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This article uses The Bridge (FX, 2013–2014), an adaptation of the Danish-Swedish series Broen/Bron (SVT1/DR1, 2011-), to explore the ways in which the brand identities of channels shape the adaptation process for scripted television formats. By situating The Bridge in the broader context of FX’s effort to maintain a coherent brand identity, the author argues that producers were not attempting to repurpose Broen/Bron’s narrative for the American audience. Rather, the network wanted to provide its traditionally young and masculine audience with another ‘muscular’ crime series while appealing to additional demographics in the hopes of expanding the channel’s overall viewership.

Using Netflix's weekly Global Top 10 lists for English-language and non-English-language series and films, this article highlights some of the ways in which the world's most popular streaming platform misrepresents both the production and consumption of its most popular geographically diverse global content. First, the Global Top 10 lists create a series of false equivalencies between the popularity of English-language and non-English-language content that mask the difference in production budgets between the two categories. Second, Netflix's publicized data isolates the global audience distribution of non-English-language content from other economic, technological, cultural, and political factors affecting local media ecosystems as demonstrated through an analysis of South Korea. Third, in failing to account for genre-related differences, the Global Top 10 lists distorts audience behavior in the Ibero-American region. Despite the variety of limitations presented by the incomplete audience data from Global Top 10 lists, when properly contextualized with recent academic research and economic information extracted from the specialized trade press publications, this article argues that the relationship between global streaming audiences and geographically diverse content is far more complex than it appears in the Netflix's industrial discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the media industry studies approach, this article examines the acquisition strategies and licensing practices employed by three recently launched niche Jewish/Israeli subscription video on-demand (SVOD) services. Drawing on qualitative interviews with executives and publicly available materials, this analysis argues that these services acquire film and television titles through a combination of traditional and innovative licensing arrangements intended to maximize access to Jewish-themed or Israeli-produced content unwanted by better funded platforms. The findings reveal the ways in which access to specific kinds of content is dependent on executives' ability to leverage preexisting industry-specific professional relationships as they attempt to maximize the value created from limited economic resources. As such, this article offers insights by contextualizing licensing practices being employed by niche SVODs across film and television industries while also highlighting the limitations of using the mainstream/niche binary to understand streaming distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the discourses of streaming success within the television industry by focusing on Netflix and two of the service's original series: Fauda and La Casa de Papel. Using publicly available secondary data through 2019, this analysis argues the transnational platform's efforts to redefine successful television while maintaining a high level of data secrecy necessitate the discursive construction of a global and undifferentiated audience. Yet, rather than representing a break with the past, the discourses of streaming success reveal Netflix to be a television institution attempting to address traditional industry challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the media industry studies approach, this article provides a history of the industrial discourses surrounding Netflix's audience data. From Netflix's entry into the streaming market in 2007 until late-2018, the company did not publicize information about viewership. During this time, executives' public discussions of proprietary data are understood in relation to multiple organizational goals: differentiating the streaming platform from the traditional television industry, denigrating traditional television industry practices, and deflecting criticism. In late-2018, the company began selectively publishing viewership numbers for a small number of original titles to highlight the popularity of the platform's original content. Although the company maintains its anti-transparency policies, the shift toward selective data releases has significant implications regarding Netflix's relationship with the traditional television industry. This analysis concludes with a discussion of streaming audience data that situates in the emerging realities of 'popular' television in the context the medium's broader transformations and continuities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the processes by which Netflix entered national pay-television markets in Israel and Spain. In both contexts, Netflix first establishes itself through collaborations with over-the-top (OTT) television operators and then expands through collaborations with legacy providers. By using the perspective of cross-national comparative research, this analysis complicates the scholarly understandings of subscription video on-demand (SVOD) global expansion by drawing attention to the significance of national multichannel providers. Given the differences between the Spanish and Israeli pay-TV markets, Netflix's similar pattern of engagement in each case highlights the value of understanding SVOD global expansion as a coherent industrial process that produces distinct, context-dependent outcomes. Ultimately, the histories of Netflix in Israel and Spain reveal that internationalization operates at a meso-level where collaborations with pay-television providers facilitate access to national audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research offers a "helicopter view" of the Israeli pay-television market eighteen months after Netflix's global expansion to complicate the narrative of intractable conflict between subscription video on-demand (SVOD) platforms like Netflix and national television industries. Using data from qualitative interviews with ten industry executives, this article argues that relationships between global SVODs and local television providers are more varied than is widely believed. Israeli multi-channel executives consider Netflix to be an indirect competitor, view Netflix the content distributor as distinct from Netflix the content buyer, and expect Netflix to have little impact on the national market. Ultimately, these industry responses reaffirm the fundamental local-ness of television even as digital technology reshapes the relations between national and global industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Branding has been described as the defining industrial practice of television’s recent past. This article examines publicly available industry documents, trade press coverage, and executive interviews to understand the place of traditional television network branding in subscription video on-demand (SVOD) portals as represented by Amazon and Netflix. Focusing on materials relating to licensed rather than original content and this content’s role within the US domestic SVOD market, two distinct approaches emerge. For Amazon, the brand identities of some television networks act as valuable lures drawing customers into its Prime membership program. For Netflix, linear television networks are competitors whose brand identities reduce Netflix’s own brand equity. Ultimately, Amazon’s efforts to build a streaming service alongside network brand identities and Netflix’s efforts to build its own brand at the expense of such identities demonstrate the need to think about contemporary television branding as an ongoing negotiation between established and emerging practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses Jason Mittell's controversial essay "On Disliking Mad Men" (2010) in the cultural context of post-network television. The author uses 72 critical reviews of five HBO series to place Mittell's argument alongside other rhetorical strategies that resist the prestige associated with high-status prime-time cable dramas. In relation to these rhetorical strategies, the troubled publication history of and negative scholarly reactions to Mittell's essay are understood as indicative of elite post-network television audiences policing the symbolic boundaries surrounding culturally legitimated texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis explores the relation between class-stratified White masculinities and moral ambiguity in FX crime drama. Conflicts between morally ambiguous White men inThe Shield(2002–2008),Sons of Anarchy(2008–present), andJustified(2010–present) support colorblind racial ideology by positioning a central antiheroic protagonist in opposition to overtly racist characters who embody stereotypes associated with the White underclass. In comparison with traditional crime dramas, these juxtapositions provide realistic depictions of contemporary America by acknowledging the existence of racial prejudice while the antihero’s ultimate victory stands as a rejection of anachronistic racial sensibilities drawing attention away from issues related to systemic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the correlation of the economic realities and post-racial ideologies of racism in prime time cable drama. It discusses these post-racial ideologies as a challenge of colourblind racism in cable drama. It investigates the association of moral standing with race contending that modern audiences are compelled to determine prejudice characters.