO, CNN, MTV, Nickelodeon, just to name a few – and this is the fitting time to undertake a detailed analysis of how Netflix, as the preeminent Internet TV networks, has come to be. This book, then, combines historical, industrial, and textual analysis to investigate, contextualize, and historicize Netflix's development as an Internet TV network. The book is split into four chapters. The first explores the ways in which Netflix's development during its early years a DVD-by-mail company – 1998-2007, a period I am calling "Netflix as Rental Company" – lay the foundations for the company's future iterations and successes. During this period, Netflix adapted DVD di...
TV Got Better: Netflix's Original Programming Strategies and Binge Viewing
2015
This paper analyzes the promotional strategies of Netflix, arguing that the company reinforces what Pierre Bourdieu has called the discourses of distinction. In particular, the streaming service highlights what Tryon calls the promises of plenitude, participation, prestige, and personalization. Netflix highlights these discourses in part through its ongoing engagement with subscription cable channel HBO, and in part through promotional materials such as its TV Got Better campaign, which sought to naturalize viewing practices such as binge watching as being part of a technological and narrative cutting edge.
“Television of the future”? Netflix, quality, and neophilia in the TV debate
Revista MATRIZes, 2021
In this article, we investigate Netflix, questioning the expectations of the public and the critics regarding changes that arise from the introduction of this service in the market. From the analysis of trade press coverage, access data, and the company's investment trends, we inquire what types of TV consumption experiences are at stake in the discourse promoted by analysts and novelty enthusiasts. We also discuss how evaluations on these platforms renew the ongoing controversies about television quality. In spite of the type of elucubration awakened by the sensation of ubiquity and stylistic revolutions, we will defend that the practices related to streaming work, in fact, as updated models of linear TV.