Journal of Digital Media & Policy - Current Issue

The European video-on-demand (VoD) market has grown rapidly over the past decade, but differences across European nations persist. While the US-based globally operating players Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ dominate the subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) market, VoD services emerging from the legacy media industries and funded by means other than subscription shaped the early development of the European VoD market. This article maps and compares the development of the VoD market within the European Union with a focus on the idiosyncrasies in uptake and offer of VoD in different countries. Building on previous studies of national media systems, the article develops four comparative dimensions for the case of the European VoD market and operationalizes them using quantitative data from the European Audiovisual Observatory (EAO) and Eurostat from the period 2016–22. The comparative data analysis results in a grouping of countries, according to similar levels of market penetration and diversity of catalogue and content offers, while accounting for differences in size, concentration in the SVoD market and levels of market intervention within these clusters. These four types of VoD market development offer a contextualization to nation or service-specific case studies of players in the European market and a basis for hypotheses to explain these differences.

Global streaming services’ investment strategies in Europe have shifted the production landscape for scripted fiction. This article examines the commissioning patterns for scripted serial TV fiction through a comparative analysis of three small European markets: Flanders, Ireland and Norway. The analysis assesses the differences and similarities in the volumes of scripted fiction and how they evolved, focusing on the position of SVoD commissions in the total volumes based on a dataset of 411 unique titles and 609 title seasons of serial scripted fiction released between 2016 and 2023. It reveals that different economic and cultural contexts modulate global streamers’ investments in local content, which in turn are an essential facet of global streamers’ localization strategies in Europe. Our findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of SVoD localization strategies within European markets, contextualizing the variations in investment and production patterns.

Voyo, owned by Central European Media Enterprises (CME) and operating across six national territories, is currently one of the only three prominent transnational SVoD services based in countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Under the new owner PPF, a Czech-based investment group which bought CME from AT&T, Voyo enjoyed unprecedented levels of investment in high-end original content, which resulted in a dynamic growth of subscribers from 2020 onwards, making it the second strongest streamer in Czechia and Slovakia after Netflix. The article labels CME’s digital strategy ‘deep localism’ and approaches it through the recent political-economic debates about the geography of platform economy. Despite its multi-territory corporate structure, CME has isolated each of its national Voyo services in terms of original production, licensing and audience targeting. This shows in the high percentage of local content as well as the virtual absence of its cross-border circulation between the national Voyo catalogues, which have been branded as purely national. The article interprets this compartmentalized strategy of deep localism as both a response to the changes in the global streaming market and an attempt to preserve the traditional linear audiences of CME in the new digital era. The research behind the article is based on interviews with CME executives and on comparative VoD catalogue analysis.

This article situates the Spanish SVoD service Filmin within the global and national contemporary streaming panorama. It critically analyses Filmin’s four main self-proclaimed strategies for standing out in the highly competitive Spanish SVoD market – a curated catalogue, the platform’s European identity, engagement with classical films and collaborations with film festivals. The success of these strategies is evident in Filmin’s substantial profit of 1.5 million euros in 2020. This article focuses on an in-depth examination of these programming strategies, key collaborations and insights from an interview with Filmin’s co-founder and current CEO, Juan Carlos Tous, to explore how this SVoD service has successfully developed a middlebrow curatorial strategy, reaching a unique position in the Spanish market and distinguishing it from the rest of its competitors.

In Sweden, the government has been reluctant to regulate streaming platforms, including the measures in the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which aim to maintain domestic and European productions. This article investigates what values are mobilized to legitimate the (non)regulation of streaming platforms in Sweden and what this means for democratic deliberation about platforms, content and culture. Building on policy documents and in-depth interviews, our findings are structured around policies addressing (1) democracy, equality and diversity and (2) European content, production and cultural values. Regulations are perceived to be difficult to enforce and often undesirable. This article identifies a shift in policy where regulating television has given way to producing media-literate, self-governing subjects. We introduce the concept ‘platform gaze’ to explain how regulation has deferred to the desires of platform providers, neglecting, e.g. independent producers. Further, we argue that the political space to discuss streamed content as culture has diminished.

Review of: The Travels of Media and Cultural Products: Cultural Transduction, Enrique Uribe-Jongbloed (2024)

Abingdon, MA and London: Routledge, 110 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-03246-034-5, h/bk, USD 53.59