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This chapter offers both a more detailed examination of the principles behind the recommendation systems and examines the comparative impact of these technologies across media organizations. Recommender systems research has changed dramatically over the past decade, but little of this new knowledge has filtered into research on web traffic, online news, or the future of journalism. Scholarship to date has focused on the impact of these technologies for an individual web user or an adopting media firm. But there has been little exploration of the wholesale effects of these changes not only within news and media organizations, but also with regard to competition between them. In addition, this chapter takes a detailed look at the Netflix Prize—a contest with surprising lessons even for those who do not care about movies. As it turns out, the task of recommending the right movie is similar to recommending almost anything—predicting which songs users like, which ads they prefer, which news stories they engage with.

In this section Conclusion, G-Stolz, Watts and Jenner summarise some of their results and bring them together to formulate an approach to transnational bingeing that brings their work together. In this, they particularly focus on ideas of Netflix and its function within transnational television. As more platforms publish content at the same time transnationally, the different approaches to understand Netflix as transnational company become increasingly important.

Since 2012, binge-watching has transitioned from niche behaviour to one of the the primary modes of television viewing. After a decade, its scholarship has reached a point of saturation sufficient to construct a useful taxonomy of binge-viewers behaviour. Drawing on that binge-watching literature, this chapter presents the first such taxonomy, organized by viewer motive, practice, and outcome. We plot binge-watching across multiple spectra: attentive to inattentive, intentional to unintentional, stable trait vs. situational occurrence, solo to social, and fixed content vs. shifting content. Our taxonomy also catalogues the variety of binge-watching outcomes found in the literature, including regret, satisfaction, nostalgia, and deeper character engagement. Through such an organization of this now ubiquitous media phenomenon we hope to offer future scholars a foundation on which to develop more nuanced and useful understandings of binge-watching and contemporary television consumption.

This chapter addresses how profiling and social sorting shape consumption and entertainment through recommendations and nudges. It looks at a conversation between a man and his grandchild while they were deciding what to watch. The grandchild mentioned a movie which Netflix says is a 96-per cent match to his tastes. He explains that Netflix tracks what he watches and whether he likes something, then suggests other programmes it thinks he might like. The man then talks about the importance of pushing one's boundaries and getting exposed to new stories, ideas, and genres to learn stuff and cultivate new tastes. When the conversation turned to the news, the grandchild mentions Facebook, which he claims is another thing that only shows him what it wants him to see. He also talks about targeted ads and algorithms.

As the 2008 global recession irrevocably changed entertainment financing, films beyond blockbuster or microbudget production methods became anathema to studios. However, adaptations of Victorian literature did not die in this climate; they merely conformed to market demands whether in the form of Disney adaptations of Alice in Wonderland or a new iteration of BBC prestige drama. The last decade has seen a reduced, albeit largely well-received, series of 19^th century-set stories and literature adaptations in theatres and on television, largely bolstered by the rise of streaming. Within this context, interfidelity’s holistic approach and negotiation of specific relationships between texts as well as the production and industrial contexts in which films are produced is all the more vital. In bridging a contrapuntal reading of Victorian works with recent advances in adaptation studies, interfidelity fosters a space in which fidelity is a fundamental tool in tracing the development of Empire from colonial discourse to global capital’s post-recession evolution and its effect on Hollywood production. Though best illustrated by direct application to films that share the context of those discussed in this study, interfidelity is applicable to the host of current adaptation situations that result from Victorian texts’ continuing appeal and Hollywood’s increasingly transnational make-up.

Scholars and journalists have tended to define binge-watching in terms of episodes rather than hours. This chapter finds that users also tend to define it that way, and that episode boundaries are more effective than time elapsed to trigger the end of a binge. An analysis of 150 000 users’ watch histories showed that the more episodes there were in a season, the fewer users completed it, and that this negative correlation was stronger than that with time and season completion. Follow-up data-prompted interviews, in which interviewees looked at their own watch histories and reflected on them, confirmed this. Viewers considered the episode to be the unit of the binge, and found its boundaries a more consistent cue than their subjective sense of duration.

Disruption arises when great firms fail precisely because they continued to make choices that had originally made them great. It is important to distinguish this from other causes of failure (e.g., complacency or incompetence) and also from the over-use of the term “disruption.” To do this, the chapter is anchored in the case of Blockbuster video, which is one of the most often discussed poster children for disruption in recent memory. Here the author shows, contrary to many commentators, Blockbuster was always early in thinking about exploiting digital opportunities but the timing was never right given its traditional business model. To understand disruption, we identify its intellectual origins. The chapter discusses how each of these thinkers would have examined the Blockbuster case as a thought experiment, demonstrating that the case itself has a richer and more subtle narrative than ‘Netflix destroyed Blockbuster’. In particular, it is far from clear that this would not have happened even if Netflix did not exist.

Value chain analysis (VCA) aids the strategist in understanding a firm’s potential sources of competitive advantage by decomposing the firm’s business processes into strategically important activities. Viewing the firm as an aggregate of interlinked value-adding activities and placing them in the context of a broader value chain helps to understand each activity’s impact on both cost and revenue potential. As such, VCA can be used to help the firm achieve an optimal allocation of resources. This chapter discusses the underlying theory, core idea, depiction, process, insight or value created, and risks and limitations of VCA. The chapter also continues the illustration of Netflix and applies the steps of value chain analysis to this case.

The purpose of a competitor analysis is to provide managers with a complete picture of the competitive landscape confronting a firm. The core idea behind a competitor analysis is to use a systematic approach to (1) identify current and future rivals to a firm, (2) assess the strengths and weaknesses of current and future rivals, (3) determine a match between a competitor’s strategies and capabilities, (4) analyze the future plans and intentions of rivals, and (5) predict a competitor’s reaction to initiatives launched by a firm. The ability to anticipate the response by rivals provides a firm with a competitive advantage. This chapter discusses the underlying theory, core idea, depiction, process, insight or value created, and risks and limitations of competitor analysis. Finally, the chapter offers the illustration of Netflix and applies the steps of competitor analysis to this case.

What about all the classic films that aren’t available as streaming video? In essence, they will cease to exist. Netflix is banking on the fact that most people have no real knowledge of film history, and so they’ll content themselves with streaming only the most recent and popular films. This is something akin to Amazon deciding to do away with physical books altogether, and offer everything only on Kindle. No doubt Amazon is thinking about this possibility, and would love to do it, but to do so would marginalize literally hundreds of thousands of books. After killing off all the brick and mortar stores for DVDs, CDs and books, Amazon and Netflix seem poised to do away with all vestiges of the real, and enter the digital only domain. What will be lost in the process is not only the physical reality of books and/or DVDs, coupled with the fact that many titles won’t make it to Kindle or streaming video, simply because they’re not popular enough. In short, we’ll have the “top ten” classics, and the rest of film history - many superb, remarkable films - will gather dust on the shelf.

From 2007 onwards, a sizeable majority of the top-grossing Bollywood films have been funded partially or in full by a Hollywood studio. Since 2015, Indian films have found new outlets in online media companies such as Netflix, Amazon Studios, and YouTube. And in 2018, both Amazon and Netflix had marketed their original content using the Bollywood star-centric model. It is in this context that the last chapter unpacks the probable futures in the ever-evolving, flexible historiography of Indian cinema.

This chapter explores the rise of algorithmic aesthetics through the lens of Netflix. The company’s rejection of a big-data statistics approach to taste in favor of a hybrid human-computational model has led to the Borges-esque project of taxonomizing all real and potential films into one of 76,897 genres. This massive analytical enterprise shapes the company’s creative investments in original work, particularly its original television series House of Cards. The story of the show’s development, distribution, and aesthetics illuminates algorithmic models of culture that are increasingly influential and inescapable. House of Cards embodies a pillar of the algorithmic age: the seduction of bespoke and intimate content personalization underwritten by monolithic computational enterprises. The chapter closes by arguing that Netflix demonstrates the power and pitfalls of cultural arbitrage by manipulating certain kinds of computational abstraction to achieve cultural and financial success.

This chapter focuses on TV Globo’s efforts to reposition itself within the increasingly complex and competitive new Brazilian mediascape, particularly as those efforts pertain to strengthening its streaming service, Globo Play. With the growth of Netflix Brasil in recent years and the streaming platform’s emergence as one of Globo’s biggest threats, chapter six considers some of the tactics employed by Globo to remain competitive. Namely, such tactics center on the media conglomerate’s experimentation with its over-the-air and over-the-top businesses and an increased production in series. To illustrate Globo’s efforts in this arena, the chapter analyzes the production and rollout of two Globo original series, Supermax and Assédio.

Although more changes will certainly arise as the transformations to the Brazilian mediascape continue to take hold, it is clear that the confluence of legislative, technological, economic, and creative factors during the post-2011 context have given way to the most competitive mediascape in the history of Brazil. This particular moment represents a snapshot of Brazil, where the increasingly diverse field of television and Internet fiction is altering the relationships between distributor and producer and producer and viewer, and where a hegemonic force like Globo struggles to maintain and reproduce its audiences in the face of a number of subnational, transnational, and global movements, organizations, and technologies. In short, in the new Brazilian mediascape, while Globo competes with national and international pay-television channels, YouTube, and Netflix and while telenovelas compete with series, both local and foreign, more Brazilians in more parts of Brazil are faced with more symbolic portrayals of the nation than ever before. The result is a Brazil reframed by the small screens.

This chapter moves readers from Andrew Smith’s adolescence-as-dystopia to the popular animated Netflix series Big Mouth, which represents adolescence as a horror show. Like Grasshopper Jungle, Big Mouth provides audiences with monstrous avatars for the storm and stress of adolescence. Instead of horny, rampaging mutant mantises, however, Big Mouth offers viewers Hormone Monsters, haunted houses, ghosts, and other Gothic tropes as embodiments of those anxieties that surround puberty and its horrifying humiliations. Unlike Grasshopper Jungle, Big Mouth universalizes queerness, celebrates the polymorphous perversity of childhood, and uses camp to defuse many of the anxieties that attend other representations of adolescent sexuality. Big Mouth offers us a kind of camp with strong ties to shame—what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls “dark camp”—and illustrates how shame and debasement can function as a powerful model of relationality, one that unites the show’s young protagonists through shared queer feelings.

This chapter discusses the binge-watching practices by fans who came to Reddit to discuss eight original Netflix series with other fans. The data collected indicates that the majority of comments are made within the first 48-72 hours of release. Emotional commitment, anticipation, and a desire for completion without being spoiled were motivating factors. References to addiction and expressions of regret were outweighed by the pleasures of the binge watch. When the binge was interrupted, it was due to a lack of interest in the text, emotional intensity or the demands of everyday life. Binge watching is thus a practice imbricated with both affective and domestic relations.

Who are binge-viewers? Research on contemporary television audiences has revealed complex, nuanced, and at times contradictory depictions of these illusive yet ubiquitous consumers of contemporary media. At times gluttons at times epicures, binge-viewers consume more voraciously and specifically than any audience in television history. And yet no research to date has examined how media companies attempted to construct and normalize binge-viewers through their advertised depictions when the new media practice began mainstreaming. This chapter offers a first of its kind typology of binge-viewer tropes as they appeared in the commercial rhetoric of streaming services at that time. The subsequent analysis reveals a mnemonically perverse campaign exploiting 20th century fears of television and hyperbolic depictions of couch potatoes in mock public service announcements to sell an evolutionary narrative of binge-viewers as savvy, agentic, and self-aware.

National, Transnational, Transcultural Media revisits the terms surrounding cultural belonging in their uses in cultural and in television studies, explores definitional shifts and potential issues in application where global players such as Netflix are concerned. Netflix in particular has built their reputation not only on Binge Viewing as a cultural phenomenon, but also on transcultural values transmitted to and bestowed upon its viewership. It’s cultural power on a global scale in terms of affecting television habits is central to the debate.

This chapter uses textual analysis and genre studies to conceptualize Netflix original productions as transnational television. Using the British series Sex Education and the German How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast) as examples, the article analyses the teen series produced for a transnational market. In this, the article especially considers how the series relate to established genre conventions established in the teen series' American iteration. The article uses this analysis to develop the idea of genre as characteristic of a so-called 'grammar of transnationalism'. This is particularly relevant in regards to Netflix and its business model, which addresses its content to a transnational audience and in this context highlights the national while de-emphasising the local.

This chapter introduces the section on textual analysis. This happens via establishing concepts of ‘bingeability’ and questioning how the ‘bingeable’ text recaps narrative events via narrative digressions. The focus here is the Netflix series Stranger Things as example for the way previous events are ‘remembered’, thus structuring series memory in a specific way.