Streaming Europe: How Transnational Streaming is Reshaping European Film and Television Markets

For media industry scholars, the European market is more than just another territory. It is a unique experiment in cultural governance across a density of languages, institutions, and market structures. ‘Europe’, in this sense, is a problem of knowledge for anyone interested in media, technology, and regulation—­ no matter where you live. By the same token, Streaming Europe is more than a geographic market
study. It is a powerful work of cultural and economic analysis—­ a book that equips our field with the concepts needed to make sense of the streaming transition as it unfurls across a continent, and around the globe. The US-­based global subscription video-­on-­demand services (Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video) play a starring role in Streaming Europe.

Much of the book explores how these SVODs—­ especially Netflix, the service that ‘set the template, for researchers, but also for other streamers and legacy media’ (Raats and Iordache, Conclusion)—­ have reconfigured production and distribution across European markets. But this is not the end of the story. Streaming Europe also pays careful attention to the private broadcasters, pay-­ TV operators, and public service media providers that previously dominated those markets. How these incumbents react to over-­ the-­ top competition is a vital piece of the puzzle, too often overlooked in breathless commentary on digital disruption. Other stakeholders considered in this book are the regulators that shape media markets and the politicians—­ from progressive to populist—­ to whom they answer. Bringing all these perspectives together, Streaming Europe provides a genuinely holistic account of the streaming industries. Unlike other studies that focus on fragments of a larger whole, Streaming Europe is not content with a micro view. This book has larger ambitions: it wants to tell us how the micro and the macro work together, revealing glimpses of a whole cultural system—­ from financing and commissioning to translation and user interface design.
Edited by Tim Raats and Catalina Iordache, Streaming Europe is the product of years of collaboration by researchers at SMIT (Studies in Media, Innovation and Technology) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. SMIT has long been the world’s leading media economics research centre and is particularly known for its studies of video markets, attracting a respected group of outstanding scholars whose work is influential in the field. Combining the work of the SMIT team with invited essays from distinguished experts, Streaming Europe weaves these years of knowledge and debate into a concise field guide to the economics of streaming.

What I love most about SMIT’s approach to media economics is its holistic understanding of markets. This is not the neoclassical economics that strips its objects of culture and history. On the contrary, SMIT research uses institutional, policy, and production-­focused perspectives to understand culture. It is historical and humane in its approach. It understands the importance of language and the power of genre. It respects the ways audiences behave, think, and feel. This is a contextual way of thinking about markets, in the best tradition of economic thought. Streaming Europe showcases how this approach can be put to work across the streaming ecology. In sharing this knowledge, the contributors and editors of Streaming Europe have done a great service to streaming scholars worldwide. I can think of no better guide to the turbulence of today’s video landscape than this excellent volume.

(Foreword by Ramon Lobato)