This commentary extends Jaramillo-Dent and Latzer's framework of enchanted and disenchanted creator sensemaking by arguing for a thicker ecological account of creator cultures. It proposes that ecology should be understood as a system of interdependent relationships that produces unequal power relationships through which visibility, income, recognition and vulnerability are distributed. It further argues that language and place of belonging are not contextual variables but structural forces that shape creator power, monetization, intimacy and mobility. Finally, it situates creator belief systems within longer histories of media production, showing how platform labour inherits genres, aspirations and exclusions from older cultural industries. Enchantment and disenchantment, therefore, should be understood less as opposing modes of creator sensemaking than as intertwined responses to platform ecologies that demand constant participation while keeping the conditions of control unevenly distributed.

This article examines the uptake of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in the Nigerian film industry (Nollywood). It positions Nollywood as a key empirical and conceptual reference point for understanding how AI reshapes cultural production. Inspired by post-colonial and decolonial theory, it challenges the predominant focus in AI and cultural industries research on the Anglo-American world and Europe. Situating GenAI adoption within Nollywood’s institutional history and labour relations, the article rethinks key issues pertaining to AI and the democratisation of cultural production, the precarity of cultural labour, and the question of bias. Addressing these issues, we draw on 21 semi-structured interviews with Nigerian filmmakers, complemented by trade press and news analysis. The study identifies three interrelated dynamics. First, the integration of GenAI intensifies existing market bifurcations. Rather than democratising creativity, differences in access to subscription-based GenAI tools reinforce stratification between high-budget productions, targeting cinema and global streaming services, and low-budget productions, oriented towards domestic streaming services and YouTube. Second, the paper details how GenAI generates cultural friction in the practices of cultural production. Nigerian filmmakers encounter cultural misplacement, stereotyping, and what we call unrepresentation, due to models trained predominantly on Global North data. Yet, these frictions also prompt tactical workarounds, including hybrid workflows, model customization, and the development of localised AI infrastructures. Third, the study contributes to debates on cultural labour by showing that GenAI does not primarily replace creative practices. Instead, it substitutes specific forms of informal labour, particularly in pre-production. This reshapes labour precarity by eroding informal relational economies that have historically sustained Nollywood’s workforce.

This autoethnographic study explores the interplay of identity, privilege, and precarity in academic research. Reflecting on a migrant academic's journey across India, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands, the article interrogates how caste, class, and religious background shape both scholarly inquiry and professional trajectories. It examines structural exclusions, the performative dimensions of academic labor, and methodological dilemmas in studying informal media economies. Drawing from reflexive and interdisciplinary perspectives, the study critiques hierarchical knowledge production and institutional biases while advocating for greater critical self-awareness in global academia and media industry research.

In this article, we investigate the integrated commodity forms within Internet-based production cultures in India based on four key transactional affordances adopted by Indian creators, which includes screenwriters, directors, producers, and editors. We argue that these affordances encompass the gendered transactions, negotiations within sociocultural contexts, and politics of censorship (state, platform, and self-censorship). To do so, we highlight the self-reflexive practices of creators and their commercialized social life that shape content creation, commissioning, circulation, and popularization of India’s platform productions. Through illustrative examples we demonstrate that Indian content creators are deeply influenced by social, political, and gendered interactions across both local and global networks within Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Digital India’s various converging, overlapping and interconnected new media industries.

Drawing on Indian, Irish, and Turkish YouTube creators’ perceptions of their work, this article focuses on peripheral creator work cultures to broaden the understanding of creator labor precarity. We situate creator labor within not only the platform architectures but also within the geographical specificities of media production, distribution, and consumption. In doing so, we demonstrate that peripheral creators face distinctive struggles for visibility and survival in screen industries that emerge from their heterogeneous sociocultural and linguistic contexts. Based on the interviews with creators and streaming service executives conducted between 2017 and 2023, the findings reveal that creators’ choice of language and place of practice distinctly affects their global reach, visibility, and their ability to sustain a career in screen industries.

My article examines the influence of platformization in labor exchanges to assess how gendered expectations impact digital production cultures. It investigates the socio-cultural transactions that marginalized communities, especially women, from above-the-line professions have to navigate as they seek work opportunities on streaming services. Drawing on feminist production studies and media studies scholarships, the article discusses how gendered expectations become the norm in hiring creator labor. Through analysis of the data-set on the gender representation of key creative professionals in the Indian web series produced between 2014 and 2020, semi-structured interviews with creative professionals, and trade press literature, this research offers a nuanced understanding of how and why Indian on-screen dynamic representations and democratic entrepreneurial working structures do not eradicate gendered production norms. On the contrary, gendered interpretation of algorithmic data, the #metoo movement, and newer forms of sexism emerge alongside existing gendered production cultures to hamper the participation of women and minorities.

This book provides an in depth look into the digital transformation of the Indian media industries, arguing that it has primarily been facilitated by the advent of social media platforms and a resulting shift in the creator dynamics of contemporary film and television production. Drawing on first-hand research within three categories of agents: creators, platform and portal executives, and intermediaries (talent agents, and multi-channel networks), Smith Mehta develops the concept of the ‘new screen ecology’ to show how the Indian screen industries are affected by social relations between these actors and how industrial practices blur the amateur-professional divide through creator and content interdependencies. Mehta interrogates the production practices of 13 different platforms and portals, including Hotstar, Netflix, YouTube, and TVFPlay, analyzing the extent to which they benefit from the lack of censorship and restrictive industrial practices characteristic of traditional media structures. In doing so, he examines the dynamics of digital transformation in the screen industries in a region-specific context and contributes to a body of literature on Indian digital production cultures. This book investigates the political, social and economic transactions that led to the digital transformation of the Indian audio-visual industries. It traces the interdependences between two social (YouTube, Facebook) and eleven digital (Hotstar, Spuul, Hoichoi, Addatimes, TVFPlay, Reliance Jio, Zee5, Voot, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, AltBalaji) video streaming services, in platforming content drawn from both professional and professionalizing-amateur sources. Drawing on approaches from critical media industries studies, political economy and cultural studies, it interrogates the shifting creator dynamics in contemporary Indian film and television production with the advent of internet-based local and global video distribution services. In doing so, it brings to light the contribution of Indian intermediaries such as talent agents and third-party service providers that manage YouTube channels, also referred to as multichannel networks, in facilitating the localisation strategies of global portals such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, enabling the movement of creators from platforms to portals and expanding their value propositions through investments in content and talent-led ventures.

This article analyzes the significant events that led to the emergence and growth of the online Indian audio-visual sector. The principal argument that drives this narrative is the co-evolution of Indian formal and informal media economies that led to the media industries' digital transformation. Drawing on historical analysis of the Indian film and television industries, we argue that just as the informal means of finance, social relations, illegal cable and satellite distribution had a formative influence on how these industries formalized, the Indian online audio-visual sector is driven by distinctive formalization processes, led by creators who are engaging with both local and global UGC-led platforms as well as PGC-led portals. Using a critical media industries framework, with data gathered from semi-structured interviews with 'above-the-line' Indian online media practitioners together with trade press literature, we propose an analytical framework that incorporates both platforms and portals as industrial objects for mapping digital production cultures that originate as inherently informal.

This article foregrounds the significant transformations within the nature and role of Indian intermediaries such as talent agents and multichannel networks (hereafter, MCNs) in the new screen ecology. Building on previous findings (Cunningham and Craig, 2019; Boyle, 2018; Lobato, 2016; Roussel, 2017), I contend that intermediaries exercise a strong influence over streaming platforms as well as content creators through role playing as producers, facilitators and enablers of media talent and content. Through diversification in media management activities across traditional and new media, the intermediaries have successfully readjusted their image from marginalized invisible middlemen to proactive media industry trendsetters. The MCNs and talent agents have been instrumental in developing revenue circuits through their distinct industrial and cultural practices. In doing so, both these entities have diversified from their defined business operations to create their niche by identifying the demands of the evolving Indian media landscape. In charting out their evolving dynamics, my study critically analyses intermediary transactions to offer a revisionist account of their industrial practices.

This article draws on a political economy approach to examine the politics of censorship that undergirds the current Indian online audio-visual sector. Through our analysis of interviews with media creators, government policies and trade press literature, we probe the implications of censorship on India’s burgeoning online production culture and we contest the Indian government’s ideological motives in spearheading the censorship process. We conclude that the current measures for regulating online content reflect the government’s ongoing agenda to curb freedom of expression and promote Hindu nationalism through policy interventions.

Film, television, and music form a major domestic and export product in India. Whereas, in the past, content production has been restricted to professional producers, digital media platforms have drastically altered the landscape of content production in India. Through in-depth interviews of ten online content creators, the article describes motivations of online content creation in India. Discussion themes include professional activities, identity construction of creators, and quasi-corporate structures that are taking root in the democratized digital spaces in India. In doing so, the article challenges the notion of creators on social media as mere “amateurs” or “UGC” (user-generated content). Conclusions from this study suggest future research should take a more holistic approach to studying online content creators rather than classifying creators on the basis of platform affordances.

In this article, I foreground the granular movements that determine the ubiquitous nature of India’s new media economy created by the advent of streaming media platforms and the emergence of regional online content creators in India. I argue that the increasing preference of Indian audiences to consume online content in their own language has led to a demand for ‘regional’ content, whereby streaming platforms and online creators are increasingly investing in ‘non-Hindi’ and ‘non-English’ language content to cater to the linguistically and culturally diverse Indian population. Through a primary focus on online content creation practices in Bengali and Marathi languages, the article explores their ‘local’, ‘regional’, ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ appeal, and subsequent blurring of boundaries between ‘regionalization’ and ‘localization’. The remainder of the article focuses on the emerging diaspora of regional online content creators who are adopting distinct content strategies to develop relationships with online communities based on commonalities of language and culture.

In this article, I discuss the various issues that have prompted select creators such as writers, directors, actors, producers and casting agents to focus their creative energies on Internet-based content. The article's main findings illustrate that because a growing segment of Indian content, new media practitioners are disillusioned by the programming and industrial practices of television, they increasingly embrace digital delivery platforms as the preferred outlets for their creative expressions. By drawing from critical media industry studies framework, the aim of this research is to examine the everyday practices of content creators and compare the formal and aesthetic qualities of their textual artefacts, as these professionals navigate the larger structural tensions between television and Internet in India. The article marshals evidence based on qualitative interviews, trade press, and news articles to suggest that the television industry's production culture discourages creators from seeking meaningful work and instead look for opportunities on the Internet.

This article draws on findings from fieldwork, narrative as well as textual analyses to explore the inherent gender biases that pervade within the Indian media ecology. It explores the precarious nature of women participating in internet television production culture to argue how internet-television, despite demonstrating the values of freedom of expression, reinforces the same social inequalities that exist within the traditional media. Findings reveal that the such discriminatory practices prevail even within globally reputed media institutions such as FTII. Finally, in examining these instances, the research concurs that failure to check toxic masculinity may have been one of the reasons for the #MeToo cases in Indian media.

Through critical reflection on the creator labor discussions in the new media economy and its application to the quotidian practices of Indian online content creators, I analyze the emerging industrial practices that are shaping India's new screen ecology with direct implications to the Indian media entertainment landscape. In doing so, the article highlights the distinct understanding of Indian online creator labor to argue the several ways in which the creators perform agency while negotiating with social media platforms. I articulate 4 broad categories in which precarious creativity is dealt with, on and through social media, as they balance the structural tensions between old and new media. Findings also suggest the creator's preference to deal with precarious creativity on social media platforms than having to struggle with creative hegemony and closed-door networks of Indian traditional media.

The thesis provides an in-depth study on the emergence of the Indian online audio-visual landscape by showing how the launch of a local and global suite of social media platforms like Youtube, Facebook, and portals like Hotstar, TVFPlay, Netflix shape the working conditions of above-the-line labor. Drawing on in-depth interviews with three categories of professionals: creators, platform and portal executives, and intermediaries (talent agents, multi-channel networks), this research demonstrates how the Indian screen industries are affected by social relations between these professionals and how their industrial practices blur the content and creator-based distinctions between platforms and portals.