Netflix and emerging economies of media distribution

This project investigates how media distribution works as a sustained practice of exchange, and how emerging economies both disrupt and reinforce existing "models." With a foot in the "old world" recalcitrance of the media oligopolists (especially the studios) and in the emerging world of (post)convergent technologies, Netflix provides a useful analytical entrance that begins to describe the conflicts and the stakes that arise vis-à-vis media distribution as online VOD models take hold. Attending to Netflix as a business, as a distribution model, as a disrupter, as an Internet interface, as a content aggregator, as an archive, and as a "technology" opens up a space into both the established relationships among institutions involved in media distribution, and into the disturbances (and subsequent new relations) that entities like Netflix cause. The importance of reconciling these relations—which involve some of our most integral cultural, political, legal, and infrastructural institutions—is beyond question