Teasing apart television industry disruption: consequences of meso-level financing practices before and after the US multiplatform era

Abstract

The emergence of Internet-distributed television services such as Netflix has led viewers and legacy television companies to rethink the norms of television. Internet distribution is often presumed as the source of Netflix’s market differentiation, but the contemporary competitive field has simultaneously been adjusted by shifts in revenue model and ownership regulations. This article examines the multiple shifts in the US television industry to illustrate how adjustments in the underlying financing practices of series production and revenue sources also structure the multiplatform environment. Distribution technology is not reshaping the boundaries and norms of television texts and industries alone, but adjustments to industrial practices such as financing must also be examined. Comparison of the financing practices of subscriber-funded, linear, HBO, and nonlinear Netflix ground the analysis.

The Golden Ratio of Algorithms to Artists? Streaming Services and the Platformization of Creativity in American Television Production

“…Streaming platforms have retained the industry’s traditional practices of gatekeeping, distributing carefully selected and commissioned content. However, they have shifted the financial practices of doing so (Lotz, 2019).…”

“…Where a television network used to pay a production studio a licensing fee for the right to air a series that did not cover the costs of production but allowed the studio to retain ownership of the program and the right to any second-run profits, the cost-plus model means that they pay more than full production costs, but also obtain rights to the work, limiting future windows from which creatives can profit. This shift seems like it could have an impact as an incentive structure for creative production, although it is uncertain what shape that might take, as Lotz (2019) writes,One could reason that cost-plus financing would encourage greater creative risk-taking because creatives and production companies are guaranteed to emerge without deficits, but such a supposition would be far more compelling if backed with evidence. We might also suppose that talent most motivated by financial gain and that can command market power would be less likely to ply their trade for services that use cost plus financing.…”

Television’s role in Indian new screen ecology

“…As I show, the differences in media-texts on television and the Internet are caused by a combination of industrial and cultural logics of media production activities. As Lotz (2019) argues in her analysis of HBO and Netflix in the post-network US television era, contemporary studies concerning the television industry must parse out the technological, industrial and business practices to offer clear view of the complexities that shape the production of media-texts. In accounting for these differences, my study signals to the broader shifts that are taking place in the international television industry owing to the ‘diverse cultural, social, technological and cultural factors, disaggregation of television content from television distribution networks and the growth of multiplatform distribution networks’ (Boyle, 2019).…”

Global online platforms, COVID-19, and culture: The global pandemic, an accelerator towards which direction?

“…Thus innovative subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, or HBO Max, have major impact on the balance of power in the global audio-visual economy (Lobato, 2018;Vlassis, 2020), insofar as platformization drives changes in how people watch TV programs and movies and it entails the rise of the platform as dominant infrastructural and economic model in the industry (Evens and Donders, 2018: 4). In this context, the rise of global streaming platforms leads different stakeholders to rethink the key norms in the functioning of audio-visual industries (Lotz, 2019) and triggers various regulatory and governance challenges for policymakers (Poell, 2020;Vlassis et al, 2020).…”