Petr Szczepanik – författare

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.This book provides an alternative perspective into the audiovisual and media industries of eastern and central Europe, namely the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. In doing so, it offers insight into the ways the screen industries of small nations are positioned in and respond to globalization and digitalization. Petr Szczepanik suggests that for these ‘digital peripheries’, globalization and digitalization are as yet incomplete, stumbling processes, closely intertwined with and mediated by deeply local circumstances and players. Instead of a top-down economic or political overview, this book places central focus on the lived realities of producers as key initiators, facilitators, and cultural intermediaries. Drawing on in-depth interviews, it looks closely at how their agency is circumscribed by the limited scale and peripheral positioning of the markets in which they operate, and how they struggle to come to terms with these constraints through their business strategies, creative thinking and professional self-perceptions.Each of the seven chapters provides a close study of one such production practice. This includes but is not limited to independent producers limited by the size of their home markets; the ‘service producers’ working on large Western projects in Prague and Budapest and short-form online video production with its promise of dynamic growth in the era of mobile. However diverse, all these cases illustrate that while many industry practices and actors remain territorially and nationally bound, it is impossible to understand the full complexity of media markets and producer practices in the internet era without considering transcultural networks and flows. Theoretically building on the literature in critical media industry studies, this book offers a comparative analytical framework for studying small and/or peripheral media industries beyond east-central Europe.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Charles University, Prague.

This is an open access book. Media industry research and EU policymaking are predominantly tailored to large (and, in the latter case, Western) European markets. This open access book addresses the specific qualities of smaller media markets, highlighting their vulnerability to global digital competition and outlining survival strategies for them. New online distribution models and new trends in the consumption of audiovisual content are limited by, and pose new challenges for, existing audiovisual business models and their legal framework in the EU. The European Commission’s Digital Single Market (DSM) strategy, which was intended e.g. to remove obstacles to the cross-border distribution of audiovisual content, has triggered a heated debate on the transformation of the existing ecosystem for European screen industries. While most current discussions focus on the United States, Western Europe, and the multinational giants, this book approaches these industry trends and policy questions from the perspective of relatively small and peripheral (in terms of their population, language, cross-border cultural flows, and financial and/or symbolic capital) media markets.