Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork this article points out that while China is often criticized for the demise of the Hong Kong film industry, the roots of its problems go back to the territory's British colonial film policies and Hong Kong's postcolonial turn as a global city. Moreover, because film personnel of the former “Hollywood of the East” must now increasingly cross borders to find work, it is argued that the forced reconfiguring of Hong Kong’s film industry can also be understood as fostering revitalization through a free trade agreement with China that facilitates co-productions.

This article, working from archival data and in-depth interviews, illuminates how the Chinese film production sector emerged, stabilized, and changed in the era of Reform and Opening, focusing the discussion on four sub-fields of film production: political ‘main melody film’, commercial film, ‘international Chinese film’ and independent film. The article contributes to a better understanding of cultural production amidst global linkages and national refractions by highlighting the processes through which globalization is appropriated by social actors in the cinematic field to alter domestic power relations.

This article highlights the use of exclusive sports rights as a ‘battering ram’ to open up pay-TV markets and the resulting escalation in the value of premium rights—trends commonly identified in Western countries that have also been apparent in TV markets of the Global South. The cases of India and South Africa also demonstrate the importance of sports broadcasting regulation, especially major events legislation and the application of competition law, in order to limit the use of sports rights as a source of market power within pay TV in two significant non-Western media markets. 

This paper explores internal driving forces behind the emergence and prosperity of China’s cultural industries, tracing the Chinese Communist Party’s radical transformation from stressing class and the ideological nature of culture to arriving at the concept of ‘cultural industries’ as a means to expand an orthodox Marxist/Leninist/Maoist notion of culture. By extending the market mechanism into the cultural arena and acknowledging the status of culture as a public service provider, a market profit contributor, and an essential builder of the ‘socialist core value system’, the Chinese Party-state takes advantage of the economic power of the market while retaining the ideological control function of culture.

This article draws upon a series of interviews with African-Australian media producers in Melbourne to interrogate the relationship between ethnic minority media and the broader Australian public sphere in order to address unanswered questions about the role of ethnic minority media beyond their specialized audiences. The authors analyze explicit and implicit attempts by African-Australian broadcasters and media producers to communicate across communities and to positively impact the practices and understandings of white Australian journalists and audiences.

In this article the structure of Hollywood film distribution is analyzed through the lens of risk, in which social world of cinema bears directly on the film business’s degree of confidence and thus the ability of capitalists to make predictions about future earnings. The presentation explains why, for the political economy of Hollywood, the social world of cinema is an instrumental order inasmuch as while risk is specifically about the size and pattern of future earnings, it is also an indirect prediction about the stability of the social conditions that would help translate potential earnings into an actual stream.

Based on a case study of the Hub in Glasgow, Scotland, this essay’s three related claims about digital media creative clusters point to wider global trends in media industries: first, property developers commonly include online social networking platforms to attract media workers to purpose-built properties; second, integrating and managing professional identities through the construction of place are considered necessary to promote that place to a larger audience; finally, reorganizing place in this way refashions creative work as a more nebulous concept, a process that integrates formerly distinct aspects of work and non-work lives into the common pursuit of innovation for economic gain.

DuPont entered the motion picture film stock market in the 1920s, but in order to penetrate Hollywood, the chief market for its film, DuPont needed to create a product that could match that of the undisputed industry leader, Eastman Kodak. This paper discuses how the competition between these companies contributed to the rapid increase in the quality of film stock and to the changing relationship between technological manufacturers and their customers in Hollywood, revealing an expanded system that positions the studios as both consumers of technology and sellers of entertainment.

In this study, respondents from the USA and Germany were asked questions about Olympic media consumption, fan involvement, and nationalized feelings before, during, and after the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games. Nationalized qualities across four factors (patriotism, nationalism, smugness, and internationalism) varied little over time, with structural equation modeling indicating that these four qualities did have an effect on both fan involvement and the amount of Olympic media consumption.

This article explores the consequences of scholars' failure to engage with the Japanese anime series Heidi, Girl of the Alps, despite its significance as an extremely globally influential text and an exemplar of Hayao Miyazaki's early work, an example that in important ways defies anime’s typical characterization as a quintessentially Japanese genre whose attractiveness to foreign audiences comes from its mix of exoticism and universal human values. Exploring how Heidi resonates with dimensions of Japanese culture and of Miyazaki's oeuvre, it demonstrates how “reclaiming” Heidi can help us develop a more sophisticated understanding of transcultural dynamics under conditions of globalization.

This research examines China’s laws and regulations on digital media content, which have developed and transformed along with the market-oriented media reform and Internet growth. It argues that there has been a continuous effort to articulate legal criteria of content regulation since the early 1980s, that the ‘vagueness’ of the law is part of the political and ideological ambiguity of China’s reform and development and will not be resolved independently of larger and more profound transformations of the Chinese state and society, and that these developments only make sense when not compared against an idealized Western legal order.

This study is an attempt to understand and analyze ‘Interlocalization’—a communication praxis involving the horizontal flow of knowledge, culture, tradition, and know-how free from forms of hegemony and domination—in the Indian context, focusing on two possible broad catalysts of the process: India’s communication business alliances, and transnational networking among Indian diaspora communities. It finds that India’s worldwide communication business footprint has not yet generated a strong impetus to interlocalization but that an encouraging scenario is discernible in Indian diaspora networking, with implications for the process.