Overview

The essays in this volume provide a textured analysis of streaming video in the global South, revealing both the impacts of and challenges faced by Northern streamers in Southern markets, as well as new possibilities and constraints experienced by producers and performers from the South. In recent years, major streaming video companies from the global North like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney + have begun expanding to international markets, which are increasingly in the global South. Yet, much scholarship on the streaming of film and television focuses primarily on North America and Europe. This volume contests the prevailing perspective by focusing on media environments across the vast, yet relatively understudied, contexts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and by tracking emerging trends in digitized audiovisual culture through their example. Moving between political-economic and textual approaches, and exploring a variety of formats and genres (from serialized drama to feature-length documentary), the volume argues that the complexities of the global streaming landscape impel us to interrogate long-standing theories of Western cultural imperialism imposed on the non-Western world and to attend closely to shifting dynamics between the global North and South.

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Reviews

Altered IP addresses. Local broadcast preferences. Nationally recognized talent. Market-specific technologies. These are some of the factors disrupting the myth that advanced capitalist nations invariably dominate the global media ecology as streaming video on demand (SVOD) technologies proliferate. This enthralling volume offers eleven fascinating case studies by key scholars writing about varied nations of the global South to correct the record. Essential for media, communication, and new technology enthusiasts, Streaming Video in the Global South alters how we understand the world’s geopolitical axes by accounting for the ground realities shaping streaming media platforms, infrastructures, and flows from a truly global vantage point. * Priya Jaikumar, Professor, University of Southern California, USA *

Altered IP addresses. Local broadcast preferences. Nationally recognized talent. Market-specific technologies. These are some of the factors disrupting the myth that advanced capitalist nations invariably dominate the global media ecology as streaming video on demand (SVOD) technologies proliferate. This enthralling volume offers eleven fascinating case studies by key scholars writing about varied nations of the global South to correct the record. Essential for media, communication, and new technology enthusiasts, Streaming Video in the Global South alters how we understand the world’s geopolitical axes by accounting for the ground realities shaping streaming media platforms, infrastructures, and flows from a truly global vantage point. * Priya Jaikumar, Professor, University of Southern California, USA * This collection makes a vital contribution to our understanding of streaming platforms, expanding the discussion not only geographically but also by situating these platforms within broader historical, political, and cultural frameworks. While keeping the concept of “platform imperialism” at the core of its analysis, the volume pushes the debate further by showing how SVOD services enter into and reshape complex national and regional ecosystems across the globe. The individual chapters offer nuanced, intermedial explorations that move beyond simplistic narratives of domination or homogenization, instead revealing the multiple negotiations, resistances, and cultural specificities that shape streaming’s global presence. Ultimately, the collection redefines our grasp of global video streaming, showing it as a technological system and cultural practice whose influence is far-reaching, yet always unevenly distributed. * Masha Salazkina, Professor of Film and Moving Image, Concordia University, Canada *

Author Information

Shakti Jaising is Professor of English and Director of Film Studies at Drew University, USA. Her writing on literary and cinematic responses to colonialism, neoliberalism, and the War on Terror appears in publications like Modern Fiction Studies, Interventions, Jump Cut, and ARIEL. Jaising is the author of Beyond Alterity: Contemporary Indian Fiction and the Neoliberal Script (2023). Hadi Gharabaghi is Visiting Assistant Professor of Film, Television, and Media at Fairfield University, USA. His work appears in prominent venues like The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and in edited collections, including Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (2020).

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