Abstract
“How Netflix is creating a common European culture”, was an article in The Economist emphatically titled on March 31, 2021. In this respect, we provide first-hand data on VOD movies and TV-series, collected in ten countries in the context of the Horizon 2020 project EUMEPLAT- European Media Platforms: Assessing Positive and Negative Externalities for European Culture: Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Türkiye. Data have been collected between November 2021 and February 2022, in the three major VOD platforms in each country. To what degree the use of common platforms – such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, or HBO in the East - is making the Europeans more European, in fact, is still to be understood. To start with, the offer of the VODs significantly varies from country to country: the Netflix catalogue, for instance, contains more than 5,000 titles in Romania, around 4,400 in Belgium, and only 3,800 in Spain and Sweden [Iordache 2021: 7]. Such tendency is plainly in line with the huge disparities in Netflix libraries in different areas of the world [Lobato 2018: 245], while also reminding us that globalization is not all about homogenization, for it also produces new stratifications, even of unexpected kind. Based on our data, we put into focus the following aspects: (1) the impact of geo-blocking strategies; (2) the hegemony of US contents; (3) and the stratifications internal to the European media landscape.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Video Platformization; Audiences; Euroepanization
