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.
Amanda D. Lotz is Professor in the Digital Media Research Center at Queensland University of Technology and the author and editor of several books, including Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-funded Video on Demand, Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars and The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Second Edition.
Ramon Lobato is Associate Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is the author of Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution and Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution.
"Reveals the power of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services to commission stories that matter, and highlights Lotz and Lobato’s prowess in commissioning cutting-edge, impactful research. The chapters they have collected in this book are essential reading for anyone serious about contemporary media industries and global production cultures." ~Derek Johnson, University of Wisconsin–Madison
"If you really want to understand the impact of SVOD on contemporary global culture, then read this book. Streaming Video unpacks the complex interplay of the national and the global that underpins SVOD’s impact on storytelling practices. It offers a truly international perspective—with case studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East chosen by leading and emerging scholars—that expands the scope and scale of contemporary studies of streaming media." ~Catherine Johnson, author of Online TV
