Digitalization as formalization: A view from below

Parthasarathi, Vibodh; Amanullah, Arshad; Koshy, Susan

doi:10.1386/jdtv.7.2.155_1

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…44 These figures were significantly bolstered by the rollout of digital cable networks, which make up the majority of "internet" subscriptions. 45 Even so, this still represents less than 32 percent of India's estimated 1.34 billion population which supports ambitions for market growth but also indicates infrastructure and access constraints well into the future. Equally, although the smartphone user-base in India crossed three hundred million in 2017 and the share of mobile phone users who use a smartphone in India has risen to 33.4 percent, 46 Evans et al argue that "smartphone ownership figures do not easily equate to high speed service subscriptions, however," given that active 3G and 4G subscribers figures remain noticeably lower.…”

Section: Habitsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Over-the-Top Video Services in India: Media Imperialism after Globalization

Fitzgerald¹

2019

Media Industries Journal

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This article reviews the rapid growth of over-the-top (OTT) video services in India, such as Voot, Hotstar, Netflix, and Amazon, and places their development in the context of the dominant trends and business models at the international level. The expansion of such services in India, a country that ranks as the second largest market globally for "tech companies" such as Facebook and Amazon, raises questions about conceptions of development, participation, diversity, and power used to understand platformization in areas such as communication and culture. The article assesses the specific dynamics of platform growth in the country in relation to the interplay between new digital infrastructures, including fiber-optic cables, broadband networks, and smartphones; corporate strategies among small and large, local and international players; and state policy and regulation, which seeks to both address concerns about economic, political, and cultural security and spur the socioeconomic development of India among "wired" nations.The development of internet-distributed video, known as over-the-top (OTT) video services, marks a disruptive intervention in the markets for audiovisual content across the world. The scale of the market ambitions involved has led to renewed debate about the concept of "media imperialism" as a framework for understanding the international communication order. On the one hand, liberal and futurist accounts position disruptive platforms as startup businesses favoring amateur production and supporting "new voices" as a counterpoint to the hegemony of legacy media actors. On the other hand, critical political economists of communication argue that the age of media imperialism has returned with a vengeance, given the global market power of major US-based "IT" or "tech companies" and the support those companies receive from the US state. 2 Given the potentials of its large and growing user-base, India has emerged as the latest territory ripe for the global expansion of US OTT video platforms. US tech companies are well aware that "Despite infrastructural challenges,

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Section: Habitsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Over-the-Top Video Services in India: Media Imperialism after Globalization

Fitzgerald¹

2019

Media Industries Journal

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“…In the 1990s, easier access to formal capital sources saw the expansion of mid-level players in the media economy. However subsequently, the infrastructure requirements of the digitisation process has favoured the big business houses, compelling a consolidation of the media economy around what we might call the ‘usual actors’ (see Parthasarathi et al, 2016).…”

Section: Characteristics Of India’s Media Marketsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Market matters: interdependencies in the Indian media economy

Parthasarathi

Athique

2019

Media, Culture & Society

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In the complex operations of the Indian media economy, the phrase ‘media markets’ requires careful consideration as an analytical concept. As a noun, ‘media markets’ is typically used to refer to a spread of media businesses and/or consumer sectors. Closer examination reveals that there tend to be multiple markets operating simultaneously within any media business (for products, capital, labour, audience, etc.). This implies an ‘economy of markets’, transacting both across media formats and with markets situated outside of the media production process. Both ‘media exchanges’ and ‘mediated exchanges’ shape the dynamics of the inter-locking markets that constitute the Indian media economy. Thus, at the categorical level, we ask several questions: What are the boundaries of media markets? Who are the key actors? How are these transactional relationships valued? With these questions in mind, this article seeks to identify points of distinction in form and geography along with critical relationships between overlapping markets and underlying interests. We propose a topology of Indian media markets, organised via three levels, with treatment of each taking into consideration the synergistic character of media markets and how interdependency shapes functional norms, rules of exchange, and the embedding of media transactions.

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“…In their account of the ‘digitalization’ of cable television in India, Parthasarathi et al (2016) astutely observe that the ‘techno-organizational practices’ involved in the digitalization of cable also formalized and reconfigured the chain of value in the industry, taking power and customer-oriented flexibility away from last-mile cable operators (who were primarily responsible for the early formation of cable television in India) and consolidating it within larger corporate organizations higher up the chain. Television, then, is more than the sum of viewer experience or the product of creative personnel.…”

Section: Conclusion: Television and Its Digital Futuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remaking the set: innovation and obsolescence in television’s digital future

Chirumamilla

2018

Media, Culture & Society

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In this article, I examine how television’s shifting presence in an unfamiliar venue – the repair shop – is illustrative of a broader tension between rhetorics of innovation and obsolescence. Investigating the nature of this tension, I argue, is crucial for understanding how television is changing in India. Through interviews with small-town and rural television repairmen in south India, and an ethnographic study of a small-town television repair shop, I explore how studying the television as a material object with a distinct life outside the walls of the home and the experiences of the individual viewer can open up new veins of analysis for scholars of television, both in India and elsewhere. Furthermore, I argue that the technological instability on display in the repair shop challenges persistent notions of a technologically empowered ‘digital’ future that have been promulgated by state governments in India.

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Digitalization as formalization: A view from below

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Over-the-Top Video Services in India: Media Imperialism after Globalization

Over-the-Top Video Services in India: Media Imperialism after Globalization

Market matters: interdependencies in the Indian media economy

Remaking the set: innovation and obsolescence in television’s digital future

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