Branding has been described as the defining industrial practice of television’s recent past. This article examines publicly available industry documents, trade press coverage, and executive interviews to understand the place of traditional television network branding in subscription video on-demand (SVOD) portals as represented by Amazon and Netflix. Focusing on materials relating to licensed rather than original content and this content’s role within the US domestic SVOD market, two distinct approaches emerge. For Amazon, the brand identities of some television networks act as valuable lures drawing customers into its Prime membership program. For Netflix, linear television networks are competitors whose brand identities reduce Netflix’s own brand equity. Ultimately, Amazon’s efforts to build a streaming service alongside network brand identities and Netflix’s efforts to build its own brand at the expense of such identities demonstrate the need to think about contemporary television branding as an ongoing negotiation between established and emerging practices.

This article compares the processes by which Netflix entered national pay-television markets in Israel and Spain. In both contexts, Netflix first establishes itself through collaborations with over-the-top (OTT) television operators and then expands through collaborations with legacy providers. By using the perspective of cross-national comparative research, this analysis complicates the scholarly understandings of subscription video on-demand (SVOD) global expansion by drawing attention to the significance of national multichannel providers. Given the differences between the Spanish and Israeli pay-TV markets, Netflix’s similar pattern of engagement in each case highlights the value of understanding SVOD global expansion as a coherent industrial process that produces distinct, context-dependent outcomes. Ultimately, the histories of Netflix in Israel and Spain reveal that internationalization operates at a meso-level where collaborations with pay-television providers facilitate access to national audiences.

Scholars of emerging technologies and new media have the tendency to approach their subject matter using a binary: Is Facebook/Twitter/etc. good or bad? In contrast, Baym's latest offering provides a refreshing change of pace. By examining the ways in which individuals incorporate digital media into their routine practices of relating, Personal Connections generates nuanced analyses of a broad range of media as they intersect with a variety of interpersonal relationships. The thorough review of the available evidence effectively counters grandiose claims so often made about the transformative effects of emerging technologies. In using psychological, sociological, and cultural-studies paradigms, this book clearly demonstrates the need to understand new media in both the context of macro-level cultural trends and the realities of micro-level lived experience.The centerpiece of Baym's argument is a rejection of the conceptual dichotomy separating mediated behavior from everyday practice. In previous research addressing new technologies, embodied interactions, specifically face-to-face interactions, are considered the communicative norm. This approach has led scholars to consider all mediated interaction to be diminished by comparison. Such a consideration, according to Baym, underestimates "the extent to which we are driven to maximize our communication satisfaction and interaction" (p. 57). And part of this maximizing occurs when individuals use all available social cues to develop context and emotion online. Rather than conceptualizing social cues as something lost when one moves from "real" to mediated social life, the author argues that social cues should be treated as variable; media providing more cues are considered "rich," whereas those providing fewer clues are considered "lean" (p. 9). As such, even the leanest of media includes elements of face-toface interaction along with elements of writing. Baym notes that individuals commonly use a variety of signals to indicate both personal and collective identities. Regarding the former, the choice of name and images (avatars or photographs) are the most significant markers. In terms of collective identities, the ability to display particular markers varies between social networking sites. Nevertheless, ethnic, racial, or national identities can often be imputed from taste preferences or listed interests.Similar claims are made regarding online communities. Rejecting the notions of community based on shared physical space, Baym argues that

Using the media industry studies approach, this article provides a history of the industrial discourses surrounding Netflix’s audience data. From Netflix’s entry into the streaming market in 2007 until late-2018, the company did not publicize information about viewership. During this time, executives’ public discussions of proprietary data are understood in relation to multiple organizational goals: differentiating the streaming platform from the traditional television industry, denigrating traditional television industry practices, and deflecting criticism. In late-2018, the company began selectively publishing viewership numbers for a small number of original titles to highlight the popularity of the platform’s original content. Although the company maintains its anti-transparency policies, the shift toward selective data releases has significant implications regarding Netflix’s relationship with the traditional television industry. This analysis concludes with a discussion of streaming audience data that situates in the emerging realities of ‘popular’ television in the context the medium’s broader transformations and continuities.

This research offers a "helicopter view" of the Israeli pay-television market eighteen months after Netflix's global expansion to complicate the narrative of intractable conflict between subscription video on-demand (SVOD) platforms like Netflix and national television industries. Using data from qualitative interviews with ten industry executives, this article argues that relationships between global SVODs and local television providers are more varied than is widely believed. Israeli multi-channel executives consider Netflix to be an indirect competitor, view Netflix the content distributor as distinct from Netflix the content buyer, and expect Netflix to have little impact on the national market. Ultimately, these industry responses reaffirm the fundamental local-ness of television even as digital technology reshapes the relations between national and global industries.