This article explores the functions of landscape and its relationship to national identity within the globally dispersed mode of production. Following O'Regan, Goldsmith and Ward, I conceive of Australian filming locations as "local Hollywoods," and focus on Animal Logic - an animation studio that has recently been purchased by Netflix - to illuminate the tensions between national companies and Hollywood studios as they attempt to forge creative identities and assert their corporate signatures over the franchised media they create in partnership. I argue that companies located at different levels of the corporate hierarchy involved in global production can harness the emotional component of landscape in the service of these goals in two interconnected ways. First, I show how contemporary style can facilitate a deeper engagement with branded landscapes. I then analyze reflexive storytelling strategies that are used to construct industrial filmmaking locations as “heterotopic” spaces that both reflect and shape behaviours, beliefs, and the uses of physical places within the nation.
Adrien Sebro’s Scratchin’ and Survivin’: Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions explores the author’s critical intervention in media industry studies through the lens of Black creative labor during the 1970s network television era. Focusing on Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons, Sebro advances the concept of “hustle economics” to theorize the improvisatory and labor-intensive strategies employed by Black writers, performers, and producers as they navigated structurally racist production cultures. Drawing from rich archival materials, Sebro situates these sitcoms as sites of creative dissent rather than mere liberal representation, with particular attention to gender politics and the labor struggles of figures like Esther Rolle and Redd Foxx. This interdisciplinary study extends the traditions of critical media historiography by illuminating how Black creatives shaped primetime television from marginalized positions. Scratchin’ and Survivin’ is a vital contribution to Black media studies and television history, offering a compelling account of Black authorship, labor, and resistance within the network era.
Understanding technological developments in the media industries and their application and regulation can be a challenge for qualitative social science research because technology tends to require the insights of experts such as computer programmers and engineers. This article describes a method for accessing media technologists’ expert knowledge by using the whiteboard to create think-aloud, collaborative, and co-creative sessions designed to arrive at a shared understanding between researchers and informants. The aim of the whiteboard method is to bring informants into ‘teaching mode’, allowing the researcher to ask uninformed, unprepared questions. Key to the method is documenting each stage of the process by taking pictures as informants outline, connect, correct, or erase items on the whiteboard. The whiteboard method thus creates a rich dataset of pictures, illustrations, and notes from the collaborative process. Useful for learning ‘how things work’, the whiteboard method can be applied to understand complex as well as rapidly changing and diverse technological and industry contexts.
During the mid-2010s and early-2020s, a series of controversies and social movements, including #Oscarssowhite, #WhiteWashedOUT, Black Lives Matter/#BlackLivesMatter, and #MeToo, brought Hollywood’s lack of diversity under greater scrutiny. Within this context, some producers, creators, and on-screen talent of color began to receive more job opportunities and gain greater attention and exposure. One figure who received exposure during this period was Charles D. King, a former talent agent who exited William Morris Endeavor in 2015 to establish Macro, a production and talent management company that has a purported mission to elevate the voices and visions of people of color in the screen industries and to cater to under-served audiences by producing work with more diverse stories. While the steady employment gains made by talent of color in Hollywood initially gave the impression that longer term changes were on the horizon, however, the greater opportunities that talent of color were finding was arguably not a corrective to historical inequalities and racism in Hollywood but was a temporary public relations solution. Accordingly, this article scrutinises notions of disruption that have cohered around King and Macro to show how public relations activities surrounding producers and talent of color can obfuscate continuities of Hollywood inequalities. To do so, the article explores some of the ways that King and Macro may depart from certain racist Hollywood industry logics, before conducting a qualitative analysis of a ‘great leader’ discourse that frames King as a disruptive figure bringing about real change through the successful execution of his ‘master plan’. The article then conducts a quantitative analysis of the theatrical distribution and box-office data of several Macro feature films to explore how they compare to White-cast productions and to what extent they adhere to longer term trends.
This review of Playing the Percentages (UT Press, 2024) offers a description and assessment of this new book about film distribution in the early 20th century.
Video-on-demand (VoD) services are increasingly important for public service media (PSM). Yet, the public knows little about the publishing patterns of PSM VoD services. Compared to the transparency in classic program listings for broadcasting printed in newspapers, an overview of availability and findability of VoD content is non-existing. This inhibits any kind of public assessment of the programming of public service media: What are the programming profiles of different PSM VoD services? How do they balance different genres against each other, reflecting the core public service obligation to inform, educate, and entertain? How do they fulfil their public service obligations? Before we can answer such questions, we must develop a method for documenting and analyzing PSM VoD pages. Seeing the patterns of program appearances, movements, disappearances, and reappearances as a dance, we present the “VoD Dance” method to map movements over time of the VoD content. We analyze how PSM VoD front pages change over time at a micro-level (day-by-day) and a macro-level (over several years). We summarize the high-level characteristics of the “dances” in seven tentative indicators.
Streaming services have profoundly transformed the audiovisual industry, reshaping both production and distribution practices as well as viewing habits. Notably, video-on-demand (VoD) services have greatly expanded the number of series produced annually. Yet despite the extensive volume of audiovisual productions available on VoD services, most scholarly work continues to prioritize case studies or limit their scope to a small corpus of texts. This article critically examines artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted content analysis as a methodological avenue that could allow scholars to analyze extensive corpuses of audiovisual productions available on streaming services. Using multimodal generative algorithms and other integrated digital tools, such as the large language model (LLM) Gemini and the platform Google AI Studio, we will show how AI-assisted analysis might enable more thorough understandings of media production within the VoD landscape. Drawing on the results of test analyses conducted with Gemini, this article also critically addresses the epistemological and methodological challenges of AI-augmented content analysis.
This article responds to recent scholarly debates about the problems of generating empirical data on streaming production cultures. Our proposed roadmap offers strategies to navigate the industry secrecy, barriers to access, and unequal power dynamics that often impede production research. Drawing on combined insights from fifty interviews, we share best practices and dispel myths around accessing screen workers and other industry professionals. The article especially focuses on our experiences from conducting interviews, but we also provide ideas for collecting and synthesizing other forms of empirical data. The resulting roadmap offers an innovative approach to conducting research in a complex and opaque streaming environment.
A review of Push The Button: Interactive Television and Collaborative Journalism in Japan by Elizabeth Rodwell
This article explores the environmental impact of video streaming by examining the incongruent emissions figures presented in various white papers and corporate sustainability reports. Investigating how emissions data are produced, it addresses the complexity of impact assessment and analyzes how these data are used in corporate sustainability reports. The article highlights the creation of opacity and nonknowing surrounding the environmental impact of video streaming, arguing that these practices ultimately serve corporate interests and reinforce power dynamics related to who has access to this knowledge and who remains uninformed.
This article considers strategies and tools (qualitative methods, web scraping, and small-scale data visualization) that can be used to study cinephile video-on-demand (VoD) services, such as BFI Player, Fandor, Filmatique, FilmStruck, LaCinetek, Mubi, Sundance Now, Tënk, and The Criterion Channel. It argues that these cinephile VoD services have characteristics that require a distinctive approach to data collection and analysis. The metaphor of cobbling, which emphasizes the heterogeneity of borrowings from both academic and nonacademic practices, is developed throughout the article. The goal is not so much to present a streamlined methodology as to reflect on the choices and adjustments made to create a unique set of analytical strategies. The article begins by describing the steps taken to achieve a multimodal analysis of the catalogs’ websites and the circulation of content and subscribers through them, before moving on to consider the development of specific methods for collecting and visualizing data on title selection.
This article advocates for a “close contact for context” approach as a crucial step before, or in combination with, automated data collection and comparative analyses to assess the prominence and discoverability of European works in video-on-demand (VoD) catalogs. Grounded in media industries research, the method emphasizes the importance of close observation within the dynamic interface environments of VoD services. To this end, we present a set of reflections based on an exploratory study conducted on four US-based subscription VoD services in Spain and Belgium and propose three key sets of methodological considerations to be integrated in future assessments of prominence and discoverability tools and practices. First, a broader analysis of market characteristics and their interrelations is essential for conducting comparative research and understanding the strategies of transnational players within each market. Second, VoD services must be treated as individual cases shaped by specific industry practices and business models. Third, we recommend “getting personal” with the object of study through detailed analyses of interface architectures and consumption affordances, and propose the concept of a title’s discovery arc to analyze its spatiotemporal placement. This approach underscores the value of contextual, qualitative insights to complement quantitative evaluations.
Researching video-on-demand (VoD) services is notoriously challenging as these platforms maintain tight and strategic control over consumption data. To address this barrier, this chapter explores data donations as an innovative method for accessing real-world viewing data, made possible by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union. Under the GDPR, individuals can request their personal data from platforms like Netflix and voluntarily share it for research purposes. Using data donations from 126 respondents, we analyze 51,635 individual interactions with TV shows on Netflix in 2023, structured into 10,519 viewing sessions. We use the dataset to explore three widespread myths in VoD research: binge-watching, popularity, and diversity. Through this exploratory study, we demonstrate the potential of data donations for empirical VoD studies, discuss how to facilitate ethical and secure data donations, and reflect on key challenges, such as low participation rates, messy and incomplete datasets, and issues of sample representativeness.
This article explores the current crisis in compensation within the U.S. film and television industry as a symptom of deeper structural adjustments. While recent strikes and public outcry highlight growing anxieties among creative workers, the issue extends beyond simple labor-capital conflict. By tracing the historical evolution of pay practices and examining the industry's shifting economic base, the article argues that traditional compensation models are no longer viable. Instead, it calls for a reimagining of how labor, value, and sustainability are understood in the digital era. Compensation emerges not just as an economic concern, but as a key site where outdated norms clash with new industrial realities.
