Drawing on in-depth interviews with users of Netflix and the local streaming service BluTV as well as analysis of press releases, and original TV series produced by these platforms, this study explores the emergence and impact of Video on Demand (VOD) in Turkey. It examines how VOD is adopted, negotiated, reformulated, and received in a non-Western context where global and local VOD platforms compete, substitute and emulate each other. We ask the following research question: What are Turkish audiences’ social, psychological and technological needs and expectations from global and local VOD platforms? In order to respond to this question, we explore Turkish audiences’ insight into what VOD means to them and offers them as content, in comparison with platforms’ marketing discourse. The article argues that a) the local content that platforms offer is a central juncture through which audiences articulate their larger expectations from VODs, and b) Netflix’s localization attempts do not always correspond with the audience demand, it is heavily critiqued and at times rejected by the local audience. The findings of this research indicate that the expectations, needs, and gratifications of Netflix and VOD audiences depend on three factors: Their interpretation of VODs’ local content in relation to their cultural experience with broadcast TV, their technological needs such as instant access to global content and time/space shifting opportunities, and lastly the political context and policies such as the internet regulation and censorship. The significance of this is study is in showing, as distinct from the abundant literature on localization of Netflix, the complexity of local taste. Audiences’ evaluation of a VOD is shaped simultaneously by multiple factors including their experiences with network TV, other VODs, media regulations as well as informal networks/piracy.
This article explores the entangled relationship between Turkish TV series and the city of Istanbul examining both the series’ representation of the city and the effects of flourishing series’ production on the city. We argue that TV series production and representation changes and is changed by the urban restructuring of globalizing Istanbul since the late 1980s. Analyzing internationally popular series such as Noor, Valley of the Wolves, and 1001 Nights and building on television, urban and cultural studies, this article explores the ways that Istanbul’s neoliberal renovation process appears in and is shaped by TV series. The three segments of the article probe how series reflect and push forth the gentrification of historical neighborhoods, their increasing use of abandoned post-industrial areas as shooting locations, and their promotion of spaces associated with creative industries and luxury lifestyles. We show that both images and image making are connected to city making.
Using information gathered through analysis of screen industry–related promotion material and fieldwork conducted in Belfast in June 2017, this article traces the ways in which screen economy connected to James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and HBO’s Game of Thrones and the celebratory discourse around these works brand Belfast as a dynamic global media capital. This study inquires into the ways in which association with screen industries contributes to the spatial value of a region, especially a post-industrial city that actively seeks to alter its past global image and association with a violent civil conflict. It also aims to contribute to the debate about the discourse on labor in creative cities by showing that while manufacturing labor is waning, its discourse of social welfare, hard labor, and craftsmanship transfers itself to creative industries that then justify themselves through the claim to inherit traditional industries’ economic strength, job opportunities, and work ethics.
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