Videoage International June-July 2019

8 Book Review June 2019 V I D E O A G E #NetflixEverywhere? The Challenges Faced By The SVoD Global Expansion By Luis Polanco “T oday, you are witnessing the birth of a new global Internet TV network,” saidNetflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings at the four-day Consumer Electronics Show (CES) trade fair in 2016. During his keynote presentation, Hastings announced the streaming service’s availability in over 190 countries. The company had started initial international rollouts as early as 2010 in Canada, followed by Latin America in 2011, and select territories in Europe throughout 2012 and 2013. But on that day at the CES in Las Vegas, the company—which began as a DVD rental service headquartered in Los Gatos, California — declared its worldwide scope. “Whether you are in Sydney or St. Petersburg, Singapore or Seoul, Santiago or Saskatoon, you now can be part of the Internet TV revolution,” he said. Ramon Lobato, a senior research fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, chooses this global launch announcement as the starting point for his study of the media-services provider, NetflixNations: The Geography of Digital Distribution (240 pgs., New York University Press, 2019, U.S.$25). While the book discusses Netflix’s growth from a simple U.S. media company to an international giant, Lobato is primarily concerned with how that development between 2010 and 2016 has affected discussions around global television and digital distribution. By using the behemoth as a case study, Lobato is able to analyze and query the political and economic implications of streaming services as more and more competitors enter the OTT fray. Lobato explicitly mentions that Netflix Nations is for “cord-cutting students” and scholars of media and communications. Regardless, it is still relevant to industryexecutivesandTVenthusiasts who are curious to understand the successes and setbacks of Netflix’s global strategy, and how that global strategy mirrors the past. As Lobato puts it, “the story of Netflix is not entirely new; indeed, it closely resembles the history of transnational satellite channels expanding into Europe, Latin America, and Asia in the 1990s.” Despite Netflix’s profound success in Western countries with rising middle-class populations, Netflix has had to adapt its own efforts of expanding globally by addressing local tastes. This process, Lobato writes, was not dissimilar to the globalization strategies of U.S.-based cable channels. He uses MTV as an example, referring to its “one channel for all” approach, which failed the company, and consequently promptedViacom to launch MTV Europe and MTV Asia, with even further localized channels introduced later on. For Lobato, the cable/satellite network and the streaming service share a similar trajectory with the “launch of a disruptive American television service, the attempted export of this service to global markets, uneven uptake, cultural blowback, and then a commitment to localization and local content production.” Interestingly, by noting the challenges Netflix encountered in its development (or lack thereof) in countries such as India, Japan, and China, Lobato is able to reflect on several contemporary debates surrounding national distinctions in Internet infrastructure, localization concerns, and state intervention. While India is a promising market for multina- tional companies, Lobato notes that “India’s de- mography, regulations, and infrastructure pose many challenges for foreign media companies.” Netflix entered the country’s streaming market as part of its 2016 global launch announcement. Whereas film is heavily supervised by India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which screens film content for explicit and vio- lent subject matter, digital media services exist in a grey area. Services like Google Play and iTu- nes tend to opt for the safer side and sell content approved by the CBFC. But Netflix, upon its arri- val in the country, asserted that it would not be suppressing its content. “This signals an appeal to cosmopolitan Indian subscribers,” Lobato wri- tes, who also have the means to afford Netflix. As Lobato points out, Netflix is comparatively pricey in India, where competing services have signifi- cantly reduced price points. Take, for example, Eros Now, which has a subscription charge that’s a tenth of Netflix’s price, or Star India’s Hotstar, which is free with ads. Netflix’s internationalization process in China was very restricted. The streaming service’s cost was also an issue, but China’s regulatory agencies and local media companies proved another strong impediment. Netflix not only had to contend with the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Culture, and the Cyberspace Affairs Council of China, but with the preexisting streaming services operated by the trio of companies known as BAT: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. “The regulatory hurdles that blocked its entry remind us that global media is a domain of national policy as well as of commercial strategy,” Lobato explains. One of the more eye-opening sections in the book offers insight into how Netflix utilizes its own content delivery network (CDN), Open Connect. Lobato cites a technical article, “Open Connect Everywhere: A Glimpse at the Internet Ecosystem through the Lens of the Netflix CDN,” from a team of computer scientists, who report which areas were better served on an infrastructural level. Lobato extrapolates that “the tiny Micronesian island of Guam is well served by Open Connect servers, presumably because of its U.S. military bases,” while Africa apparently received only minimal network capacity. Another infrastructural issue Lobato points out is bandwidth, which differs by country depending on a number of economic and technical factors. “While Netflix is now potentially available to users in almost all countries, access to the service depends in practice on both the reach and the capacity of a country’s broadband infrastructure, as well as the pricing structures that regulate both Internet access and SVoD services.” Lobato mentions Cuba as an example because Netflix had previously announced that it would be providing its service to the island. “Netflix’s Cuba service exists only in a virtual or theoretical sense,” Lobato explains, as the country has very limited public Internet and its citizens do not have credit cards. “This attempt to follow the infrastructure reveals a rather different story about Netflix’s globalization than the one suggested in the company’s public relations,” writes Lobato. “It gives us a sense of the unevenness of Netflix’s presence around the world, and its finite capacity to deliver on its promise to be a global television network.” Netflix Nations offers compelling information to those against the streaming monolith, as Lobato writes early in his preface how “the book is substantially about Netflix’s failure rather than its success in various markets around the world.” But the case study will be equally worthwhile for those interested in the broader dialogue on Internet-distributed television.