Digital Peripheries: The Online Circulation of Audiovisual Content from the Small Market Perspective

This book does not aim to address exhaustively all aspects of unevenness in cross-border audiovisual circulation and all types of small and peripheral media markets. Rather, it takes as its point of departure primarily the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), and especially the so-called Visegrad countries, and expands in scope to other European and non-European cases of smallness and peripherality, such as Belgium, Greece and Canada. The advantage of starting with CEE is that it not only connects small sizes and peripheral positions, but also that it opens a new perspective on the EU media and cultural policymaking debates, in which this particular region has remained surprisingly underrepresented. Our focus on CEE, part of the former Eastern Bloc, also provides a fresh perspective on globalization. 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.