Streaming freedom in illiberal Eastern Europe

Abstract

The article asks how we begin to assess the connections and mutual influences between television’s increasing globalisation facilitated by digital distribution platforms and the globalisation of crisis borne by the failure of the neo-liberal free market paradigm, which has resulted in the rise of nativist nationalisms, xenophobia and authoritarianism. I argue that, considering these contradictory developments as interconnected disrupts some of the epistemological paradigms inherited from the Cold War and simultaneously helps us understand – and demystify – emerging paradigms of consumer empowerment associated with streaming in television and media studies. In particular, I demonstrate the importance of resisting sweeping assessments about the globalisation of the ‘HBO-type quality drama’ by considering the operations of HBO Europe, whose pioneering localisation practices in Eastern Europe have thrived within increasingly illiberal political conditions in the post-socialist Eastern European region.

Introduction: Theorizing Digital Peripheries

“…Having been drawn into the Western media economy only recently, the region remains affected by political and industrial legacies of state socialism while still tending to some degree to approach transnational media as something foreign and imported. With the recent surge in nationalism, illiberalism and the politicization of media in some of the CEE countries and with its status, at the same time, as a key growth market for transnational online services (Ampere Analysis 2019), the region offers an illustrative case for studying the post-globalization tendencies in both industry practice and media policymaking (see Imre 2019). However, we chose not to frame the book's geographic focus as "post-socialist," not only because many of the chapters discuss Western European or non-European markets, but also because the concept imposes a restrictive epistemology that defines the present in terms of one historical rupture (the collapse of state-socialist regimes) and privileges a "territorial notion of space as bounded container" (Müller 2019: 538), while instead we seek to identify links and continuities, similarities and differences across various cases of the small and the peripheral.…”

An academic study of research literature on Czech television: The dawn of taking TV seriously

“…Apart from treating Czech television as a separate subject of study embedded in specific political, cultural and historical contexts, cross-cultural comparative initiatives should be pursued that allow for moving beyond traditional ‘territorial container thinking’ (Hepp and Couldry, 2009: 33–34). For example, new comparative perspectives may be developed for studying small and peripheral television cultures or for comparing different (post-) socialist or populist nationalist media systems within and beyond Europe, while considering the increasing role of cross-border cultural flows, transnational media services and industry trends, or supranational regulatory initiatives; recent examples of such efforts include Imre et al (2013), Mihelj and Huxtable (2018), Imre (2019), Szczepanik et al (2020). The more general struggle for the independence of media as well as humanities in East-Central Europe is beyond our discussion but in the Visegrád Four countries, i.e.…”