September 12, 2024

 Utrecht University 

Deadline: May 1, 2024

An international workshop

Video-on-demand services (VODs) are often assumed by researchers to be black boxes, impenetrable to academic inquiry. Data on VOD catalogs, audiences, and usage can be challenging to source and may be commercially protected, leading to concerns about transparency and access (Wayne 2022).

Nonetheless, in recent years researchers have found many innovative workarounds to investigate VODs, publishing important studies of VOD libraries, recommendations, promotion, and use. This scattered but vibrant field of empirical VOD research now spans television and screen studies, media industry studies, platform studies, law, economics, computer science, and policy research. We see for instance advances in catalog research (Grece 2018), distant readings of VOD interfaces (Kelly 2021), reverse engineering of algorithms (Pakovic 2022), logging user interactions through browser extensions (Castro et al. 2021), and quantitative analysis of proprietary data sets from third-parties (Lotz et al. 2022). Such research is valuable for scholarly debate because it allows us, in the absence of industry disclosure, to better understand trends in production, distribution and consumption of content; and from a policy perspective, it is also vital to establish if local content quotas and requirements for prominence/visibility are being met.  

Topics of interest within VOD research include:

* What makes up the library of a VOD?

* How do libraries differ between services and across space and time?

* How is content circulated? (interfaces, recommendations and promotion)

* What do we know about usage of different VODs?

* How is usage shaped by prominence and discoverability within the interface?

* What VOD content is popular/culturally significant?

* How are data used by VODs for producing and distributing content?

* What can VOD research contribute to public policy debates?

We invite papers that propose, modify, elaborate, demonstrate or reflect on innovative methods for studying VODs, including empirical methods for data collection and/or critical and interpretive methods for data analysis. Our focus is on research methods for subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) and broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD) services, rather than on social video platforms such as YouTube and Tiktok. 

Submission details:

Abstracts of 500 words are due by 1 May 2024 along with a 100 word bio and should be sent to Karin van Es (K.F.vanEs@uu.nl) and Ramon Lobato (ramon.lobato@rmit.edu.au). 

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 1 June, and accepted authors will be invited to submit extended abstracts of 2,000 words by 5 September. The workshop will be held on 12 September at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. A special journal issue is planned following the workshop. We also welcome expressions of interest from scholars who cannot attend the workshop but would like to be considered for the special issue. Please feel free to reach out to the organisers by email.

References

Castro D, Rigby J, Cabral D and Nisi V (2021) The Binge-watcher’s Journey: Investigating Motivations, Contexts, and Affective States Surrounding Netflix Viewing. Convergence 27 (1): 3-20.

Grece, Christian (2018) Films in VOD catalogues – Origin, Circulation and Age. Strasbourg: European Audiovisual Observatory. 

Kelly JP (2021). ‘Recommended for you’: A Distant Reading of BBC iPlayer. Critical Studies in Television, 16(3), 264-285

Lotz A, Eklund O and Suroka S (2022) Netflix, Library Analysis, and Globalization: Rethinking Mass Media Flows. Journal of Communication 72 (4): 511–521.

Pajkovic N (2022) Algorithms and Taste-making: Exposing the Netflix Recommender System’s Operational Logics. Convergence 28 (1): 214–235

Wayne ML (2022) Netflix Audience Data, Streaming Industry Discourse, and the Emerging Realities of ‘Popular’ Television. Media, Culture & Society 44 (2): 193–20.