This book deals with the various ways Netflix reconceptualises television as part of the process of TV IV. As television continues to undergo a myriad of significant changes, Netflix has proven itself to be the dominant force in this development, simultaneously driving a number of these changes and challenging television’s existing institutional structures. This comprehensive study explores the pre-history of Netflix, the role of binge-watching in its organisation and marketing, and Netflix’s position as a transnational broadcaster. It also examines different concepts of control and the role these play in the history of ancillary technologies, from the remote control to binge-watching as Netflix’s iteration of giving control to the viewers. By focusing on Netflix’s relationship with the linear television schedule, its negotiations of quality and marketing, as well as the way Netflix integrates into national media systems, Netflix and the Re-invention of Television illuminates the importance of Netflix’s role within the processes of TV IV.

The New York Times bestseller Shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies There has never before been a company like Netflix. It has led nothing short of a revolution in the entertainment industries, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue while capturing the imaginations of hundreds of millions of people in over 190 countries. But to reach these great heights, Netflix, which launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, has had to reinvent itself over and over again. This type of unprecedented flexibility would have been impossible without the counterintuitive and radical management principles that cofounder Reed Hastings established from the very beginning. Hastings rejected the conventional wisdom under which other companies operate and defied tradition to instead build a culture focused on freedom and responsibility, one that has allowed Netflix to adapt and innovate as the needs of its members and the world have simultaneously transformed. Hastings set new standards, valuing people over process, emphasizing innovation over efficiency, and giving employees context, not controls. At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies. At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance, and hard work is irrel­evant. At Netflix, you don’t try to please your boss, you give candid feedback instead. At Netflix, employees don’t need approval, and the company pays top of market. When Hastings and his team first devised these unorthodox principles, the implications were unknown and untested. But in just a short period, their methods led to unparalleled speed and boldness, as Netflix quickly became one of the most loved brands in the world. Here for the first time, Hastings and Erin Meyer, bestselling author of The Culture Map and one of the world’s most influential business thinkers, dive deep into the controversial ideologies at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which have generated results that are the envy of the business world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from Hastings’s own career, No Rules Rules is the fascinating and untold account of the philosophy behind one of the world’s most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.

How streaming services and internet distribution have transformed global television culture. Television, once a broadcast medium, now also travels through our telephone lines, fiber optic cables, and wireless networks. It is delivered to viewers via apps, screens large and small, and media players of all kinds. In this unfamiliar environment, new global giants of television distribution are emerging—including Netflix, the world’s largest subscription video-on-demand service. Combining media industry analysis with cultural theory, Ramon Lobato explores the political and policy tensions at the heart of the digital distribution revolution, tracing their longer history through our evolving understanding of media globalization. Netflix Nations considers the ways that subscription video-on-demand services, but most of all Netflix, have irrevocably changed the circulation of media content. It tells the story of how a global video portal interacts with national audiences, markets, and institutions, and what this means for how we understand global media in the internet age. Netflix Nations addresses a fundamental tension in the digital media landscape – the clash between the internet’s capacity for global distribution and the territorial nature of media trade, taste, and regulation. The book also explores the failures and frictions of video-on-demand as experienced by audiences. The actual experience of using video platforms is full of subtle reminders of market boundaries and exclusions: platforms are geo-blocked for out-of-region users (“this video is not available in your region”); catalogs shrink and expand from country to country; prices appear in different currencies; and subtitles and captions are not available in local languages. These conditions offer rich insight for understanding the actual geographies of digital media distribution. Contrary to popular belief, the story of Netflix is not just an American one. From Argentina to Australia, Netflix’s ascension from a Silicon Valley start-up to an international television service has transformed media consumption on a global scale. Netflix Nations will help readers make sense of a complex, ever-shifting streaming media environment.

“A read so riveting, it's not hard to imagine watching it unfold on Sunday nights.” —The Associated Press The inside story of HBO, the start-up company that reinvented television—by two veteran media reporters HBO changed how stories could be told on TV. The Sopranos, Sex and the City, The Wire, Game of Thrones. The network’s meteoric rise heralded the second golden age of television with serialized shows that examined and reflected American anxieties, fears, and secret passions through complicated characters who were flawed and often unlikable. HBO’s own behind-the-scenes story is as complex, compelling, and innovative as the dramas the network created, driven by unorthodox executives who pushed the boundaries of what viewers understood as television at the turn of the century. Originally conceived by a small upstart group of entrepreneurs to bring Hollywood movies into living rooms across America, the scrappy network grew into one of the most influential and respected players in Hollywood. It’s Not TV is the deeply reported, definitive story of one of America’s most daring and popular cultural institutions, laying bare HBO’s growth, dominance, and vulnerability within the capricious media landscape over the past fifty years. Through the visionary executives, showrunners, and producers who shaped HBO, seasoned journalists Gillette and Koblin bring to life a dynamic cast of characters who drove the company’s creative innovation in astonishing ways—outmaneuvering copycat competitors, taming Hollywood studios, transforming 1980s comedians and athletes like Chris Rock and Mike Tyson into superstars, and in the late 1990s and 2000s elevating the commercial-free, serialized drama to a revered art form. But in the midst of all its success, HBO was also defined by misbehaving executives, internal power struggles, and a few crucial miscalculations. As data-driven models like Netflix have taken over streaming, HBO’s artful, instinctual, and humanistic approach to storytelling is in jeopardy. Taking readers into the boardrooms and behind the camera, It’s Not TV tells the surprising, fascinating story of HBO’s ascent, its groundbreaking influence on American business, technology, and popular culture, and its increasingly precarious position in the very market it created.

Focuses on binge-watching and its role in contemporary television studies.

The taste for horror is arguably as great today as it has ever been. Since the turn of the millennium, the horror genre has seen various developments emerging out of a range of contexts, from new industry paradigms and distribution practices to the advancement of subgenres that reflect new and evolving fears. New Blood builds upon preceding horror scholarship to offer a series of critical perspectives on the genre since the year 2000, presenting a collection of case studies on topics as diverse as the emergence of new critical categories (such as the contentiously named ‘prestige horror’), new subgenres (including ‘digital folk horror’ and ‘desktop horror’) and horror on-demand (‘Netflix horror’), and including analyses of key films such as The Witch and Raw and TV shows like Stranger Things and Channel Zero. Never losing sight of the horror genre’s ongoing political economy, New Blood is an exciting contribution to film and horror scholarship that will prove to be an essential addition to the shelves of researchers, students and fans alike.

Whether it’s “Flashback Friday” or “Throwback Thursday,” audiences are hungry for nostalgic film and television, and the streaming giant Netflix serves up shows from the past that satisfy this craving, in addition to producing original contemporary content with nostalgic flavor. As a part of the series “Reboots, Remakes and Adaptations” originated by series editors Dr. Carlen Lavigne and Dr. Paul Booth, this edited volume focuses exclusively on the intersection between the Netflix platform and the current nostalgia trend in popular culture. As both a creator and distributor of media texts, Netflix takes great advantage of a wide variety of audience nostalgic responses, banking on attracting audiences who seek out nostalgic content that takes them back in time, as well as new audiences who discover “old” and reimagined content. The book aims to interrogate the complex and contradictory notions of nostalgia through the contemporary lens of Netflix, examining angles such as the Netflix business model, the impact of streaming platforms such as Netflix on the consumption of nostalgia, the ideological nature of nostalgic representation in Netflix series, and the various ways that Netflix content incorporates nostalgic content and viewer responses. Many of the contributed chapters analyze current, ongoing Netflix series, providing very timely and original analysis by established and emerging scholars in a variety of disciplines. What can we learn about our selves, our times, our cultures, in response to an examination of “Netflix and Nostalgia”?

This book serves up an accessible, critical introduction to food television, providing readers with a solid foundation for understanding how culinary culture became pop culture via the medium of television. The book follows FoodTV’s journey from purely instructional resource to a wide variety of formats, from celebrity chef and restaurant profiles to culinary travel and every manner of cooking competition from kids to cannabis. Tasha Oren traces the generic expansion of cooking on television as she argues for its development as a uniquely apt lens through which to observe and understand television’s own dramatic extension from network to cable to streaming platforms. She demonstrates how FoodTV became popular commercial television through its growth beyond instruction, response to industrial and cultural change, and a decisive turn away from an association with domesticity or femininity. The story of FoodTV offers a new understanding of how certain material, stylistic, and textual practices that make up television emerge as conventions, and how such conventions both endure and evolve. This book is an ideal guide for students and scholars of media studies, television studies, food studies, and cultural studies.

The first comprehensive account of the biggest wake-up call in the history of the entertainment business: the pivot to streaming. Go inside a disparate group of media and tech companies -- Disney, Apple, AT&T/WarnerMedia, Comcast/NBCUniversal and well-funded startup Quibi – as they scramble to mount multi-billion-dollar challenges to Netflix. After spotting Netflix and the deep-pocketed Amazon Prime Video a decade’s head start, rivals from the tech and start-up realm (Apple, Quibi) and traditional media (Disney, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal) all decided to move mountains to enter the streaming game. At a cost of billions, each went after their own piece of the market, launching five new services in a seven-month span. And just as the derby was heating up, the coronavirus pandemic arrived, a black-swan event bringing short-term benefits but also stiff challenges. The battle for streaming supremacy may end up having more than one winner, but the cost and disruption to decades-old business models have also produced a lot of losers. Binge Times reveals the true costs of the vision quest as companies are turned inside-out and repeatedly redraw their org charts and strategic plans. Stretching from Silicon Valley to Hollywood to Wall Street, it is a mesmerizing, character-rich tale of hubris and ambition, as the fate of a century-old industry hangs in the balance.