Ji Hoon Park, Kristin April Kim, and Yongsuk Lee's "Netflix and Platform Imperialism" successfully employs ethnographic methodologies to come closer to answering some of the most pertinent questions regarding Netflix's global strategy: Why this content? Why here? And why now? As Lobato points out in Netflix Nations, the company, through its own press releases, has "so proudly and loudly proclaimed its global status" (Lobato, 69). But he is quicker to define Netflix as operating as both a transnational and global television distribution service, meaning its systems cross "one or more national borders" and in a "large number of international markets simultaneously" (Lobato, 68). Park et al's piece focuses primarily on the national (the Korean TV Drama industry), but contains thought provoking ideas about Netflix as a "multinational" and "global" service all the same.
This type of overlap has fascinated me in recent weeks, so much so that I've been looking at Amanda Lotz and Ramon Lobato's "Global Internet TV Consortium," where a group of media scholars around the world study the peculiarities of Netflix's global strategy in their respective national markets. The initiative has published more than 20 national "dossiers" studying the impact of internet-distributed television services, and the extent of Netflix's market penetration. As the dossiers, and additional articles by Lotz and Lobato, make clear, just because Netflix is available to 230 million subscribers in 190 countries does not mean the platform has equal visibility or usage rates in all of them. One interesting example is Sweden, a country that Netflix has been operating in since 2012. As of February 2021, however, Netflix Sweden had only 10 locally commissioned titles in its library of close to 5,000. But this does not mean the service is underutilized in Sweden: at the time of Chris Baumann's Global Internet TV report, Netflix was the most popular SVOD platform in the country, meaning that Swedes subscribe to the streamer even though its local catalogue is lacking. This proves Lotz, Eklund, and Soroka's point that as a "bespoke content" provider, Netflix's features "allow different business strategies that yield different content priorities and different cultures of consumption" depending on the country. All of these authors would argue that these vastly different strategies mean that Netflix operates more like a series of "national media services stitched together into a single platform" (Lobato 70).
But things change so quickly when it comes to SVODs and Netflix. In spring 2021, in a move that may come to resemble their decision to "ride the Korean wave," Netflix announced its intentions to open a Nordic hub in Sweden to boost its production operations in Europe. By opening a new office, the hub is another way for Netflix to assert its multinational status, though we must wait and see if this leads to a significant increase in local content production (likely yes, but two years is not enough time to properly judge).
There are other tensions worth exploring beyond a non-core blog post, such as the fact that Netflix's subscriptions in APAC remain stagnant (around 40M) despite Japan, South Korean, Taiwan, and India being what Lotz calls "variable markets" because they have a disproportionately high number of local commissions and co-commissions compared to other countries (Lotz 211). Perhaps this indicates that local users view Netflix as a complimentary, rather than substitution, service for what they are already using. So while business analysts wonder why Netflix hasn't penetrated the APAC market further, cultural scholars should keep asking what this says about the ways users in different geographies value and consume Netflix's original content, and the national, multinational, or global implications of who this content is really for.
Sources:
Baumann, Chris. "Sweden." Global Internet TV Consortium. August 2017. https://www.global-internet-tv.com/sweden
Lobato, Ramon. Netflix Nations. New York: University Press. 2019.
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