Picking a reading for a response this week was pretty easy, my favorite K-drama is a Netflix production that was mentioned a few times in “Netflix and Platform Imperialism: How Netflix Alters the Ecology of the Korean TV Drama Industry”. However the reading encouraged me to look into what many Nigerians refer to as Netflix Nollywood.
Park et al write in their piece "As Netflix’s transnational production scales up its production budgets, local TV stations or platforms cannot afford to compete. Benefiting from economies of scale, Netflix lures top-tier local creators who wish to collaborate with it. The stable supply of multilingual, multicultural, original international content helps Netflix’s capital accumulation and solidifies its transnational monopoly."(76) Netflix remained the only US based streaming service available in Nigeria until last year when Amazon Prime Video extended their reach there as well. However, Prime is still 6.5 years behind Netflix's reach in the country and three years behind in terms of original content creation.
Park et. Al states "Netflix brought significant changes to the Korean drama industry on a structural level. Most noticeably, the platform giant f-acilitated the production of big-budget Korean dramas and enhanced their overall production values." (80-81). When Netflix began to fun Nigerian projects in 2020, after already acquiring them for the platform thus increasing the reach of the already booming industries, the "significant changes" the Korean industry received, were also received by Nollywood. The already increasing production quality received a massive boost, and stories that would typically not be funded in Nigeria due to a certain level of puritanism held in the country are given their chances.
I theorize that investigation into more foreign industries Netflix has invaded would notice similar patterns, thus the company has a massive hold on "global" television and will continue to do so in my opinion.
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