Ramon Lobato - Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ramon Lobato is Senior Research Fellow in Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. His previous books include Shadow Economies of Cinema , The Informal Media Economy , and Geoblocking and Global Video Culture .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like any television program, digitally distributed or otherwise, this book would not exist without the contributions of a great many people. Between 2015 and 2017, I was fortunate to receive an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE150100288), which allowed me to spend much of my time conducting research for this book and its companion volume Geoblocking and Global Video Culture (2016), which I coedited with James Meese. Over the course of this fellowship, I was lucky enough to work with a number of very talented scholarsAlexandra Heller-Nicholas, James Meese, Tessa Dwyer, Alexa Scarlata, Ben Morgan, Chris Baumann, Thomas Baudinette, Wilfred Wang, Ishita Tiwary, and Renee Wrightwho provided research assistance as well as countless critical conversations. Briefing papers written by Thomas, Wilfred, Ishita, and Renee were especially important for . Naturally, I am also grateful to the Australian Research Council for making this research possible. Jonathan Gray, whose knowledge of television knows no boundaries, provided encouragement and advice over several years as this project took shape, and kindly hosted a visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017, where I was able to try out some ideas that would make their way into this book. Amanda Lotz has been a generous interlocutor throughout and has helped me see this topic in entirely new ways. Colleagues in the Global Internet Television Consortium provided a forum for comparative insight. Julian Thomas, Jennifer Holt, Hannah Withers, Patrick Vonderau, Stuart Cunningham, Joshua Braun, Scott Ewing (greatly missed), Jock Given, Tom ORegan, Ellie Rennie, Rowan Wilken, Csar Albarrn-Torres, Dan Golding, Liam Burke, Jenny Kennedy, Esther Milne, and Aneta Podkalicka, among others, offered sage advice, support, and help with translations. I am also grateful to audiences at the Porting Media conference (Concordia University, October 2017), the Cultural Studies Association of Australia, and the International Communication Association conferences where various drafts of this work were presented. Finally, thank you to Eric Zinner and Dolma Ombadykow at New York University Press; Critical Cultural Communication series editors Aswin Punathambekar, Adrienne Shaw, and Jonathan Gray (again); and two reviewers who provided careful and constructive feedback.

This book draws on some ideas and material that were initially developed in the earlier publications Geoblocking and Global Video Culture (2016); Rethinking International TV Flows Research in the Age of Netflix (2017); The Friction of Digital Markets (2017); and Streaming Services and the Changing Global Geography of Television, in Handbook on Geographies of Technology , edited by Barney Warf (2017).

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