Netflix Nations
Organisation | Vrije Universiteit Brussel, imec-SMIT
My Role | Researcher, Author
Are we to examine the Netflix transnational model
through the lens of culture or economics?
This is a 1-page summary. Download the full paper here.
Note: An early version of this research essay was written for imec-SMIT (VUB) as part of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree in Digital Communication Leadership (delivered by the University of Salzburg, Vrije Universiteit Brussel & UCLA California).
Preface.
As Netflix Inc. continues to assert its dominance as the world’s largest internet television network, I’m reminded of an earlier statement from Reed Hastings (Co-founder & VP, Netflix) when asked about the company’s rationale for global expansion.
“We know what everybody wants, which is the same catalogue around the world.”
— as quoted in Barrett, 2016
With this essay, I intend to examine whether Netflix’s monopolistic aspirations qualify as a form of media imperialism. And if so, are we to theorise this imperialism a function of culture or economics? There is no straightforward response to this from the perspective of media scholarship alone.
On the one hand, Netflix’s proprietary business model itself is based on multilingual and multicultural content. On the other hand, the company represents a larger history of US-based corporations trying to establish dominance in the global media and entertainment markets by way of capital accumulation.
Summary.
Drawing from the work of Jin (2013), Srnicek (2016) and most recently Davis (2021) among others, I consider the question of how Netflix presents a complicated case of platform imperialism: a hybrid form of imperialism that has much less to do with cultural production than with the technological affordances of the platform that provide the foundation for transnational domination.
The problem of imperialism I investigate is therefore inevitably linked to longstanding debates around cultural imperialism since the 1960s: for instance, while Schiller’s (1971) focus was on the cultural consequences of content, Tunstall (1977) was preoccupied with the influence of media themselves, which is another way of underlining the axiom that ‘the medium is the message’ (McLuhan, 1964).
My take on this aligns with Tunstall’s to the extent that if Netflix does display a form of media imperialism, it’s not in the way that its ever-increasing library of transnational content is curated, but via the economics of platform capitalism which prohibits competition by cornering markets in financially and politically weaker nations.