Universal ideals in local realities

Abstract

The potential of the internet to act as a global distribution outlet for screen content has long come into conflict with the nationally-focused strategies of producers, broadcasters, governments and internet service providers. Online viewing therefore acts as a useful case study for interrogating how tensions between 'global' and 'local' manifest within an increasingly digitized media landscape. This article examines the online viewing markets in three countries at different stages of digital maturity (South Korea, Brazil, India) to consider how online viewing has evolved in each. It then examines audience questionnaire and interview data generated in each country to explore how viewers are making sense of and valuing online viewing services. By interrogating all three samples before focusing specifically on India in more detail, it examines two tensions within the global expansion of online film and television distribution: between global trends and local infrastructures, and between the ideals of online viewing services and the grounded realities of their daily use. *** Uses of the internet by the screen industries as a distribution platform creates a complex relationship between the infrastructures and services facilitating online dissemination of film and television, and the consumption practices of geographically and temporally dispersed connected viewing audiences. Grasping 2 the factors at play in defining that relationship becomes particularly dense when recognizing how such connected viewing is now emerging as an addition to the channels of transnational media flows. In one respect, connected viewing might be judged to exemplify a boundaryless global mediascape, resisting the constraints of space and time by making content accessible anywhere anytime.At the same time, limitations to broadband coverage and speed, restrictions placed on the provision of content by territorial licensing, the application of geoblocking strategies, or the diverse socio-economic specificities of media user communities, are just some of the factors at play in ensuring connected viewing is always deeply embedded in specific contextual circumstances. So the promises of constant and ubiquitous access that have so often driven the utopian rhetoric of connected viewing must always be judged against the on-the-ground realities of what is actually available to users and how they actually interact with variable levels of provision. In these ways, connected viewing invites us to reconsider again the global/local dyad, but also what 'global' and 'local' might stand for in the online and connected viewing universe. Asking what means of delivery and access to media content are available to who, and how and why that 'who' make use of that content, might be considered an overarching set of concerns for assessing the ways in which connected viewing is now integrated into contemporary popular media.The tension between online viewing's boundaryless potential and specifically local realities has, so far, reached its epitome in debates a...

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