Beyond Streaming Wars: Rethinking Competition in Video Services

Internet-distributed video services have attracted exceptional attention in recent years for their novelty and growth. Business and trade discussions frequently excerpt internet-distributed video services from the broader field of video and narrowly construct their relationship as one of direct competition (e.g., streaming wars). However, there are several distinguishing characteristics of these services that make their relationship more complex. This article explores the multifaceted distinctions and markets within internet-distributed video, including differences in programming, geography, audience, business model, and market position. We also consider what is at stake in different imaginings of video markets for media industry scholarship and policy.

Taking Netflix to the Cinema: National Cinema Value Chain Disruptions in the Age of Streaming

This article explores how international over-the-top services impact the national feature film value chain in Canada and Australia. The main objective of this exploration is to interrogate the tendency to classify Netflix as television—whether in the context of broadcasting policy or in light of disciplinary biases that tend to separate media industry studies from the more cinephilic text-focused approaches of film studies. By equating entertainment services like Netflix with television, the discussion of how feature films will sustain themselves in a rapidly changing market becomes sidelined. Examining examples from Canada and Australia, we seek to draw attention to the ways in which film sustains and develops its industry and how services like Netflix relate to policy mechanisms designed to foster national cinema. This article offers an intervention into the developing discourse around Netflix as television to ask the question: what does it mean to consider Netflix as cinema?

Gendered Labour in the Neo-Art House

This article excavates and analyzes women’s labor in the neo-art house industry. Focusing on the labor histories gleaned from interviews, I offer a reconceptualization of the art house industry post-digital exhibition transition; detail an initial schema of the challenges facing women-identified laborers in the industry, including gendered divisions of labor and financial precarity; and consider internal advocacy efforts some neo-art house workers have created to advance diversity and challenge sexual harassment, among other social justice issues.

The Labor of Digital Privacy Advocacy in an Era of Big Tech

This article explores the labor of contemporary digital privacy advocates and their myriad efforts to protect and preserve public interests during the era of Big Tech companies. It is based on qualitative interviews with professional staff, lawyers, and policy analysts at multiple major advocacy organizations in Washington, DC. We have employed a grounded theory approach to address four labor-related themes that consistently emerged across our interviews: coalition building, agenda formulation, the art of navigating public- and private-sector relationships, and balancing a domestic and global policy landscape. In the current policy landscape, there is an intensifying degree of advocacy–industry coordination taking place, in part because of US regulatory roll-backs under the Trump administration and a gridlocked Congress. As a result, advocacy organization staff members often rely on companies for information to do their assessment and agenda-setting work. They also apply pressure to these companies and force them to think about how their technologies and operations impact users and publics around the world; they mount legal challenges to various media and tech initiatives to ensure public interests are protected; and some end up working with or for these companies in ways that may impart and integrate the values of advocacy organizations within profit-driven organizations. This article explores the multiple dimensions of advocacy labor which itself is often excluded from media policy and industry analysis.