UNDERGROUND NETFLIX IN LEBANON

Abstract

Since its first operations and launching of its services, Netflix aimed to create its digital community to become the ultimate, largest and global subscription video-on-demand service (SVOD). In fact, Netflix once through DVD-email shipping, nowadays distributed through streaming softwares, had its way through formal and informal models into different communities and cultures since 2016, particularly the Lebanese market. In this very familiar digital entertainment spectacle, and across media distribution and cultural technology theories, this thesis examine and intertwines Netflix distribution with an in-depth media analysis in tracing the extended history of Netflix underground circulation through the evolving practices and cultural understandings of streaming laborers and users with the notions of infrastructure, access and globalization within the Lebanese informal distribution context.

In fact, this study argues why and how Lebanon’s informal circulation of Netflix mediates users’ relationship to movie culture and their practices of Netflix access, while remaining bound to the predominance and influence of informal Netflix distribution over other formal and informal streaming services. In other words, it explores how informal distribution practices have irrevocably created unlimited paths to the flow of Netflix media content within the Lebanese spectrum under what we call “underground Netflix”. By extension, this thesis focuses on writing the story of underground Netflix’s arrival to Lebanon while foregrounding how a global video portal interacts with national users, markets, and other competitive streaming services, and why this corelates with the public’s cultural ideology of global media access and informal distribution in this digital era.