Netflix audience data, streaming industry discourse, and the emerging realities of ‘popular’ television

Using the media industry studies approach, this article provides a history of the industrial discourses surrounding Netflix’s audience data. From Netflix’s entry into the streaming market in 2007 until late-2018, the company did not publicize information about viewership. During this time, executives’ public discussions of proprietary data are understood in relation to multiple organizational goals: differentiating the streaming platform from the traditional television industry, denigrating traditional television industry practices, and deflecting criticism. In late-2018, the company began selectively publishing viewership numbers for a small number of original titles to highlight the popularity of the platform’s original content. Although the company maintains its anti-transparency policies, the shift toward selective data releases has significant implications regarding Netflix’s relationship with the traditional television industry. This analysis concludes with a discussion of streaming audience data that situates in the emerging realities of ‘popular’ television in the context the medium’s broader transformations and continuities.

Greek screen industries: From political economy to Media Industry Studies

This introductory article to the Special Issue ‘Greek Screen Industries’ of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture offers a critical overview of the recently emerging field of Media Industry Studies and situates existing work on Greek screen industries in its context. It argues that the current fragmentation and lack of dialogue between social sciences and arts and humanities approaches on the topic is particularly marked in the Greek context, a fact that can be explained by institutional and historical reasons. It calls for an expansion of the agendas privileged by political economy approaches to screen media towards the more pluralistic, empirical and culture-orientated perspectives facilitated by Media Industry Studies.

The Permanencia Voluntaria archive and the historical study of Mexican cinema

This article provides an overview of the archival materials held at the Permanencia Voluntaria collection in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Focusing on the documents of the production company Cinematográfica Calderón, in operation from the late 1930s to the 1990s, the article makes a case for using such material to construct critical industrial histories of Mexican cinema. Drawing on concepts from media industry studies, the article examines three intertwined aspects of the production company’s operations during the 1950s and 1960s: marketing, censorship negotiations and transnational distribution. Accordingly, it proposes that these factors be placed in conversation with cinematic texts as a way of reconsidering the place of the nation in Mexican film studies, expanding the objects of analysis in this field and re-evaluating a period of film history whose significance has largely remained overlooked.