From Telenovelas To Netflix: Transnational, Transverse Television in Latin America

NEW DIRECTIONS IN LATINO AMERICAN CULTURES
From Telenovelas to
Netflix: Transnational,
Transverse Television
in Latin America
Joseph Straubhaar
Melissa Santillana
Vanesa de Macedo Higgins Joyce
Luiz Guilherme Duarte
New Directions in Latino American Cultures
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Joseph Straubhaar • Melissa Santillana
Vanessa de Macedo Higgins Joyce
Luiz Guilherme Duarte
From Telenovelas to
Netflix: Transnational,
Transverse Television
in Latin America
Joseph Straubhaar Melissa Santillana
The University of Texas at Austin Department of Radio-Television-Film
Austin, TX, USA The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX, USA
Vanessa de Macedo Higgins Joyce
Texas State University–San Marcos Luiz Guilherme Duarte
San Marcos, TX, USA University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL, USA
New Directions in Latino American Cultures

ISBN 978-3-030-77469-1 ISBN 978-3-030-77470-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77470-7
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Acknowledgments
We would first and foremost like to thank and acknowledge Kantar Media
and particularly Jimena Urquijo for giving us access to their TGI Latina
surveys from 2004 to 2014. That has provided us a truly unique opportu-
nity to pair theoretical concerns that several of us have been working on
for years with a remarkable base of data about audience preferences in
major metropolitan areas of eight Latin American countries. We were for-
tunate that such a survey was so comprehensive that most of our major
concerns and issues were covered in it, such as whether respondents pre-
ferred television and film from their nation, the region, the U.S., or
Europe; attitudes such as cosmopolitanism and also extremely detailed
demographic data that permitted us to examine issues of cultural and lin-
guistic capital, for example. We have intended this book to be theoretically
oriented and informed, first and foremost, but to have the opportunity to
put many of our theoretical ideas to an empirical test was also greatly
appreciated.
We would like to also strongly and heartily thank several former gradu-
ate students who worked on the original report from which the TGI
Latina data was extracted. Jeremiah Spence finished his doctorate at
University of Texas, examining this same data, and is an affiliated researcher
at UT. Vinicio Sinta, who finished his doctorate at University of Texas, is
now teaching at Texas A&M San Antonio. Adolfo Mora, who finished his
v
vi Acknowledgments
doctorate at University of Texas, is now teaching at Schreiner College near

San Antonio. Victor García Perdomo, who finished his doctorate at
University of Texas, is now Director of the MA Program at Universidad de
La Sabana, Colombia. We would also like to thank Deborah Castro
Marino, now at the University of Rotterdam, who worked on several arti-
cles that came out of this data and which are cited in this book.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Industries and Genres 1
Identities and Audiences 3
Ongoing Appeal of U.S. Programming in Latin America 4
Technologies that Increased the Flow of U.S. and Other Foreign
Programming into Latin America 5
The Streaming Television Revolution 6
Theorizing the Audiences for Foreign Television 7
Outline of the Rest of the Book 8
References 9
2 The Growth of Latin American Television 13

Introduction 13
Latin America: A Birthplace of International Communication
Theories 17
Television Eras in Latin America 19
Putting Latin America in the Context of the Other World
Regions and Countries 22
A Region of Broadcast Exporters and Importers 23
Brazil 23
Mexico 25
Argentina 26
Colombia 27
Venezuela 28
vii
viii Contents
Chile 30
Peru 31
Ecuador 32
Audience Television Preferences Sample and Methods 33
The Impact of Streaming Television 38
References 40
3 Why Latin American Audiences Stay Loyal to National

Broadcast Television 49
A History of National Preferences 50
Dependency on U.S. in Television 51
Cultural Imperialism 52
National Production 53
Telenovelas 53
The Introduction of Dramatic Series in Latin America 58
Cultural Proximity 59
Primary, Local or National, Cultural Proximity 61
Secondary, Regional (Geo-Cultural), or Cultural-Linguistic
Cultural Proximity 62
Ongoing Competition with Imported U.S. Television Programs
and Channels 63
Capitals, Class, Viewing Options, and Viewing Choices 64
Methodology 65
Measurements 66
Data Analysis 67
Limitations 67
The Context of Multichannel Viewing Growth 67
Preferences for National and Regional Television Programs 68
General Preferences for National Programming and Channels 68
Genre Preferences and Domestic Bias 71
News 72
Telenovelas 72
Regional Programming Preferences 74
National Program Preferences and SES 75
Analysis/Conclusion 76
References 79
Contents ix
4 The Persistence of the Popularity of US Television 87

Structural Factors Favoring the Commercial System of US
Television 88
Cultural Imperialism and the Deeper Structural Factors
Favoring the Popularity of US Television 90
The Persistence of US TV Programs on Broadcast Channels 93
The Structural Context for Latin American Elite Audiences 94
Impact of Transnational Pay-TV on the Increased Availability of
US TV 96
Why Audiences Began to Choose Foreign TV More Often 97
The Growing Appeal in Latin America of the Big Wave of US
Programs on Pay-TV 98
Changes in Latin American Audiences for US Television 99
Cultural, Economic, and Linguistic Capitals and Viewing
Preferences 103
Cultural Capital 104
Economic Capital 107
Linguistic Capital 111
Age 115
Conclusion: Predicting Foreign Television Preferences 116
References 118
5 Changing Class Formations and Changing Television

Viewing: The New Middle Class, Television and Pay
Television in Eight Latin American Countries 2004–2020123
Social Class and Television in Latin America 124
Elite Desires for Diversity on TV 127
Beyond the Elite Audience on Pay-TV 128
The Growth of the Middle Class in Latin America 130
The Role of the Lower-Middle Class 133
Breaking Down Class with Bourdieu’s Capitals to Predict
Multichannel Growth 134
Methodology 136
Findings: Income and Multichannel Penetration 137
Findings: Education and Multichannel Penetration 142
Education, Income, and Reasons for Getting Multichannel
Television 146
x Contents
The Bust Years: 2014–2019 150

Analysis and Conclusion 154
References 155
6 Streaming Television, Netflix, and Transverse

Transnationalism159
Introduction 159
Eras of Television and Streaming 160
Transversality 161
Reasons Why Streaming Is Increasingly Global 162
A Multiplicity of Models for Streaming 165
YouTube 166
Netflix 167
Disney+, HBO, Amazon Prime 170
Broad Range of Streaming Competitors in Latin America 171
Toward a Systematic Classification of the New Online Video
Players 173
Media Imperialism 177
Platform Imperialism 178
Streaming Services as Global and Cosmopolitan 179
Transverse Flows and Streaming Companies 180
Taste Clusters Across Borders and Algorithmic Globalization 182
Problems of Access to Streaming 183
Netflix Strategy in Latin America 184
Netflix and Quality Television 187
Multilingualism on Netflix 189
Netflix Production in Latin America 190
Conclusion 193
References 195
7 Netflix, Distinction, and Cosmopolitanism Among Latin

American Middle Class and Elite Audiences203
Distinction 204
Cosmopolitanism 207
Cosmopolitanism and Globalization 208
Cosmopolitanism and Bourdieu 209
Multiple Mobilities 211
Cultural Omnivores 212
Contents xi
Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism 213
Peripheral Cosmopolitanism 214
Cosmopolitans and Omnivores in Latin America 215
Cosmopolitanism and Globalized Media Preferences 219
Cosmopolitanism as Branding for Netflix and Others 220
Cosmopolitanism and Audience Preferences for U.S. and
European Television and Film 221
Conclusion 229
References 232
8 Conclusion237
National Preferences 237
Continuing Attraction and Power of Imported Programs and
U.S. Culture 240
The Impact of New Television Technologies 241
Increase in Lower-Middle Class Increases Pay-TV Use 242
Economic and Cultural Capital and the Appeal of Foreign TV 243
Television Over the Internet, Streaming Television 245
Latin American Cosmopolitan Audiences 248
References 251
Index255
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Multichannel penetration by country in Argentina, Brazil,

Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela,
2003–2014. (Source: TGI Latina) 35
Fig. 2.2 Cable, satellite, and non-multichannel households in
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru,
and Venezuela, 2004–2014. (Source: TGI Latina) 36
Fig. 2.3 Percentage of population using the internet in Latin America
2000–202039
Fig. 2.4 Mobile data traffic in exabytes per month. (Source: https://
www.statista.com/statistics/292859/north-america-mobile-
data-traffic/#statisticContainer) 40
Fig. 3.1 Latin American TV viewing interests (interested and very
interested) by origin in 2004, 2014. (Source: TGI Latina) 69
Fig. 3.2 Overall programming origin preferences, eight country
average 2004–2014. (Source: TGI Latina) 70
Fig. 3.3 Changing program preferences in Venezuela.
(Source: TGI Latina) 71
Fig. 3.4 Genres x national origin preferences. All countries. (Source:
TGI Latina) 72
Fig. 3.5 Trends in preference for regional Latin American
programming. (Source: TGI Latina) 73
Fig. 3.6 Latin American regional viewing interest x SES. All countries.
(Source: TGI Latina) 75
Fig. 4.1 Programming preferences in Latin America by origin of
programs, 2004–2014 100
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 4.2 Interest in programs and films from the USA by country:
2004, 2007, 2008, and 2013 101
Fig. 4.3 Interest in programs and films from Europe by country:
2004, 2007, 2008, and 2013 102
Fig. 4.4 Interest in programs and films from USA by cultural capital
2004–2014105
Fig. 4.5 Interest in programs and films from Europe by cultural capital
2004–2014106
Fig. 4.6 Interest in programs and films from U.S. by economic capital
2004–2014109
Fig. 4.7 Interest in programs and films from Europe by economic
capital 2004–2014 110
Fig. 4.8 Interest in foreign programs and films by linguistic capital
2004–2014113
Fig. 4.9 Interest in U.S. programs and films by linguistic capital by
countries 2004. (Source: TGI Latina) 114
Fig. 4.10 Interest in U.S. programs and films by age: 2004–2014 117
Fig. 5.1 Percentage-specific countries have of the total members of the
upper-middle class (next 20%) in the eight country sample 131
Fig. 5.2 Higher education for different social levels in Latin America 132
Fig. 5.3 Percentage-specific countries have of the total members of the
lower-middle class (next 30%) in the country sample 133
Fig. 5.4 Multichannel penetration in Latin America 2004–2014 138
Fig. 5.5 Multichannel penetration by Latin American countries
2004–2014139
Fig. 5.6 Multichannel penetration by income level: Combined Latin
America140
Fig. 5.7 Multichannel penetration Next 30% (income level) by country 141
Fig. 5.8 Multichannel penetration Bottom 40% (income level)
by country 142
Fig. 5.9 Multichannel penetration Top 10% (income level) by country 143
Fig. 5.10 Multichannel penetration by education achievement:
Combined Latin America 143
Fig. 5.11 Multichannel penetration by education achievement
(TERTIARY ONLY) by country 144
Fig. 5.12 Multichannel penetration by education achievement
(SECONDARY ONLY) by country 145
Fig. 5.13 Reasons for multichannel for all Latin American countries
(Total responses) 148
Fig. 5.14 Reasons for multichannel adoption by educational
achievement (combined Latin American countries) 149
Fig. 5.15 Reasons for multichannel adoption by income (combined
Latin American countries) 151
List of Figures xv
Fig. 6.1 OTT players with the most users 172

Fig. 7.1 Interest in TV programs from different origins among
cosmopolitans in various Latin American countries 223
Fig. 7.2 Interest in TV programs from different origins among
non-cosmopolitans in various Latin American countries 224
Fig. 7.3 Origin of program and film preference and cosmopolitan
attitudes225
Fig. 7.4 Cosmopolitans vs. Non-Cosmopolitans and origin of
program and film preferences 226
Fig. 7.5 Origin of program and film of preference and access to
different streaming platforms 227
Fig. 7.6 Access to streaming platforms and level of economic status 228
List of Tables
Table 2.1 An overview of trends across times and spaces in Latin

American TV 20
Table 5.1 Pew income distribution 2001 vs. 2011 126
Table 5.2 Latin America GDP declines in the second half of last decade
(annual variation in %) 134
Table 5.3 Comparison of SES and education on pay-TV penetration rate
increases145
Table 6.1 OTT players with the most users in Latin America-2019 174
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Industries and Genres

This book is about television in Latin America. Its national and regional
industries create most television programming there within the genres
that have developed over time in the region to please its audiences. Those
programs hold their attention for the advertising that pays for most of the
television systems in the region. However, quite a bit of the programming
has always come from the U.S., and to a lesser degree, Europe, and else-
where. With the technologies of cable, satellite and now streaming, that
inflow of foreign programming has increased hugely. While many in the
audience still prefer national programs, an increasing number among the
upper-middle and middle classes, particularly the young, are turning to
the new foreign outlets, like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney. This book
examines both dynamics in the audience and various theoretical under-
standings for them. It also examines the dynamics among the television
industries as both global and national actors create a variety of programs
and channels (broadcast, pay-TV, and streaming) to appeal to different
parts of the audience.
There are interesting questions about the political and economic con-
texts of the Latin American television industries. They grew up under a
great deal of influence by national governments (Sinclair and Straubhaar
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Straubhaar et al., From Telenovelas to Netflix: Transnational,
Transverse Television in Latin America, New Directions in Latino
American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77470-7_1
2 J. STRAUBHAAR ET AL.
(2013), by both national and foreign advertisers (Mattos, 1984), and by

fundamentally U.S. models of how to create programming for an
advertising-oriented industry (Fox, 1975; Straubhaar, 1984), such as the
now-famous case of how Colgate-Palmolive got Cuban producers to adapt
the U.S. soap opera into what became the Latin American telenovela
(Rivero, 2009). In terms of political economy, many researchers see this
development of commercial Latin American television under U.S. influ-
ence as part of a worldwide push to spread consumer capitalism, both
institutionally and through programs and advertisements that drew audi-
ences into a role as consumers rather than as citizens (Dorfman &
Mattlelart, 1975; Garcia Canclini, 2001). In a larger theoretical sense,
these developments have been seen as the dependency of Latin America
on U.S. models and resources (Cardoso & Faletto, 1979; Dagnino, 1973),
as well as part of larger structures of cultural imperialism (Nordenstreng &
Schiller, 1979; Schiller, 1969). All of these forces shape the examination
we make of Latin American television industries in Chap. 2.
As research on Latin American television progressed into the 1980s,
however, one of the things that stood out was how, despite their origins in
dependency and imperialism, the industries in the larger countries, par-
ticularly Brazil and Mexico, were beginning to produce a great deal of
nationally focused programming: melodrama, variety, comedy, music,
sports, and news (Straubhaar, 1984; Antola & Rogers, 1984). This con-
trasted with the original predictions of cultural and media imperialism
theories that there would be a one-way flow of television from the U.S. and
a few other countries into the rest of the world (Nordenstreng & Schiller,
1979), based in part on earlier empirical studies that showed a substan-
tially one-way flow in the early 1970s (Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974).
Culturally, that was thought to lead to a cultural threat to national identi-
ties, even cultural homogenization or synchronization (Beltran, 1978;
Hamelink, 1983).
The fact that Brazil and Mexico began to produce most of their own
programming, and even export it to other countries in the region (Antola
& Rogers, 1984; Sinclair, 1998; Straubhaar, 1981), created important
case studies in the global debate on television production and flow. Along
with evidence from Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and elsewhere
(Sinclair et al., 1996), there was growing evidence that a number of coun-
tries were breaking out of the limited television production aspect of
dependency and unbalanced flow of television. Chapter 2 of this book
examines the tensions between the ongoing forces of dependency,
1 INTRODUCTION 3
imperialism, and national governments’ push to produce more, in a form

of import-substitution industrialization of television (Straubhaar, 1981),
and the region’s major television producers. It also examines the forces of
genre development that came into greater scrutiny as researchers more
interested in cultural studies began to look at the growth of distinctive
genres, particularly telenovelas (Martin-Barbero, 1987; Mazziotti, 1993)
and variety shows, referred to in Brazil as shows de auditório (Miceli, 1972;
Sodre, 1972).
Identities and Audiences

The force that created a space in which both television industries and
genres could grow was the interest and preferences of Latin American
audiences, although media industries, genres, and audiences tend to grow
together (Holt & Perren, 2011; Jenkins & Deuze, 2008). It began to
become clear even in the mid-1960s that Latin American audiences pre-
ferred nationally produced television genres, telenovelas, variety shows,
comedy, music, news, and sports. For example, TV Globo launched a sta-
tion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1965, in partnership with Time-Life
Corporation, which recommended the Hollywood common wisdom of
programming a lot of imported shows from the U.S. (Wallach, 2011).
That programming approach put them in fourth place out of four stations
in ratings, which only improved when Globo’s management changed and
emphasized local production with news, music, variety, and telenovelas
(Wallach, 2011).
Anderson argued that national identities developed in nineteenth-
century Latin America and elsewhere as imagined communities based on
the interaction of several forces: national government measures such as
schools, maps, holidays, museums; the development of newspapers and
key works of nationally based fiction in national languages; and what he
called print capitalism—media industries that provided the basis for
extending both government ideas and commercial media content into the
population. Radio and then television extended that development much
further by reaching people who could not read or who lived beyond the
reach of print media (Porto, 2012), creating a new form of electronic capi-
talism (Appadurai, 1996).
Political leaders like Getúlio Vargas in Brazil used music, soccer, and
news on national radio to articulate broader national identities that
brought in working classes, rural populations, and racial groups previously
excluded by emphasizing music that came from Afro-Brazilian traditions

(Vianna, 1999). The military revolution of 1964 expanded television cov-
erage to ensure that all Brazilians got a Portuguese language national sig-
nal and counted on commercial television to expand the consumer
economy (Straubhaar, 1981; Wallach, 2011). Similarly, in Mexico La hora
nacional, a one-hour weekly radio program debuted in 1937, worked as a
project of musical nationalism, focusing on showcasing Mexican art music
that incorporated popular musical themes. This program that continues to
this day was one of the first efforts to use radio to build national cultural
and political unity (Hayes, 2006). Telenovela development in Brazil after
1968 refocused the genre on national themes and issues, similar to what
happened in Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela in the 1960s–1970s
(Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). As Chap. 3 shows, the nationally oriented
content proved very popular. Those countries too small or poor to pro-
duce telenovelas increasingly imported them from regional producers like
Brazil and Mexico (Roncagliolo, 1995).
Ongoing Appeal of U.S. Programming

in Latin America
Although national programming increasingly filled up most of the most

popular hours of broadcast on the main television networks of Latin
America, smaller stations continued to carry quite a bit of imported
U.S. programming. It was cheap, priced well below what it cost to pro-
duce an equivalent program in Latin America (Fox, 1975; Hoskins &
Mirus, 1988), and it was popular with enough of the audience to deliver a
profit (Read, 1976; Straubhaar, 1981). Chapter 4 explores how while
national programming was the most popular in terms of audience prefer-
ence, as reflected in surveys by the main regional survey and ratings group
(Kantar Media’s TGI survey), U.S. television programs and films were a
close second, in terms of overall preferences, much higher than either
regional Latin American or European programming.
The background to this relative popularity of U.S. programs can be
seen in the high levels of exposure that Latin American audiences have had
to U.S. films, music, cartoons, comics, and other media since the initial
explosion of Hollywood exports in the 1920–1930s (Guback & Varis,
1986; Schnitman, 1984). Hollywood dominated the Latin American mar-
ket, although Mexican films of their golden age in the 1940s were also
1 INTRODUCTION 5
fairly popular across the region (Berg, 2015; Ricalde & Irwin, 2013).
Other national cinemas struggled (Schnitman, 1984) or were thwarted by
the big American studios, so cinema audiences had a long process of cul-
tivation in which film was essentially North American. Since the same
Hollywood companies created much of the television programming
exported in the 1950s–1970s, the U.S. had an export advantage in televi-
sion as well, reflected in the 1974 UNESCO study (Nordenstreng &
Varis, 1974).
To dig beneath the surface of why U.S. programs remained popular, if
not as popular as national programs, Chap. 4 breaks down the audience by
social class, education, income, language ability, and other major audience
characteristics. In line with the predictions of French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu (1984, 1986), we found that more elite audiences and upper-
middle classes tended to prefer imported programs, which were seen in
context, as more sophisticated or at least as more distinct from popular
tastes, since the middle class on down to the working poor still preferred
national programs. The results are based on the Kantar TGI surveys of
preferences from 2004 to 2014. This audience analysis fits with long-
standing predictions by both dependency theory (Dagnino, 1973; Dos
Santos, 1978) and cultural imperialism theory (Beltran, 1978; Schiller,
1969) that Latin Americans and other elites tended to be drawn away
from national culture toward the cultures of colonial and post-colonial
powers. Chapter 4 also explores that historical process and the litera-
ture on it.
Technologies
that Increased the Flow of U.S. and Other Foreign
Programming into Latin America
Several generations of technology have helped television and film pro-
gramming from the U.S. and elsewhere penetrate further into Latin
America. The main broadcast networks that spread the farthest into rural
and small-town Latin America were usually the flagships that carried the
most national programming, such as TV Globo and Televisa (Sinclair &
Straubhaar, 2013). However, increasing availability of satellite channels at
lower cost enabled smaller networks, like SBT and Record in Brazil, which
carried more U.S. programming, to gain national distribution, too. The
big leaps forward in massive penetration of U.S. and European
programming in Latin America came with first, satellite and cable distribu-
tion of pay-TV foreign channels, and now, since 2011, new U.S.-based
streaming services, starting with Netflix in 2011, then Amazon Prime, and
accelerating recently as Disney+, HBO Max, and other services announced
international expansion since 2019.
Although some expected satellite and cable-based international televi-
sion to penetrate quickly and deeply into Latin America (Mattelart &
Schmucler, 1985), it languished outside of Argentina and Colombia,
where government takeovers or regulation kept national commercial tele-
vision networks less developed. Elsewhere, the preference for national
content on national networks kept the take-up of pay-TV low (Reis, 1999)
until after 2000, when three things began to change. Economic growth
since the 1990s in many countries allowed more people to move up into
the middle and upper-middle classes (Ferreira et al., 2012), which gave
them more purchasing power, making the acquisition of new forms of
television more affordable. Education reforms and subsidies to families
that allowed children to attend school—rather than working—gave many
people more education, hence more cultural capital, which we argue
began to change their tastes. Third, more national broadcasters began to
create their own satellite or cable-based pay-TV channels with attractive
national content, such as national films, national telenovela revivals,
national equivalents of documentary-based channels like Discovery, and
24-hour news. Unlike the 1980s–1990s, the expansion of pay-TV in the
largest Latin American nations increased access also to new national con-
tent, not just U.S. and European. Chapter 5 goes in-depth on the growth
of the Latin American lower-middle class and middle class, as well as the
subsequent growth of subscriptions to pay-TV, which brought in a great
deal more of U.S.-based channels such as CNN, HBO, MTV, Discovery,
and so on.
The Streaming Television Revolution

While pay-TV began to lose some subscribers after economic recessions in
several countries like Brazil after 2013, streaming has grown steadily since
Netflix entered the Latin American market in 2011. Streaming is turning
out to be quite diverse, with national, regional, and outside players, but
the most high-profile, highly used services are the U.S. streaming plat-
forms, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and so on. The new
U.S. streaming television companies seem to represent two new threats to
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Latin American television. First is a renewed wave of unbalanced flow or

media imperialism (Boyd-Barrett, 1977) from the U.S. to the region, in
the form of catalogs on Netflix that are very disproportionately U.S. in
origin (Penner & Straubhaar, 2020) or almost completely North American
in the case of Disney. Second is a new form of platform imperialism (Jin,
2017), in which some platforms like Netflix begin to have more diverse
contents from various global producing nations, including Brazil,
Colombia, and Mexico, but strategy-making, financial decisions to green-
light programs, and programming decisions, as well as the greatest part of
the financial benefit rest with the U.S.-based corporations (Birkinbine
et al., 2016).
Chapter 6 creates a typology for the different kinds of streaming plat-
forms in Latin America, within several overall categories, including their
focus and location, and looks at their relative impact via their subscription
or use numbers. It shows that the U.S. platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon,
and YouTube, do dominate the audience numbers. However, a large num-
ber of national platforms, such as Globoplay in Brazil and niche services
aimed at different kinds of films and programs across Latin America, are
growing and may offer some competition.
Theorizing the Audiences for Foreign Television

One of the main trends observed in this book is that audiences for U.S.,
European, and other television from beyond the region are growing in
Latin America, even though many parts of the audience remain remark-
ably loyal to local genres produced by national and regional industries.
Still, to have audience momentum in numbers away from national and
regional production is notable and significant. Fortunately, the TGI audi-
ence preference data we had been using allows us to examine some of the
theoretical trends in empirical terms in Chap. 7.
The dominant theorization emerged early as the exception to cultural
proximity theory (Straubhaar, 1981), built on Bourdieu’s cultural capital
theory (1984, 1986). He predicted that social elites and upper-middle
classes trying to become elite would prefer cultural products that were
identified as markers of elite status. In television and film, those had been
seen as products from the U.S. and Europe, back as far as cultural depen-
dency theory (Dagnino, 1973). Using the TGI data, there is in fact a
strong association between cultural capital (education), economic capital
(income), and linguistic capital (languages spoken or learned) and a
preference for U.S. and, to a lesser degree, European film, and television.
However, there was also a strong association with an alternative idea, that
audiences would not so much seek distinction by preferring traditionally
elite (imported) culture, but instead consume all kinds of culture, becom-
ing cultural omnivores (Peterson, 1992). That wasn’t true of people
marked solely by higher cultural capital, but it was true of people who held
all four of a set of attitudes that fits descriptions from the literature (Beck,
2002; Corpus Ong, 2009) for people who were more cosmopolitan,
which from its roots implies an attitude focused less on the local or national
and more on being a citizen of the world (Hannerz, 1997). The indicators
for such a group include interest in other cultures, interest in watching
news from abroad, interest in foreign travel, and interest in foreign food.
We thus outline three related cultural theories that were associated with
preferring U.S. and European television: a desire for elite cultural distinc-
tion (Bourdieu, 1984), cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2002), and cultural
omnivorousness (Peterson, 1992).
Outline of the Rest of the Book

By providing a summary of some of the main theoretical issues and some
of the historical antecedents of the broadcast, pay-TV, and streaming situ-
ations in the eight Latin American countries covered by the TGI Latina
surveys, the second chapter provides the grounds for the analyses of televi-
sion industries and audience behavior encompassed in the rest of the vol-
ume. Chapter 3 provides an analysis of audience programming preferences
for programs, channels, and films of national and regional origin. That
reviews the concept of cultural proximity, which predicts greater prefer-
ence for national and regional programs, looks at the socio-economic sta-
tus breakdown of who prefers these programs, and also looks at a
breakdown by genres.
Chapter 4 looks at the ongoing second preference among many Latin
American audiences, particularly in the major metropolitan areas for which
we have data, for U.S. or European programming. We find that this is
linked to the degree to which respondents have greater cultural capital
(education), economic capital (income), or linguistic capital (English lan-
guage ability for US or European programming, Spanish for Brazilians,
etc.), building on the theoretical insights of Pierre Bourdieu (1984).
Chapter 5 looks at the recent growth of the Latin American middle and
lower-middle socioeconomic classes or strata (Ferreira et al., 2012) as a
1 INTRODUCTION 9
prime driver of multichannel TV, a service formerly considered as a luxury

item. The somewhat different aspects of the social class represented by
economic capital versus cultural capital are contrasted, with cultural capital
seeming more important for obtaining multichannel access, as well as for
the desire for more kinds of channels and more channels beyond the
national television available to them. Chapter 6 looks at the growth of
streaming television in Latin America. It focuses substantially on Netflix as
the global subscription video on demand (SVOD) company that first
focused on Latin America in 2011, but also compares other global actors
such as Prime Video (SVOD), iTunes (transactional downloads and
VOD), and YouTube (advertising-supported VOD). Netflix’s strategy of
creating programs around the world, including Latin America, and then
promoting those series to global audiences, including those in the U.S., is
theorized and analyzed in terms of transversality. Other actors, such as
regional telecoms Telmex (Mexico) and Telefónica (Spain), major televi-
sion broadcasters like TV Globo and Televisa, and local/regional indepen-
dents and niche or genre-specific streaming operations have all entered the
Latin American streaming television market, numbering in the hundreds,
although far fewer get significant attention from audiences.
Chapter 7 examines the underlying attitudinal and behavioral traits
linked to cultural preferences for foreign or international television con-
tent, particularly among those in the upper-middle and upper classes, in
terms of possible pulls and drives. One is a drive for cultural and social
distinction as outlined by Bourdieu (1984). Another is cultural openness
or omnivorousness (Peterson, 1992) or cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2002;
Igarashi & Saito, 2014), in which audiences are drawn to a wider range of
media and not just those typically thought of as either popular or elite. We
use TGI data to examine those motives for preferences for television from
national, regional, U.S., or European sources.
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CHAPTER 2
The Growth of Latin American Television
Introduction
Latin American television has been notable around the world for both its
dependence on US models, advertising, and programs and the early
growth of some of its main networks, such as Televisa in Mexico and TV
Globo in Brazil, and their early push into creating most of their own pro-
gramming in the 1960s and 1970s, when many stations and networks
around the world were primarily importing U.S. or European programs
(Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). It was also one of the first strongly devel-
oped regional markets in television (Sinclair et al., 1996). It emerged as a
world exporter, particularly of telenovelas, in the 1980s and developed
satellite channels that carried Latin American programming to other parts
of the world. Recently, several Latin American networks and individual
producers have become active producers and co-producers for new stream-
ing services such as Netflix and other services that are entering the region,
such as HBO. Latin America has been the birthplace of several theories
that have influenced international and global media studies.
Those include theories of dependent development (Cardoso, 1973;
Evans, 1979); of cultural dependence (Beltran & Fox, 1980; Dagnino,
1973; Fox, 1992; Oliveira, 1986; Pasquali, 1977); of the corporatist inter-
play between national governments and private companies (Schwartzman,

Switzerland AG 2021
1977); a related idea of political patrimonialism that looks at the extension

of the rulers’ power to elites, such as those in media, who serve the rulers’
needs (Pereira, 2016); and the captured liberal media system model, refer-
ring to the bias in favor of economic and political interests (Guerrero &
Márquez-Ramírez, 2014); of the also related idea of clientelism between
state authorities and media corporate owners (Hallin & Papathanassopoulos,
2002); of the hybrid development of cultural production and reception
between local, national and international forces and influences (Canclini,
1995; Martín-Barbero, 1993); of high audience impact by US television
programs (Beltran, 1978); and of increasing audience choice favoring
national and regional programs (Straubhaar, 1991a).
Some other useful theories from outside Latin America have been
applied to it. One is the concept of political parallelism, which analyzes
media systems, in terms of organizational connections between the news-
paper or network and any specific political parties or actors, manifested in
news, but also entertainment content and partisan audiences (Hallin,
2004). For instance, Televisa was explicitly tied to the PRI party in Mexico
(Fernández & Paxman, 2001) television licenses were traditionally given
to individuals with close ties to dominant parties in Latin America
(Waisbord, 2012), including Brazil (dos Santos, 2006) and TV Globo was
closely tied to the military governments in Brazil (Hertz, 1987). Much of
Latin American political economy and critical theory about media devel-
oped from the theories of the Frankfurt School about cultural industries
(Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972).
Overall theories of imperialism have been shown to still have strong
implications for culture, information, and media (Fuchs, 2010; Harvey,
2005b), as have formulations of neo-liberalism since the 1980s (Harvey,
2005a). The theory of cultural imperialism has likewise greatly affected
the development of Latin American ideas of the political economy of
media (Bolaño, 1999; Bolaño et al., 2005; Pasquali, 1977; Schiller, 1969)
and the assumption of strong ideological impacts of foreign media on
Latin America (Beltran, 1978; Dorfman & Mattelart, 1972; Schiller,
1976). The parallel theory of media imperialism, which focuses more spe-
cifically on unequal relations between media systems, has also affected
media analysis in Latin America (Boyd-Barrett, 1977; Boyd-Barrett &
Mirrlees, 2019), since it was often used to focus on unbalanced media
flows, foreign investment, and the impact of foreign advertising
(Fejes, 1981).
2 THE GROWTH OF LATIN AMERICAN TELEVISION 15
Semiotics has often been applied to television and cultural studies

within Latin America (Benavides, 2008; Carter, 2018; Morais, 2000),
particularly to genre analysis, such as Miceli’s and Sodre’s seminal analyses
of the television variety show/talk show in Brazil (Miceli, 1972; Sodre,
1972). Cultural studies and cultural anthropology have been applied to
issues like the development of the telenovela (Leal, 1986; Ortiz et al.,
1988). More recently, theories of global television studies (Havens, 2003;
Havens, 2006; Duarte, 2009; Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013) and media
industry studies (Holt & Perren, 2011; Havens et al., 2009) have been
applied to Latin American television, particularly to focus greater atten-
tion on the key actors within television studies, such as national entrepre-
neurs, producers, programmers, writers, and so on.
One of the key themes of this book, in terms of both theoretical devel-
opment, industry, and audience analysis, will be the dialectic and contra-
diction between national industry growth and audience response to it in
parallel to the continuing impact of US ideologies, models, genres, pro-
gramming, and the audience response to that. For the national television
industry growth, we will concentrate on theories of media and the nation-
state (corporatism, clientelism, patrimonialism, imagined communities,
and political economy) and theories of political economy, cultural and
media industry, both the Neo-Marxist forms by Horkheimer and Adorno
and more recent critical media industries theories. For the U.S. impact, we
will consider theories such as imperialism, colonialism, dependency, and
dependent development.
Another focus will be examining the growth of television industries.
That includes the colonial roots of some aspects of the Latin American
commercial media model (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013); the development
of Latin American patterns, such as models of family media empires with
a corporatist relationship to the government (Sinclair & Straubhaar,
2013); and the strong impact of US advertising, broadcasting, multichan-
nel and streaming television models (Waisbord, 1998), as well as the larger
context of US economic and cultural influence on the region. This sets a
pattern for this book in an analysis of national trends, regional trends, US
patterns that flow into the region, and larger influences by other regions,
such as Europe as well as more global trends, such as satellite-based televi-
sion (Duarte & Straubhaar, 2004) and now Internet-based streaming tele-
vision, such as YouTube and Netflix (Lobato, 2018).
A related focus is the relationship between national governments and

broadcasters. This is one of the most influential factors at the national level
of television development in Latin America (Waisbord, 1995). Historically,
nation-states were often seen as the most dominant force in national com-
munications, in close interaction with domestic and foreign capital (Evans,
1979). However, nations are often left reacting to new global media
developments, such as the current strong surge of globally based stream-
ing television into the region.
Another, related major force is the way that entrepreneurs, producers,
writers, programmers, and others have developed television approaches
and programs within its industrial pattern and within its relationship to the
government (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). Many of those actors are now
increasingly working directly with regional forces, provoking a surge in
the amount of inter-regional co-production, including those between
major national producers in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico with the new
wave of international streaming companies. Netflix now has dozens of co-
productions in the region, along with others such as HBO and Amazon.
Latin America was one of the first regions outside Europe and North
America to develop a new genre, the telenovela, with regional flows, first
in scripts in the 1950s, then in programs themselves by the 1970s.
However, this genre developed first in Cuba, sponsored by a US adver-
tiser, Colgate-Palmolive (Rivero, 2015), which shows the strong struc-
tural influence of US advertisers and other economic powers. Furthermore,
while regional television flow in telenovelas and other programs flourished
in Latin America, US television programs often remained more popular, as
the empirical core of this book will show.
What audiences choose to watch, what their genre preferences are, and
how they respond to new technological options is ultimately the most
important thing for the commercial industries that dominate Latin
American television. The trends noted above shape audience preferences
over the years and are an empirical and theoretical focus of this book. The
mass audience in Latin America has remained loyal to mass-oriented
genres, like the telenovela, while increasingly fracturing along class and
other lines. Some audiences are now driven by elite desires for cultural
distinction or cosmopolitanism, enabled by increased access to foreign
programming via cable/satellite pay-TV and now streaming TV. Many are
opting away from the popular mass genres of the past.
Latin America: A Birthplace of International

Communication Theories
Some of the main theories used to explain preferences by national audi-
ences for their own programming, like cultural proximity (Straubhaar,
1991), were developed first in Latin America to explain the fact that audi-
ences there already preferred national programming as early as the 1970s,
when the commonplace expectation in much of the world—supported by
research like that by UNESCO researchers at the time (Nordenstreng &
Varis, 1974)—was that most countries were importing most of their pro-
grams, mostly entertainment and mostly from the U.S. and that audiences
preferred that imported entertainment for its production quality, modern
contents, and so on (Collins, 1986). By the 1970s, major national net-
works like Televisa and TV Globo were already beginning to export their
programs to other countries in Latin America, and to some other markets
with the same language and culture, such as Portugal for Brazil. This
export drive boomed particularly in the 1990s, when a combination of
satellite and cable TV technologies created new distribution possibilities,
and a wave of deregulation, liberalization of competition by private net-
works, and privatization of some government networks created a large
number of new stations, television networks, and multichannel distribu-
tion systems with many spaces for new channels (Hoskins et al., 1997).
With this massive wave of new markets for programming, Latin American
programs, particularly from TV Globo and Televisa, flowed to many new
places in Western and Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, and in Africa,
among others (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013; Lopes, 2004).
Broadcast television networks also grew fairly powerful in some of the
other major Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Chile, Colombia,
and Venezuela, leading them to create more of their own programming
and even export it to other Latin American countries (Roncagliolo, 1996).
As a result of domestic developments, like government takeovers of broad-
casters in Argentina and Venezuela at different times, some of these pro-
ducers declined, while others, like Colombia, rose as producers and
exporters (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). Through all of this, the idea
remained fairly constant that Latin American audiences tended to prefer
local, national, and regional programming. Among the smallest Latin
American countries, like the Dominican Republic (Straubhaar, 1991) or
Belize (Oliveira, 1986), the tendency since the 1980s was for them to
prefer imports from other Latin American countries, especially in prime

time for the largest audiences, rather than imports from the United States,
which tended to be pushed into less popular time slots in the morning,
afternoon, or late evening (Straubhaar, 2007).
This helps make sense of a phenomenon that surprised some observers
(Reis, 1999): why cable and satellite television penetration of households
and audience habits in most of Latin America was relatively low up through
the 1990s, especially compared to the boom in pay-TV that took place in
much of the world (Europe, Middle East, South, and East Asia) during
the 1980s–1990s (Baldwin & McEvoy, 1988; Price, 1999). In most coun-
tries and regions, the satellite and cable television booms of the
1980s–1990s served to bring in diversity through channels from abroad.
However, in most of Latin America, outside of Argentina and Colombia,
whose exceptional cases will be discussed below, the major impact of satel-
lite distribution was the enabling of larger number of rural areas to get
good signal for national channels (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013).
Latin America had correspondingly lagged behind in the similar boom
of VCRs throughout much of the world in the 1980s, which had enabled
audiences in many countries to start bringing entertainment that was miss-
ing (to audiences, at least) on national channels. However, Latin American
audiences were slow to adopt and buy VCRs, compared to the Middle
East, where purchases exploded quickly, in great part due to wider dissat-
isfaction with national television (Boyd et al., 1989). The common under-
standing for the low adoption of both VCRs and cable/satellite television
was that most Latin American audiences already had access to several
broadcast channels of high-quality news and entertainment, based on
national production, regional imports, and imports of some of the more
interesting U.S. and European programs and films (Boyd et al., 1989;
Reis, 1999; Straubhaar, 2007).
In fact, interviews with researchers and managers at MTV Brazil at sev-
eral points in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that they knew that they were
limited to a niche audience by their strategy (then) of primarily program-
ming U.S.—music videos on MTV as a pay-TV channel, with some lim-
ited ultrahigh frequency distribution. However, as they saw it at the time,
their advertisers were primarily interested in that niche audience, the rich-
est 10–15% of urban Brazilian youth, who as we will argue in Chaps. 4 and
5 have the cultural capital from higher quality education, language educa-
tion, and travel to really enjoy U.S. programs. So they were waiting for the
right moment to change their programming and massify their audience,

when pay-TV costs came down, more people could afford pay-TV,1 the
educated or cosmopolitan audience grew larger, and production costs for
adding more Brazilian video content would go down (Straubhaar, inter-
views at MTV São Paulo, 1989, 1994).
Television Eras in Latin America

One of the ways we will be organizing our analysis throughout the book
is in terms of eras of television, starting with some attention to the pre-
history of television in terms of the national systems that media, economic,
and cultural systems have fed into it. Then we focus on the initial decade
of the 1950s, and on the formative decades of the 1960s–1970s of national
TV genres and systems, and some increasingly direct US influence. Then
we focus on program maturity and new technological forms of flow (pay-
TV), starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s—all culminating
in the current era of streaming TV, starting with the entry of Netflix into
Latin America in 2010. Underlying these TV eras are corresponding eras
of national economic growth, national media growth, and regional and
global expansion of technology and television flows.
The other main axis of attention is what happens at the national level,
between economic development, nation-state policies, television industries,
genres, and producers, as well as the extension of those trends into the audi-
ence. Interwoven with that is what US economic trends and models, adver-
tisers, television industries, and genres are doing, on their own, and in their
interaction with Latin America. The next most pressing level of analysis is
regional, starting with the similarities of state policies and national industry
developments across the region. It also includes the flows of
producers/writers/directors, as well as scripts and genres from Cuba that
began with Fidel Castro, who had recently taken over Cuba, pushing the
personnel, genre expertise, and models of the most advanced commercial
television system in Latin American out of Cuba and into the rest of the
hemisphere, including the Hispanic US. Also key are the flows of shows and
of scripts/formats that began to circulate around the regions such as Brazil,
Mexico, and others that began to produce and then export television.
Finally, there are some influences and movements at a more global level, as
1
From this point on, the authors will use the terms multichannel television and pay-TV
interchangeably to refer to a subscription-based television service.
Table 2.1 An overview of trends across times and spaces in Latin American TV
1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s
National National live National Comes Grows in More More National
TV limited tosuffers from back, countries countries
almost all shrinks back
some cities US imports grows in as costs create create more in Peru,
most reduce telenovelas genres Venezuela
US Exports Exports flow Program Presence Some cable Cable flow Netflix
limited by heavily exports in prime flow to the to the increases
distribution flow time middle middle class flow to the
technology heavily reduced class increases middle class
Regional Cuban Cuban Regional Mexico, More Colombia Venezuela
telenovela professionals program Brazil exporters rises, out,
scripts flow spread to flow dominate Argentina Colombia
others begins moves to rises
formats
Europe, Little export Little export Some One of Present in Korean, Transverse
others activity activity export the driverssatellite, Turkish flow
activity of early cable, melodrama through
cable TV pay-TV Netflix
well as from other regions, including Europe, East Asia, and Turkey. These
two axes, over time and over space, are represented in Table 2.1.
Television had its Latin American inception in the 1950s and emerged
grounded upon an established radio industry, similar to the US model that
it drew upon (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). Television started as a rare
commodity, available to an elite in a few major cities as a prestigious com-
panion to family and community lives, as groups would gather around the
living room, presaging “new forms of sociality” (López, 2014). Television
was mainly live, with a limited transmission to a few urban centers.
Productions were mainly local, with some flow of Cuban (regional) tele-
novela scripts that were then co-produced locally (Rivero, 2015;
Straubhaar, 2011).
In the 1960s, with the advent of new and more widely available tech-
nology, such as videotaping programs that could be cycled around various
stations, television productions expanded their reach. Videotape allowed
for US exports to flow into Latin America at increasingly higher rates
(Wells, 1972), while technology such as telecommunication networks also
allowed for national expansion of television reach. Television expanded
further across national territories and became more widely available, even
though still highly prestigious and costly. National programming strug-
gled to compete with the heavy imports of the U.S. and other foreign
products (Fox, 1975; Wells, 1972).
By the 1970s, television was more widely available in most Latin

American countries, becoming more of a true mass medium. Supported
by a wider audience reach, television industries in the region invested in
national programming that appealed to the cultural preferences of national
audiences (Straubhaar, 1991; Sinclair, 1999). This was a time of experi-
mentation of formats and solidification of genres, particularly the tele-
novela, with strong national appeals to build national identities. The
regional flow of these new products increased (Antola & Rogers, 1984),
but US television programs continued to flow to Latin America
(Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974).
Latin American television established itself with strong national pro-
ductions by the 1980s, promoting local voices with nationally and region-
ally developed genres, characterized by lower production and distribution
costs. Mexican and Brazilian television emerged as lead exporters of
regional television flow (Roncagliolo, 1995), while US programming
flowing to Latin America started to move off prime time, at least on the
main channels (Straubhaar, 1984). It was also during the 1980s that early
cable and pay-TV emerged in Latin America, and foreign television access
was an early driver of cable adoption.
In the 1990s, televenovelas continued to surge as a genre, with addi-
tional Latin American countries producing their own versions. In this
same decade, cable or pay-TV emerged to change how television was con-
sumed in Latin America, segmenting the audiences by linguistic, eco-
nomic, and social capital (Straubhaar et al., 2016), as will be further
explained in this book. US programming started gushing through cable
television as well and gained popularity in Latin America with middle and
upper-middle classes. There was a shrinking of national production in
some countries, like Peru and Venezuela, spurred by the economic crises
in those countries, by politics in Venezuela, and perhaps from increased
competition by pay-TV.
The liberalization of several of the largest Latin American economies
through the turn of the century brought sweeping change to Latin
American television, including major regulatory changes that allowed
private national broadcast networks to grow in countries like Colombia,
where they had been limited before. The growth of a middle class with
the means to subscribe to subscription-based television services (Ferreira
et al., 2012), and the expansion of the Internet, which allowed more
massive access to new television services like YouTube, created both the
economic and technological bases for a challenge to the meaning of
television, like that earlier experienced in the US (Lotz, 2007, 2014) and
elsewhere.
Figure 2.1 illustrates the growth of the middle class in most Latin
American countries in the 2001–2011 period. In each of the eight coun-
tries, the percentage of the poor declined notably. Meanwhile, the per-
centage of middle and upper-middle classes grew in each of the eight
countries. By 2010, with changes in technology led by Internet penetra-
tion and greater digital image quality, streaming services arrived in Latin
America and quickly changed the dynamic of television in the region.
With Netflix, initially, in the 2010s, there is an increased flow of US prod-
ucts to Latin America, although Netflix also allowed, later on, for Latin
American products to flow within the region and internationally.
This is why Chap. 6 examines the growth of Internet-based television,
YouTube, Amazon, HBO, and particularly Netflix, which moved aggres-
sively into the region in 2011, ahead of the other subscription services,
seeming to target the upper-middle class and elites who had cultural and
economic capital as well as broadband access. In fact, as Chap. 7 examines,
to understand the dynamics of television audiences in Latin America now,
we need to dive deeper into the social structure and motives of the audience.
We examine upper-middle class and elite audiences in terms of three theo-
retical explanations (cultural capital and distinction, cultural omnivorous-
ness, and cosmopolitanism) for why they might increasingly be pursuing
more international content in pay-TV and streaming services like Netflix.
Putting Latin America in the Context of the Other

World Regions and Countries
For some researchers, it seems that Latin America has lagged behind some
other parts of the world in some aspects of media access and use. The three
aspects of media use that seem most crucial for comparison in this book
are television, pay-TV, and the Internet. Like Latin America, most other
countries have over 90% of people watching television. While some
Europeans have more subscriptions to pay-TV, on average, than Latin
America, some like Spain have less. Most of these countries have higher
Internet penetration than is common in Latin American but Spain, for
example, is comparable. In general, though we will find that Internet pen-
etration lags the more developed OECD countries, but resembles other
middle-income regions of the world (ITU, 2019).
A Region of Broadcast Exporters and Importers

Most broadcast television markets in Latin America are highly concen-
trated, with major networks like Televisa in Mexico, TV Globo in Brazil,
Clarin in Argentina, and Venevisión in Venezuela dominating their home
markets. This concentration, while highly disturbing to reformers, critics,
and some regulators, has enabled these same networks in most cases to
become powerful producers, producing highly popular, well-produced
programs that came to push imports out of most of the broadcast day
(Straubhaar, 2007). Most of these same networks, plus Caracol and RCN
in Colombia, have also been exporters to the region in at least some phases
of their existence. Analysts over the years have noted a top tier of regional
exports, usually just Televisa and TV Globo, plus a shifting second tier of
exporters that once included Venevision and RCNP—now disbanded
(Venezuela), which have now reduced production considerably (Acosta-
Alzuru, 2015), Clarin and related production companies in Argentina,
and recently has featured Caracol and RCN in Colombia (Piñon, 2014;
Roncagliolo, 1995). In a new phase, some, such as TV Globo, Clarin,
Caracol, and RCN, have also become major co-producers with others in
Latin America or with US Hispanic networks like Telemundo. TV Globo
and Televisa have also been major global exporters since the 1990s.
Brazil
Brazil has seven over-the-air national television networks, which include
five private and two public (Obitel, 2019) ones. Broadcast television
remains the most-consumed type of media in the country and, despite the
wide offerings of other television networks, viewership is highly concen-
trated among the four major networks (Reporters Without Borders,
2020). Globo continues to dominate the Brazilian broadcast TV market
through its general audience single network. The company’s audience
share amounted 38% of the audience share, followed far by SBT with 16%
and then closely by TV Record, with 15% of the audience share and
Bandeirantes, 3% of the market share (primarily male, based on news and
sports) (Obitel, 2019; Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013).
TV Globo grew dramatically since the 1960s to become a major
exporter and one of the world’s top broadcasters, and is considered the
25th biggest media corporation in the world (Birkinbine et al., 2016) with
revenues estimated at US$5 billion. TV Globo strategy for a long time was
to concentrate its audience in one channel, but since the 1990s, it has now
moved with the growth in the multichannel audience to create a number
of pay-TV channels in areas including news, telenovelas, education,
national films, children’s programming, and so on (Sinclair & Straubhaar,
2013). Even though Globo is still the nation’s absolute leader in television
and one of the world’s top broadcasters, its share of the Brazilian market
started to lose some ground in the 1990s (Borelli & Priolli, 2000).
Although considered hegemonic and, for times, criticized as a quasi-
monopoly (Hertz, 1987), Globo faces competitors, such as Sistema
Brasileira de Televisão (SBT), the number two network run by long-time
variety show host, Silvio Santos, which is explicitly targeted at the working
class and lower-middle class (Straubhaar, 2007). TV Record, the third-
largest network, whose majority owner, Edir Macedo, is a billionaire leader
of a growing and influential neo-pentecostal church, the Universal Church
of the Reign of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus). Since buying
the network in 1989, Macedo has been able to grow Record alongside his
church, and Record became the second biggest network in earnings and
viewership (de Souza Félix & Santi, 2018). Records programming includes
religious content, but most of its programming is news or entertainment,
including telenovelas that are often quite popular.
Building on the relative economic stability of the early 2000s, pay-TV
grew and expanded into the middle class, as we will explore in Chap. 5. A
major shock for the pay-TV industry occurred when the largest national
operators succumbed to debt and were forced to sell their systems to for-
eign firms. In 2012 Embratel—formerly the state long-distance monop-
oly, then privatized, and now a property of the Mexican telecommunications
juggernaut América Móvil—took over Net Brasil, which used to be
Globo’s largest pay-TV service in terms of the number of subscribers. This
acquisition turned América Móvil into the largest pay-TV operator in
Brazil—and all of Latin America—almost overnight (Sutherland, 2011),
despite the fact that Mexican law bars the company from operating televi-
sion services in its home country. In a parallel move, Editora Abril sold its
cable assets in 2011 to Telefónica of Spain, which is now the second-
largest provider in Brazil, with growing assets in other Latin American
countries as well. Even after losing Net Brasil, Grupo Globo continues to
play a visible role in the Brazilian pay-TV service industry as a minority
partner in the Sky/DIRECTV alliance, which in 2014 still had the second-
largest share of pay-TV subscribers in the country (ABTA, 2014). More
recently, the economic recession, alongside broadband capabilities, has
sped up the process of cutting subscriptions.
Mexico
A high concentration of the broadcast market is especially prominent in
Mexico, where up to 2014, Televisa and Televisión Azteca together com-
manded over 95% of the market through their nationwide over-the-air
networks (El Economista, 2014). Looking to break the long-standing
duopoly of TV Azteca and Televisa, the Mexican federal government
announced in 2014 that it would authorize the creation of two new
national over-the-air television networks. In 2016, Imagen TV was the
first commercial network to operate in Mexico after the 1993 privatization
of Imevision, now TV Azteca (Economía Hoy, 2016). Then Multimedios
TV started national transmissions in 2018 (Multimedios, 2018). However,
the two new networks make up for less than 12% of the market share
(Economía Hoy, 2018). In the last ten years, Televisa has consolidated its
hold of the Mexican pay-TV field by acquiring several of the largest
regional cable companies (Harrison, 2013) and establishing informal alli-
ances with the largest remaining independent cable operator Megacable.
Mexico has a total of ten over-the-air national networks, the privately
owned Televisa, TV Azteca, Imagen TV, and Multimedios, and three pub-
lic networks: Once TV, Conaculta, and Una Voz Con Todos. In Mexico,
Televisa and TV Azteca, for decades commanded over 95% of the TV
broadcast market (El Economista, 2014). Mexican President Enrique
Peña Nieto approved a telecommunication reform in 2013, that among
other things included opening the bidding for two national over-the-air
private networks and eliminating barriers for foreign investment in the
sector. The reform resulted in the consolidation of two new national net-
works, Imagen TV and Multimedios TV, and the arrival of AT&T (Forbes
México, 2017). While Imagen TV and Multimedios TV are now compet-
ing with TV Azteca and Televisa, the market remains highly concentrated.
Five companies share 66% of over-the-air TV. Televisa (259) and TV
Azteca (179) remain giants with more than half of all local TV stations
(53%). Followed by Grupo Imagen (46), Telsulsa (31) and Grupo
Multimedios (19) who together only make for 12.3% of the market
(Economía Hoy 2018).
Between Multimedios, Televisa, and TV Azteca, they operate about
411 local TV stations around the country (Obitel, 2019). On the one
hand, one of the newly added networks, Multimedios TV, which origi-
nated in the industrial Northern metropolitan city of Monterrey where it
operated for 20 years before going national, reached 46 million viewers

(Franco et al., 2019). On the other hand, the American AT&T who
announced it would invest $3000 million in Mexico (Forbes México
2017) had to partner with the Spanish Telefonica to compete with Carlos
Slim’s America Movil who still holds nearly two-thirds of mobile lines in
Mexico (Love, 2019). In spite of the 2013 reform, the two telecommuni-
cation companies have struggled to fight Slim’s monopoly.
Multichannel penetration remains strong in Mexico where for every
100 homes, 67 have access to it. The main competitor as of 2018 was Izzi,
owned by Televisa, claiming 30% of total pay-TV subscriptions in the
country, followed by Sky (also owned by Televisa) with 20%, Megacable
with 17%, and Dish with 17% (Franco et al. 2019). Scholars in Mexico
(Franco et al. 2019) indicate the formula for telenovelas is starting to
change. In 2018, telenovelas tend to have fewer episodes, while producers
and creators favored the “super series” or telenovelas with less than 80
episodes. The authors argue these recent changes might be linked to the
VoD logic. In that same vein, TV Azteca, the second most important net-
work in the country, announced they will stop producing telenovelas
claiming that audiences have changed. The network is now investing more
time and money in reality shows including Máster Chef and La Voz
Mexico. The broadcast of regional telenovelas in Mexico also declined
since TV Azteca and Imagen TV stopped exhibiting Brazilian telenovelas.
Imagen TV started to add Turkish telenovelas to its programming
(Obitel, 2019).
Netflix has a strong presence in Mexico where it has produced success-
ful TV shows like Luis Miguel, El Chapo, Club de Cuervos, Ingobernable,
and La Casa de las Flores. In 2018, Mexico was the second country, after
the United States, where Netflix produced the most original content.
Argentina
Argentina presents a special case in the history of broadcasting in Latin
America. The nationalization of broadcast television producing stations
and networks by the Peronist government in 1974 restricted the growth
of the television field, which in its early years followed a commercial orien-
tation similar to that in other Latin American countries (Galperin, 2000).
The military governments that expelled Peron by a coup in 1967 main-
tained the nationalization of television stations until their exit in 1983. It
was reprivatized by a new government in 1984, but the delayed expansion
of broadcast TV in Argentina, along with the obstacles posed by the coun-

try’s topography forced many households to use cable services to gain
access to TV channels. Thus, multichannel television in Argentina had a
considerably larger user base than other countries in Latin America, even
before the explosion of multichannel and pay-TV in the region
(Bulla, 2009).
Two major players dominate national broadcast television: the multi-
media conglomerate Grupo Clarín, owner and operator of Canal 13, and
Spain-based telecommunications powerhouse Telefónica, which runs
Telefe. In 2012, both networks controlled up to 64% of the market (Boas,
2012). Based on steady increases in production and export, Argentina
joined several other Latin American countries as “new exporters,” (Sinclair,
2020). With the growth of pay-TV, which started from a high base, pay-
TV grew slowly until 2014 in Argentina, helped change the patterns of TV
imports, and stimulated new content production arrangements. Clarín,
for example, joined forces with independent producers Polka and Ideas
del Sur (Becerra et al., 2014). Mexico and Brazil remain the biggest
exporters and producers of Latin American television programming, but
in recent years, Argentina and Colombia are increasingly prominent in
producing and exporting telenovelas and unscripted formats, such as game
shows and reality TV (Sinclair, 2004).
Colombia
Colombia was another country in which state control delayed the devel-
opment of a commercial broadcast industry with major networks. The
country had a mixed system for the allocation of broadcast licenses, in
which the National Television Authority (Autoridad Nacional de
Televisión, or ANTV) owned all transmission facilities for the only two
television channels with national coverage, and assigned or rented indi-
vidual airtime shares to private production companies (Arango Forero
et al., 2010). This scheme prevented private media concentration and
growth of TV networks with a strong identity like Televisa or Globo until
the 1990s.
Initial privatization in 1966 failed, but liberalized competition began
with regional networks in 1984. The consolidation of this period gave way
to the emergence of a Colombian style of telenovelas, whose national style
included irony and humor and a Colombian identity (Piñon, 2014). Some
hugely successful telenovelas, such as Yo Soy Betty, La Fea paved the way
to the increasing international viewership of Colombian television (Piñon,

2014). Colombia became a hub for telenovela production catering to the
Latinx audience in the US as well as the regional market (Piñon, 2014).
After the national government reformed the broadcasting law in 1998,
permitting fully privatized network ownership, the private media con-
glomerates RCN and Caracol received licenses to operate the two national
channels for ten years. With the maturing television industry and in an
effort toward less dependency on the state, the Colombian industry
pushed to an international market and partnership expansion (Piñon,
2014). RCN and Caracol have established international alliances to dis-
tribute and co-produce fiction content: the former with Televisa and
Univision, and the latter with Telemundo (Arango et al., 2009).
In 2008, the licenses were renewed for another ten years (Arango-
Forero, 2013). Colombia currently has five over-the-air national television
networks, the private Caracol (48.20% of audience share), RCN (18.11%
of audience share), Canal Uno (6.71% of audience share) and the two
public Señal Colombia (4.45%) and Canal Institucional (0.93%) (Obitel,
2019). In this same period, pay-TV growth continued strongly, surpassing
the penetration rate of Argentina, reaching over 90% penetration, which is
higher than the U.S. So habits of searching for programming in a non-
national network environment, that grew prior to 1998, coupled with
strong economic growth, seem to have established pay-TV penetration at
a level very unusual by Latin American standards. Concerned TV distribu-
tors attribute this incredible penetration rate to rampant piracy and infor-
mal cable services, but various serious providers also were attracted to the
growingly stable market.
Venezuela
Venezuela developed one of the strongest broadcasting systems in the
region in the second half of the twentieth century. The conglomerates that
led the field for most of its history—the Cisneros and Phelps/Granier
groups—not only produced and exported Venezuelan fiction to other
countries in the region but were also involved in some of the first region-
wide multichannel initiatives (Gibens, 2009; Duarte, 2001). Over the fol-
lowing decades, the country developed a strong television production
system, becoming one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of
telenovelas.
For most of the history of Venezuelan broadcasting, two family-

controlled conglomerates dominated the TV field: the Cisneros Group,
owner of Venevisión, and the Phelps/Granier Group, controller of RCTV
(Gibens, 2009). However, in the 2000s, the field underwent a significant
reconfiguration when the contentious relationship between the national
government and the RCTV led to the cancelation of its broadcasting
license by President Chavez in 2007. RCTV’s share of the spectrum was
then used by the Venezuelan government for a new public station called
Televisora Venezolana Social, or TVes (Gibens, 2009; El Universal, 2014).
Venevisión was forced to curtail or modify any programming considered
oppositional. This had a tremendous impact on national production and
audience interest in it, with telenovela production falling to less than one
a year and Venezuela turning to import telenovelas from others (Acosta-
Alzuru, 2015).
Venezuelan broadcasting companies were closely involved in some of
the first initiatives to establish pan-regional pay-TV channels and ser-
vices. For example, the Cisneros Group was one of the key players in the
expansion of DIRECTV to Latin America (Duarte, 2001) and at one
point the Phelps/Granier group operated Gems, a regional cable chan-
nel aimed at women (Gibens, 2009). Back in the 1990s, HBO had its
first foray into Latin America through a partnership with Omnivision, a
Venezuelan cable provider that resulted in the launch of HBO Olé
(Guilder, 1991). According to the most recent available data, DTH
satellite subscriptions account for two-thirds of pay-TV users in the
country, with operators DIRECTV and Cantv as market leaders
(Conatel, n.d.-a). Other multichannel operators highlighted by the
government in its industry statistics are Cablevision, Telefónica, and
Netuno (Conatel, n.d.-b).
The recent decline in cable penetration and relatively stagnant satellite
dish growth is the result of the country’s economic isolation and social
unrest, leading to a crisis that has led millions of Venezuelans to seek ref-
uge abroad. Within this scenario, the former regional powerhouse is now
facing low production of fiction and facing a recession of its IT depart-
ment (Obitel, 2017). Venezuela has eight private national networks chan-
nels and seven public network channels, which includes the international
channel Telesur, aimed at other Latin American countries (Obitel, 2017).
Chile
The majority of the media conglomerates in Chile are owned and oper-
ated by some of the most politically and economically powerful families
in Chile and by North American companies. Red Televisiva Megavisión
or MEGA, which represents 23% of the market share, is owned by the
Chilean Bethia Group and Discovery Communications (Plant & de la
Maza, 2016). Chilevisión or CHV, which holds a 22% market share, was
bought in 2010 by Warner Media from the University of Chile (TV En
Serio, 2018). Likewise, Canal 13—which accounts for a 21% market
share—was owned and operated by the Pontificia Universidad Católica
de Chile since 1959; however, in 2010, the network was bought by one
of the most powerful consortiums in Chile, the Luksic Group (La
Tercera, 2017).
One feature that has distinguished the Chilean television industry from
the rest of Latin America was the strength of its State-owned network,
Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN). TVN was the country’s ratings
leader for 20 years. However, in 2015, the network started to dramatically
lose its audience ratings. The audience for TVN telenovelas was particu-
larly low. The financial situation of the State network became increasingly
dire, as the government approved $47 millions in 2018 to help the net-
work out of its financial crisis (Diario Financiero, 2018). Eventually in
2020, TVN initiated a sale process to sell their studios for $88 millions,
which prompted a series of discussions in the parliament to prevent the
future privatization of the network (Rodriguez, 2020).
As the penetration of multichannel television has increased in Chile, its
market has become increasingly competitive. Since its merger with cable
operator Metropolis Intercom in 2005, telecommunications provider
VTR has held the largest share of the market through the last decade
(Benavidez et al., 2009). As of 2019, multichannel penetration in Chile
was at 57% with 3.3 million subscribers. However, that entails a 1.3%
declined from 2018. Actually, pay TV has been declining since 2015 when
it reached its peak (Obitel, 2019). The companies with the biggest market
share of pay-TV subscriptions are VTR with 33%, DirecTV with 21%, and
Movistar with 18% (Plataformas, 2019).
National TV productions in Chile have been declining for the last five
years, with 28 new productions in 2014 and only 17 in 2018, including a
decline in the number of telenovela productions. Interestingly, Turkish
melodramas have increased popularity accounting for 41% of television
exhibit time. Telenovelas remain dominant in Chile where they represent

74% of the content in TV where 48% national productions and 52% from
the rest of Latin America (Obitel, 2019).
Peru
The Peruvian broadcast industry developed in the second half of the twen-
tieth century and was strongly influenced by the intervention of the state.
From the introduction of television in the 1950s and until the liberaliza-
tion of the field in the 1990s, successive regimes—both authoritarian and
democratic—strove to pursue nationalistic and “third world” perspectives
to broadcasting planning and regulation (Fox, 1997). The constant
involvement of the state and the related instability of the relationship
between private broadcasters and the national government prevented the
appearance of private broadcasters of the scale of Globo or Televisa (Fox,
1997). Thus, by the 2000s, Peru had one of the most fragmented televi-
sion markets in the region (Boas, 2012). There are six over-the-air TV
networks with national coverage in Peru, all of which are based in Lima:
Latina, América Televisión, Panamericana Televisión, ATV, América Next,
and the only public network, TV Perú. América Televisión and Latina
have the biggest ratings and market share with 23% and 14% of the market
share, respectively. As far as genre preferences for television go, fiction tops
the list of preferences with 36% followed by informative with 30%.
(Obitel, 2019).
In 2018 the top ten most-watched programs were telenovelas, soap
operas, and miniseries, including two Mexican productions (La Rosa de
Guadalupe, La Jeja del Campeon), and one Brazilian (Justicia); however,
the favorites remained Peruvian productions. Interestingly, Turkish melo-
dramas have been growing in popularity in the last few years. As of 2018,
Movistar, owned by the Spanish company Telefónica, had the biggest
share of multichannel subscribers followed by Claro TV, a subsidiary of
the Mexican América Móvil, and DirecTV. Like in many other competitive
media markets in Latin America, most Peruvian national networks have a
VoD platform including América TVGO, Latina Play, ATV Play, TV Perú
App, Panamericana App, and Willax YouTube. Also available in Peru are
HBO Go, Fox Play, Fox Latinoamerica, Fox Sports, ESPN Play, Movistar
Plus, Claro Video, Movistar Play, DirecTV, Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV,
and Instagram TV (Obitel, 2019). Penetration of multichannel TV in
Peru has been slowly on the rise since 2005, with 3 million subscribers in
2019, representing a 35% penetration rate including a less than 1% growth

from 2018.
The numbers reflect a decade of sustained growth, which dovetailed
with the modernization of the country’s media since the 1990s. During
the 1990s, the federal government introduced a series of reforms to the
media licensing and regulations dealings, opening the sector and stream-
lining the licensing of cable providers. The reforms proved effective in
accelerating the licensing for legal cable operations throughout Peru lead-
ing to a growing field (Peirano, 2002).
Ecuador
Television technology arrived in Ecuador in 1959 by the hand of the
Evangelical Church with the intent to evangelize the country (Ortíz León
& Suing, 2019). Prior to the Presidency of Rafael Correa in 2007, most
broadcast media were privately owned with the national government con-
trolling only a handful of radio stations with few regulations monitoring
content (Ortiz & Suing, 2016). Correa’s administration moved to create
a national public television network, called Ecuador TV. The following
year, the government confiscated assets of conglomerate Group Isaias
placing two additional networks—TC Television and Gama TV—under
the control of the state (Jordan & Panchana, 2009).
In line with Correa’s democratic socialist policies, in 2013 he enacted
the Organic Law of Communication. The law required that national
broadcasting should reach at least 30% of the country’s population. The
new communication regulation—which political adversaries deemed as
gag law—required 60% of all television content to be national productions
as well as 50% of all music broadcasted in radio stations. Likewise, national
mass media companies could not be owned by foreign companies or non-
citizens (Notimérica, 2017). The law also prohibited international adver-
tising. Two years after the law came into effect, about 200 media companies
were economically sanctioned for not complying with the code.
However, in 2019, President Lenín Moreno (in office since 2017)
reformed Correa’s communication law promising to sell all the media
companies that were confiscated back to the private sector. Another major
reform included changing the definition of communication from “a public
service” to “a human right” (OBSERVACOM, 2020). Yet, as of 2020,
Gamavisión (formerly GAMA TV) and TC Televisión were still owned by
the State but operated under a commercial structure (Primicias, 2020).
Ecuador was the only other market to present pay-TV penetration rates
below the average for the region. In fact, of the eight countries with TGI
data, which we are focusing on, it is still the one with the lowest penetra-
tion rate, despite growing from just 11.5% in 2004 to 35% in 2014. Most
of this growth happened in the early 2010s, following macro-economic
prosperity trends that are dwindling in recent years. After the peak in
2014, pay-TV subscription in Ecuador started declining to 22% in 2020
(ARCOTEL, 2020).
Most broadcast television stations belong to one of the five largest pri-
vate networks with national coverage—Red Telesistema (RTS), Ecuavisa,
Canal Uno, Telerama, and RTU—or to the three networks currently
owned by the Ecuadorian government: Ecuador TV, TC Television, and
Gama TV (Jordan & Panchana, 2009). National programming in Ecuador
consists mainly of newscasts, telenovelas, and TV series, which are mainly
imported (Ortiz et al., 1988).
Audience Television Preferences Sample

and Methods
This study makes a secondary analysis of data from the TGI Latina survey.
This is a media and product consumption study conducted yearly in eight
Latin American countries by the Miami-based marketing intelligence firm
Kantar Media, with fieldwork by Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião Pública e
Estatística (IBOPE) and related research companies. The rich amount of
data provided by the TGI Latina survey allows for a comprehensive look
at demographic, attitudinal, and structural factors that are related to media
use habits, including the possession of multichannel television versus
broadcast television, the increasing use of Internet-based television, the
choice of national versus other kinds of programming, choices among
television genres, and the development of new kinds of television viewers
and users, by age, by class (both wealth and education), by language
knowledge and use, and by more or less cosmopolitan attitudes toward
television and other forms of communication.
The longitudinal nature of the data, from 2004 to 2014, also affords
the research team with an opportunity to better understand emerging
class formations and their television viewing without engaging in the
expense of a series of broad multinational surveys. The TGI LatinaS sur-
vey covers eight Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. This selection includes
the seven largest countries in South America, as well as Mexico—home to

the largest Spanish-speaking market in the world.
The samples designed for each of the studied countries are varied.
While some are close to being nationally representative samples, as in the
case of Mexico, available data from other countries can have a more lim-
ited—yet comprehensive—coverage (see the Methodological Appendix
for more details about each country’s sample). Most countries’ samples
are of major metropolitan areas, plus some particularly important regions.
For example, the Brazil sample is based on eight major metropolitan areas
plus a number of smaller cities in the State of São Paulo, with greater pur-
chasing power and access to media.
While this study may have to pay much less attention to new segments
in rural areas or some smaller cities, thanks to the method of data collec-
tion, its results should be indicative of social phenomena in the major
metropolitan areas in Latin America, which represent 60–80% of the pop-
ulations of these countries. Moreover, cities may play an important role in
the formation of what the Ferreira et al. (2012) terms the new middle
class, thanks to their larger spheres of formal employment and opportuni-
ties for consumption. For researchers interested in issues of social stratifi-
cation, using market-research data may provide an opportunity to examine
populations too difficult or expensive to survey.
However, one very important qualification or limit in using these data
is that while we can get a good sense of major metropolitan areas, we are
not getting a true national sample. The reader needs to be very careful to
not think of these data as representing all of the nations covered, just their
major metropolitan areas, which will be more prosperous, more educated,
and will have more access to new technologies like broadband Internet.
The surveys used for this study were conducted door-to-door with a
combination of interviews and, in the case of the parallel study of the prin-
cipal shopper in each home, a paper survey left behind by the interviewer.
Interviewers followed a skip pattern for sampling that was based on the
physical location of respondents’ homes. Since response rates were low
among some important demographic groups—particularly high SES
households—TGI Latina weighted the responses to better represent the
overall population.
Although the 2013 sample has so far been the largest, all the samples
for the various years were very large, surpassing 10,000 respondents. All
of the cross-tabs we generated for analysis were significant at either the
P>0.05 or the P >0.01 level, estimated by calculating the chi-square
statistic. While there is the possibility of an overestimation of statistical

significance due to the size of the sample, the focus of the analysis and
interpretation of results will focus on the most illustrative relationships.
As TGI Latina data shows, the first decade of the twenty-first century
brought a tipping point for the explosion of the multichannel and pay-TV
services in Latin America (Fig. 2.1). For all the eight studied countries
taken together, the penetration of subscription-based television grew at a
reasonably steady pace of 3% a year between 2004 and 2014, with a slight
surge in the latter years propelled by macro-economic improvements
throughout the region. The overall penetration doubled, going from 28%
in 2004 to 55% a decade later.
TGI Latina data also breaks down multichannel television into cable
and satellite, parabolic and other digital television services, compared to
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
PAN ARG BRA CHI COL ECU MEX PER VEN
Fig. 2.1 Multichannel penetration by country in Argentina, Brazil, Chile,

Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, 2003–2014. (Source:
TGI Latina)
regular broadcast television. While cable faced a sustained growth rate that
plateaued after 2010, satellite television seems to have had a significant
increase around the same time, which seems to be linked to the growth of
the new lower-middle class, often outside cable coverage areas. By the end
of the period, satellite service was the means for getting pay-TV in one-
third of the multichannel households.
It was during the DTH TV revolution that Televisa and Globo’s
ventures into pay-TV became intertwined. Both companies, in a part-
nership with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, participated in the
establishment of Sky México and Sky Brazil, the most powerful direct-
to-home (DTH) satellite service in their respective countries. After
almost two decades of accelerated growth, DTH television services
accounted for a plurality of pay-TV subscriptions in both Brazil and
Mexico in 2014, according to figures from regulatory agencies in both
countries (ABTA, 2014; Fig. 2.2).
During the ten years studied, subscription-based television services in
Brazil, Mexico, and most of Latin America grew from utilitarian begin-
nings, as distributors of domestic broadcasters’ contents to isolated regions
far from the major urban centers (Crovi, 1999; Possebon, 2008), to
becoming the epicenter of intense competition by the regions’ major play-
ers in the age of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
convergence and more stringent regulations (Gómez & Sosa, 2010; Crovi,
2006). Except for Argentina and Colombia (discussed below), the expan-
sion of pay-TV in most countries was characterized by a slow, gradual
start, concentrated in a few select markets—such as the U.S. border area
40%
Cable
35%
Satellite
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Fig. 2.2 Cable, satellite, and non-multichannel households in Argentina, Brazil,

Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, 2004–2014. (Source:
TGI Latina)
in Mexico,2 and scattered urban areas in Brazil—followed by a maturation

process that started with the entry of media giants Televisa in Mexico, TV
Globo and publishing house Editora Abril in Brazil, and Venevisión
(Venezuela), which was then probably the third most powerful network in
Latin America (Possebon, 2009).
This maturation process also included the direct participation of inter-
national providers such as DIRECTV and Sky, first as competitors, then as
partners with the local companies noted above. This stage also led to the
incursion of foreign—mostly American—media companies, which started
with English language channels, but gradually dubbed more channels, and
eventually launched more fully adapted and culturally proximate Latin
American versions of properties such as the Discovery Channel, HBO,
and MTV (Duarte, 2001).
With the largest populations in Latin America and the largest Hispanic
and Lusophone media markets in the world, Mexico and Brazil host
vibrant broadcast television markets, marked by the dominance of two of
the largest multi-media conglomerates in the Western hemisphere: Televisa
and Globo. The development of both companies as virtual monopolies
throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century has resulted
in highly concentrated broadcast TV markets in both countries, although
the sector started to become slightly more competitive over the last couple
of decades. The powerful local media conglomerates managed to hold
back multichannel development below the regional average. Brazil started
from a low penetration of roughly 15% in 2004 to surpass Mexico in 2014,
with 48.2% compared to 43.7%.
Only in Ecuador, a similar restrained growth was observed. The coun-
tries growing above the regional average included Chile, Peru, and even
Venezuela, despite its economic woes. Peru, on the other hand, more than
doubled its rate of multichannel households during the last decade, from
around 30% to almost 70% in 2014, a reflection of its status as the fastest-
growing economy in Latin America (Vera & Wong, 2013). Argentina
always maintained a historically higher penetration of pay-TV, and
Colombia outgrew all others to become the top multichannel market in
Latin America. The evolution of multichannel TV in Argentina and
2
The first cable provider in Mexico was established in 1954 in the city of Nogales, Sonora,
where it provided American programming to U.S. citizens living south of the border with
Arizona (Crovi, 1996; Sánchez Ruiz, 1991). Pay-TV did not reach a major metropolitan area
until the first cable license was granted to a Monterrey-based company in 1964.
Colombia, nations with a fragmented television industry, with high

involvement by the state, tells yet another story.
Taking the previous into consideration, it is not at all surprising that
both Argentina and Colombia developed a large user base for multichan-
nel television much earlier than the other Latin American countries. By
the start of the period studied in this volume, in 2004, both nations had a
penetration of multichannel television (both cable and DTH) larger than
50%. After taking part in the growth that characterized most of the region
during the 2000s, both countries reached 2014 with pay-TV rates amount-
ing to more than three-fourths of the studied population, over 90% in the
case of Colombia.
The Impact of Streaming Television

The era of streaming TV in Latin America is marked by the ingress of
Netflix in the early 2010s. This era is enabled by the regional growth of
Internet access. In the early 2000s, according to data on the eight Latin
American countries analyzed here (ITU, 2019), Internet penetration in
the region averaged 5%. By the 2010s, when Netflix entered Latin America,
that average increased to almost 40%. In that timeframe, streaming televi-
sion was still a relatively novel approach to accessing television but with
the relatively economic stability in the region in the following few years, it
grew in adoption. Netflix brought together television and cinema over the
Internet and developed a distribution model that allowed for expansion of
foreign content to Latin America (Heredia, 2017). Later on, increasing
content production in Latin America, included its cultural products in
Netflix’s catalogue for international distribution.
Netflix was joined by other streaming services that are transforming
Latin American television. Those include other US subscription services
like Prime TV (and Disney+ joining soon), transnational (pay per item
viewed or downloaded) services like iTunes, and TV Everywhere services
(Internet service offered to existing pay-TV customers) by US pay-TV
channels like HBO and Discovery Kids. There are streaming services from
major telecom providers like América Movil/TelMex (Mexico) and
Telefonica (Spain), major national television broadcasters like TV Globo
(Brazil) and Televisa (Mexico), free or ad-supported streaming services
like YouTube (U.S.) or SBT (Brazil), and some independent and niche
services within the region.
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Argenna Brazil Chile Colombia Ecuador Mexico Peru Venezuela
2000 2005 2010 2015 2020
Fig. 2.3 Percentage of population using the internet in Latin America 2000–2020
By 2020, Internet penetration had reached 72% of the population in

our studied countries. As Fig. 2.3 shows, Argentina leads, with almost 90%
internet penetration, and Peru remains considerably lower, at 57%.
Increasingly, audiences around the world seem to be turning to mobile
broadband to watch streaming television. While mobile is an increasingly
important means of communication and internet access in Latin America,
the majority of Latin Americans still access the internet through their
desktops, 57% of those from the eight countries studied here access the
internet through desktops, while 36% access through mobile devices
(Statista, 2020). Mobile broadband remains expensive in most Latin
American countries, which limits its use for streaming. An important char-
acteristic of Netflix and other streaming services is the potential to be
accessed through multiple devices. However, users currently prefer watch-
ing it through their televisions, at home, with the majority of users doing
so (Kafka, 2018). This may be due to the quality of data service on mobile
0
2017 2018 2019 2020
Lan America Global Regional Average
Fig. 2.4 Mobile data traffic in exabytes per month. (Source: https://www.
statista.com/statistics/292859/north-america-mobile-data-traffic/#statisticCont
ainer)
devices but could also be due to Latin American culture of watching tele-
vision with others, as a social event. Figure 2.4 shows how mobile data
traffic in Latin America falls far below the global regional average.
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CHAPTER 3
Why Latin American Audiences Stay Loyal

to National Broadcast Television
It looks at some of the major genres produced in Latin America such as

telenovelas, comedies, news, and live variety shows, as well as attempts to
create new genres such as dramatic series. It examines the trajectories of
some of the main regional television producers, such as Mexico, Brazil,
Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia. This chapter shows audience data
from TGI Latina about the strong popularity of national production and
the lower popularity of regional shows, especially in the mass audience
from the middle class down.
This chapter explores why most Latin Americans continue to watch
nationally produced television, primarily on broadcast channels, but
increasingly on some nationally produced pay-TV channels, and in some
programs produced for services like Netflix. One of the main theories
evolved to examine this preference is cultural proximity, which predicts
that audiences will prefer national or regional television. It also empirically
examines it in terms of preferences for national and regional programming
in Latin America during the period 2004–2014, based on a series of annual
surveys conducted in eight Latin American countries. The first major pre-
diction of cultural proximity—that audiences will tend to prefer local or
national programming—is confirmed from the strong, fairly stable prefer-
ence that the overall audience shows for national programming in the
years studied. However, counter to the second major prediction of

Switzerland AG 2021
cultural proximity, that Latin American audiences would favor regional

programming next, we found instead that U.S. programming was their
second choice. We examine why that seems to be the case and has become
stronger in the cable TV era.
A History of National Preferences

During the 1960s and 1970s, many studies reported a one-way flow of
media, particularly television programs, films, and news, from the U.S. and
a few European countries to the rest of the world. Herbert Schiller
(Schiller, 1976) estimated that 65% of all world communications origi-
nated in the United States. A UNESCO study in 1973 found that over
half of the world imported most of their TV shows, mostly entertainment
from the United States (Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974), while other studies
indicated the dominance of four large news agencies (AP, UPI, Agence
France Presse, and Reuters) in the production of news worldwide (Boyd-
Barrett, 1977) and the strong dominance by Hollywood of world film
distribution and exhibition (Guback, 1984).
However, this was not to be a permanent trend in all countries. As early
as 1965, the brand-new TV Globo in Brazil nearly failed when it tried a
program strategy heavy with U.S. imports on the advice of its partner,
Time-Life. It only began to succeed over the next four years as it dumped
that strategy and hired local producers to create national shows
(Wallach, 2011).
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, several of the larger and/or wealth-
ier countries in Latin America, the Mid-East, and Asia began to produce
far more of their own television programs (Lee, 1980; Sinclair et al., 1996;
Straubhaar, 1984). Some, like Brazil, Hong Kong, and Mexico, were
beginning to export them, both regionally and globally (Sinclair &
Straubhaar, 2013). This surprised Hollywood, scholars, and industry ana-
lysts, since up until that time most people supposed that a combination of
control over distribution, high production values, and cultural familiarity,
dating from the huge outflow and consumption of Hollywood films since
the 1920s would also keep U.S. television programs in prime time indefi-
nitely (Guback, 1984; Miller, 2001). One British critic expected “Wall to
Wall Dallas,” U.S. television everywhere across the world (Collins, 1986).
In reality, most Latin American countries rejected Dallas and preferred
either national or regional telenovelas to U.S. prime time melodramas
(Antola & Rogers, 1984).
3 WHY LATIN AMERICAN AUDIENCES STAY LOYAL TO NATIONAL BROADCAST… 51
One theory to explain this was cultural proximity, the idea that audi-
ences would prefer either their own local or national television, or if that
was lacking in the genres that audiences wanted, television from similar,
nearby cultures (Straubhaar, 1991a). However, this theory also seemed to
have limits, even in the 1970s–1990s. Audience research noted that upper
class or upper-middle-class audiences in Latin America were more likely to
prefer television from dissimilar cultures than were middle class, lower-
middle class, or working class audiences (Straubhaar, 1991b,
Straubhaar, 2007).
Dependency on U.S. in Television

Deriving from Marx, for whom culture serves as the ideological support
for dominance by capitalist ruling classes, cultural dependency theory
looked primarily at the role of the media as part of the economic relations
of dependency. In this analysis, Third World countries depended on the
industrialized world for capital, technology, and most manufactured
goods, while exporting low cost primary products or cheap manufactured
goods, which added little benefit to the local economy (Baran & Sweezy,
1968). Speaking primarily of Latin America, Fox (1992) observed that
“Cultural dependency generally was taken to mean the domination of
content, financing, and advertising of the domestic media by foreign, spe-
cifically U.S. companies.” Audience choices were not really considered, as
a logic of economic domination was assumed to prevail.
Fox noted that critiques of cultural dependency theories centered upon
three areas: (1) the failure of state-directed policy aimed at countering
dependency, (2) the allure of free trade, and (3) the apparent success of
some large Third World broadcasters, such as Mexico’s Televisa and
Brazil’s TV Globo in producing their own programs on a large scale
(1992). Waisbord offers a vision of the historical development of Latin
America that builds subtly on ideas like dependency. He defines three eras
of television in Latin American in which the relationship with the U.S. is
always a defining feature: early U.S. support for and equipment sales to
Latin American television businesses; a stage of direct investment that had
largely failed by the 1970s with U.S. firms withdrawing; and a stage in
which U.S. firms re-enter Latin America through cable and satellite televi-
sion (Waisbord, 1998a).
Cultural Imperialism
Cultural imperialism tends to see culture as part of a holistic system, in
which imported television programs and films, local adaptations of
American entertainment media genres, local as well as imported advertis-
ing and commercial media models all combine to encourage increased
consumption and acceptance of the framework of consumer capitalism
among viewers (Oliveira, 1993; Schiller, 1991). Indeed, if we separate
cultural imperialism into economic and cultural layers, despite its holistic
claims, we find that the economic predictions of cultural imperialism have
largely come true. From the revolutionary days of the late 1950s–1970s,
when capitalism was actively contested across the region and defeated in
Cuba, most Latin American countries have become capitalist consumer
economies, facilitated as much by nationally produced television as by
U.S. imports (Oliveira, 1993).
However, in the cultural sphere, imperialism theory predictions tended
to assume a dominance of imported television, which would lead to a
homogenization of culture. Tunstall observed: “The cultural imperialism
hypothesis claims that authentic, traditional, and local culture in many
parts of the world is being battered out of existence by the indiscriminate
dumping of large quantities of slick commercial and media products,
mainly from the United States” (Tunstall, 2008). These programs were
assumed to be attractive because of their higher production values, their
quality of acting and writing, and the appeal of their portrayals of U.S. life
(Straubhaar, 1981). The underlying political economy was assumed to be
a center-periphery domination of developing countries by more industrial-
ized ones in all areas, including culture. However, “theoretical reformula-
tion has become imperative in order to cope with these globalizing forces
that make transnational cultural flow much more disjunctive, non-
isomorphic, and complex than what the centre–periphery paradigm allows
us to understand” (Iwabuchi, 2002, p. 36).
In a critique of the cultural imperialism paradigm, Straubhaar (1991a)
said, “beyond the structural relationships that the dependency literature
leads us to examine, we must look at how media are received by audience
as part of cultures and subcultures that resist change … these audience
preferences lead television industries and advertisers to produce more pro-
gramming nationally and to select an increasing proportion of what is
imported from within the same region, language group, and culture, when
such programming is available” (p. 39). All this takes place within a
framework of the cultural industry, dominated by advertising, so at the

deep structural level, one can say that U.S. influence helped bring these
countries more deeply into a world capitalist economy (Wallerstein, 1979),
as Schiller (1969) and others warned. However, within the boundaries of
the world capitalist system (Straubhaar, 2007), their dependency seems to
have decreased.
National Production
One of the first major empirical arguments against dependency and cul-
tural imperialism rested in the success of emerging Third World producers:
TV Globo in Brazil (Straubhaar, 1984), Televisa in Mexico (Sinclair,
1992), as well as TVB in Hong Kong (Ma, 2005), Egyptian national tele-
vision (Abu-Lughod, 2005), and other stations and networks in pushing
imported programs out of prime time, substituting imported programs in
favor of local or national television production. Their growth and com-
mercial success came from attracting large national audiences to their
nationally produced programs, such as telenovelas, other dramas, music,
comedy, and large variety shows (Tunstall, 2008) and successfully draw-
ing the advertising required to support the cost of that programming
(Mattos, 1984; Straubhaar, 1984). Before considering the audiences fur-
ther, we need to have a sense of the national genres that began to draw
increasingly strong audiences, from the 1950s on.
Telenovelas
Somewhat ironically, the dominant Latin American television genre was
created with significant U.S. influence and participation, along with a vari-
ety of other influences on the development of melodrama that fed into
Latin America. Colgate-Palmolive had huge success in North America cre-
ating the commercial genre of soap opera, first in radio and then televi-
sion, to sell more soap to its intended female consumers. It worked with
producers in Cuba to create a Latin American version of first the radionovela
and then the telenovela (La Pastina et al., 2003; Rivero, 2015), so the
political economic frame of the genre needs to be recognized. It was a
genre developed in part by US advertisers to sell soap in Latin America
and can be seen as part of a larger campaign to help produce consumer
societies in Latin America (Oliveira, 1993; Schiller, 1991). The genre then
flowed into other parts of Latin America through the sale of Cuban scripts
to other national productions that aimed to replicate Cuban success with

the genre (Straubhaar, 2012). Adriaens and Biltereyst (2011) observe:
Cuba facilitated the rising popularity of telenovelas throughout the 1950s in

Latin America by providing actors, producers, and screenplays, while adver-
tising agencies and multinational corporations from the United States were
active in disseminating the new format in the wider region. After the
mid-1960s, the United States’ direct control over the growth and expansion
of telenovelas subsided and the genre gradually began to evolve in diverse
directions in different countries. (Adriaens & Biltereyst, 2011, p. 533)
There is much more to the telenovela than the advertising promotion

of consumption or U.S. influence. Even in Cuba, U.S. advertising invest-
ment met a hybrid development and production process in which Cuban
professionals added their own ideas, and used influences from Latin
American popular culture itself (Martin-Barbero, 1987), as well as from
other sources of ideas and tropes of melodrama, such as serial novels and
Mexican cinematic melodrama (Santos, 2003), French newspaper feuille-
ton serials (Lopes, 2009), local patterns of storytelling, and so on (Martin-
Barbero, 1987). In some ways, the telenovela is one of the ultimate
examples of Latin American cultural hybridity (Canclini, 1995).
The Cuban scripts produced regional classics like The Right to be Born
(or To Know Who One Is, El Derecho de Nacer), produced in many
countries across the region multiple times (Mattelart & Mattelart, 1990).
Some places like Brazil kept doing Cuba-style telenovelas up into the
1960s, but one of the trends that swept through the region from the
1960s on was localizing the telenovela genre into a variety of national ver-
sions that proved far more popular in most places. The common aspects of
the genre continued to be a serial narrative that had to be followed closely
often five to six nights a week, as the genre moved in prime time as the
prime audience attraction. They featured a beginning, middle, and end
over a period of months.
There tended to be a somewhat shared set of roles, at least a couple of
romantic leads whose relationship was often frustrated right up until the
last few weeks, often a female antagonist or enemy of the female lead, a
maid, the maid’s daughter, an evil rich lady, often an entrepreneur who
sometimes is female, a usually good woman born into poverty, a secretary,
selfish relatives (Ramirez, 2017), working class people trying to achieve
social mobility, male villains, teenagers with typical problems, mysterious
men, people embodying key social issues (particularly in Brazil and

Colombia), and so on. Social class levels vary but are often focused on
staying in the middle class or rising into it (Straubhaar, 2007). A classic
plot is about rags to riches social mobility, often with a poor Cinderella
who eventually married the rich Prince Charming, particularly in Mexico,
but common throughout the region (Erlick, 2017). Brazilian telenovelas
tend to have more subplots and characters, often with both rich and poor
families whose paths cross (Straubhaar, 2007). “Other key characteristics
of traditional telenovelas include the presence of suspense and emotion, a
heterosexual love story, the use of triangles, the forced bipolarity between
good and evil, the significance of music in creating emotional identifica-
tion, the use of actual events in the plot, natural acting, and improvisa-
tion” (Adriaens & Biltereyst, 2011, p. 553).
The national telenovela in most countries in Latin America developed
in a complex matrix of the regional flow of scripts, ideas, and professionals.
For example, TV Globo became a powerhouse of distinctive national pro-
duction. By the mid-1970s, it was producing three to four telenovelas a
night, each aimed at a slightly different audience for 6 p.m. (lighter, more
comedic, aimed more at women and children), 7 p.m. (still somewhat
lighter but aimed at a broad audience), 8 p.m. (the main event, aimed at
men and whole families, often with quite a bit about social issues), or
10 p.m. (even more social-issue oriented, aimed at the middle class on
up), which dominated local prime time (Straubhaar, 1982; Mattelart &
Mattelart, 1990). Even in 2018, 13% of Brazilian television time overall
was occupied by fiction, mostly telenovelas (Lopes & Orozco Gomez,
2019). In 2018, 86% of Brazilians had broadcast TV, 83% had some sort
of Internet access but about a third of that had broadband, and 39% had
pay-TV, a decline of about 3% per year for the previous three–four years
(Lopes & Lemos, 2019).
Mexico is an even more prominent producer and exporter of telenove-
las. Data from 2014 shows that all the top ten most watched television
programs in the Latino/a market in the United States were Televisa pro-
ductions. Likewise, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Spain, Peru, Venezuela,
and Argentina have had a significant number of Mexican telenovelas dur-
ing their prime time (Orozco & Vasallo Lopez, 2014). Besides telenove-
las, Mexico has had great success exporting comedy. Shows like El chavo
del ocho (1971–1980) and Chespirito (1980–1995) had been popular in
Spain, throughout Latin America, and even in Brazil (Gomez, 2017;
Gonzalez Hernandez, 2018). Telenovelas in Mexico have constituted one
of the biggest spaces for expression, recognition, and cultural recreation as

one of the most distinctive mass media products (Orozco Gomez, 2006).
According to Mazziotti (2005), the traditional model of telenovela
constructed by Televisa is characterized by themes and narratives follow-
ing a strong connection with theater and radio. The traditional model
follows a kind of Catholic morality of justice, moral reparation, guilt, and
suffering (exemplified by the popular Los ricos también lloran—The Rich
also Cry—from 1979). Orozco Gómez (2006) indicates telenovelas “a la
Televisa” that include classical melodramatic narratives with outdated class
and gender components as well as universal values such as virginity, hard
work as the only legitimate resource for the poor to get out of their social
status, and cunning as a strategy for the rich to survive their misfortunes
and find their destiny. Similarly, skin color and racial features are exploited
to touch on “impossible romance” tropes between a white woman and a
macho countryman. Mazziotti (2009) claims that one important element
of Televisa’s telenovela model is its star system. While the narratives and
themes remain the same, fresh and new faces are part of Televisa’s industry
strategies.
Considering Televisa and the Azcarraga’s political influence in Mexico
and as self-declared supporters of Mexico’s ruling party (until 2000) PRI,
Televisa’s programming remained in the government’s favor (Sinclair &
Straubhaar, 2013). Orozco Gómez (2006) indicates the Mexican tele-
novelas show an image of the country as always idyllic and protected.
National problems seem non-existent or appear completely eclipsed by the
romantic arc. There is no space for politics in the national melodrama.
Researchers of Latin American and Mexican telenovelas (Martin-
Barbero, 1987; Mazziotti, 1996; González, 1998; Vasallo, 2002) posit
that telenovelas are able to develop a cultural matrix. Telenovelas are able
to recreate the popular mixing of the melodrama with mundane practices
building mental maps and building “practices of knowledge and behavior”
(Martin-Barbero & Muñoz, 1992; Orozco Gómez, 2006). Mexican tele-
novelas, contrary to Brazilian telenovelas which emphasize political-
economic and social problems, which attracted more men to the audience,
are considered a more gendered product targeted specifically to women.
Telenovelas like “El amor tiene cara de mujer” (1971), “Simplemente
María” (1970), and “Corazón salvaje, 2” (1977) that were transmitted in
the morning were targeted specifically to housewives. While crafted for a
more adult and both female and male audience, telenovelas like “Cuna de
lobos” (1986) and “Yesenia” (1970) were aired during evening prime time.
Eventually, telenovelas started targeting smaller audiences with chil-

dren’s telenovelas like the Argentinian adaptation “Mundo de juguete”
(1974), “Luz Clarita” (1997), “Amigos x siempre” (2000), and the
Argentinian “Chiquititas” (2000), which was later adapted to Brazil.
Meanwhile, telenovelas aimed at young adults consisted of famous regional
adaptations like “Clase 406” (2002) adapted from the Colombian
“Francisco el matemático” (1999), and “Rebelde” (2005), another
Argentinian adaptation.
Colombia is rising as a producer and exporter of telenovelas. The
Colombian model of telenovela combines modern and traditional ele-
ments to explore urban, provincial, rural universes and juxtapose them to
work in professional environments. It maintains the good versus evil
themes but portrays characters with peculiar identity traits that results in a
caricatured version of Colombians. This can be exemplified in the popular
Yo soy Betty la fea and Todos quieren con Marilyn, where the protagonist,
the evil lady, and the lead man all tend to exaggerate and appear more like
cartoon characters. Sensuality and humor are key elements in the
Colombian telenovela (Mazziotti, 2009).
Fernando Gaitán, Colombia’s most famous telenovela screenwriter and
producer, created two of Colombia’s biggest exports Yo soy Betty, la fea
(1999–2001), which was exported to approximately 70 countries, includ-
ing the United States (Miller, 2001), and Café con aroma de mujer
(1994–1995), the most famous Colombian telenovela export of the early
1990s (Rivero, 2013). More recently, Colombia started producing nar-
conovelas, that is telenovelas related to drug cartels and narco culture.
Generally, narconovelas perpetuate a culture of violence and gender ste-
reotypes, with titles like Sin tetas no hay paraíso (Without breasts, there is
no paradise, 2006) (Miller et al., 2018).
Argentina is a notable producer of telenovelas and is considered a long-
term second-tier exporter within Latin America (Roncagliolo, 1995).
However, perhaps due to the distinctiveness of its dialect of Spanish,
Argentina has struggled to export programs to the region in proportion to
its national productivity, so it has shifted over time to be an exporter of
drama scripts and entertainment formats (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013;
Chalaby, 2017). Venezuela had been a producer and regional exporter
comparable to Argentina (Roncagliolo, 1995). However, the tumult of
national politics has limited drama production. One of two major produc-
ing networks (RCTV) had its license canceled for opposition to the Chavez
government, and the other (Venevision) is afraid to commit the resources

necessary for large scale fiction production (Acosta-Alzuru, 2015).
The Introduction of Dramatic Series

in Latin America
As we will see in Chap. 4, one of the competitive advantages of US and

other foreign television in Latin America has been their dominance of the
genre of dramatic series. There have been efforts at several points by TV
Globo to create different forms of series. Most successful probably is the
recent evolution of the super series, action-oriented series that evolved out
of telenovelas in Colombia, Mexico, and the Hispanic U.S. with
Telemundo.
In Brazil, TV Globo experimented with dramatic series in the 1970s.
One of TV Globo’s main directors, Daniel Filho, argued for increasing the
diversity of formats on television, not to diminish the telenovela, but to
diversify the themes and audiences television could reach (Rubim, 2001).
TV Globo produced several series in the late 1970s, Malú Mulher (a 1979
series about a recently unmarried woman, which ran for a couple of years),
Plantão de Polícia (a 1979 police series), and Carga Pesada (a 1979 buddy
series about long haul truck drivers, which was relatively popular and
remade again in 2003). All did relatively well, but they did not compete
favorably with telenovelas, and they did not become an ongoing main-
stream genre. Dramatic series came to be seen as a form for upper-middle
and middle-class audiences. A college professor in São Paulo interviewed
by Straubhaar in 1979 observed that he and his wife loved Malu Mulher,
but he couldn’t imagine how working-class audiences could relate to a
story about an upper-middle-class woman who sat at a typewriter onscreen
and called herself a sociologist. This was prescient because the major sta-
tions, oriented to mass audiences, did not develop the dramatic series as
other nations in the world did, particularly the United States and Europe,
so that such series began to be an item for import aimed at upper-middle-
class and elite audiences in Latin America, rather than a genre extensively
produced there.
However, there is a recent development, with roots in telenovela, of the
super series (Piñon, 2019). These are action and crime-oriented series,
much shorter than telenovelas, with varied lengths. They seem to have
developed out of narconovelas, telenovelas that started in Colombia and
then Mexico about narcotics traffickers. The success of those telenovelas

indicated a demand for Latin American action-oriented series that gradu-
ally turned into something more like U.S. action series. Piñon notes that
“superseries depart from telenovelas, in a number of key ways; but on the
other hand, they also share key elements of the telenovela genre, as a con-
sequence of their origin as telenovelas themselves in their iteration as nar-
conovelas … As the screenwriter of the successful super series El Señor de
los Cielos (Lord of the Skies, 2013–) put it: ‘I tried to keep some dynam-
ics from telenovela narrative, but mixed with the narrative structure of
series, which are close to the English-mainstream series and action-
oriented stories’” (Piñon, 2019, p. 205). The series La Reina del Sur
(Queen of the South, 2011) was shorter than most telenovelas, but longer
than a typical U.S. series, and seems to have been a first move in this direc-
tion. It was a co-production between the U.S. Hispanic network
Telemundo, RTI in Colombia, and Antenna 3 in Spain. Telemundo seems
to be emerging as a dominant producer in this new form of series, but
often in co-production with producers from other countries.
Cultural Proximity
The theory of cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991) tries to explain why
television production is growing within Latin America and other regions
of the world at both the national and regional levels. The argument, build-
ing on De Sola Pool (1977), is that all other things being equal, audiences
will tend to prefer programming which is closest or most proximate to
their own culture, starting with national programming, if it can be sup-
ported by the local economy. Localized or nationalized cultural capital,
identity, and language tend to favor an audience desire for cultural prox-
imity, which leads audiences to prefer local and national productions over
those which are globalized and/or American. Cultural proximity is cre-
ated by a feeling of cultural closeness or similarity, perceived in specific
things like humor, gender images, dress, style, lifestyle, knowledge about
other lifestyles, ethnic types, religion, and values that seem familiar or
comfortable. It could also be seen as a desire to see national cultures
reflected on television (Waisbord, 1998b).
A similar desire for the most relevant or similar programs also seemed
to lead many national audiences to prefer cultural-linguistic regional pro-
gramming in genres that small countries cannot afford to produce for
themselves. For instance, audiences in smaller countries, such as the
Dominican Republic, have shown a preference for national programming.

However, when there is lack of availability within certain genres, there is a
tendency to look next to Latin American regional programming, which
may be relatively more culturally proximate or similar than those in the
U.S. (Straubhaar, 1991). As an example of cultural proximity outside
Latin America, results from a European study by Bondebjerg et al. (2017)
tell us that, “people have strong feelings about their own national TV
drama; they express much deeper spontaneous connection with narratives
from their own national reality. There is a proximity that goes deep
between stories where locations, characters and details of a recognizable
reality are experienced and felt directly” (Bondebjerg et al., 2017, p. 11).
Anthropologist Conrad Kottak, a longtime observer of culture in
Brazil, observed in 1990 that “common to all mass culture successes, no
matter what the country, the first requirement is that they fit the existing
culture. They must be preadapted to their culture by virtue of cultural
appropriateness [emphases in the original]. If a product is to be a mass
culture success, it must be immediately acceptable, understandable, famil-
iar, and conducive to mass participation” (p. 43). The Brazilian case shows
how strong the preference is for national programming. The major chan-
nel, TV Globo, produces over 12 hours a day of programming for itself,
including over 85% of its prime time programming (Sinclair & Straubhaar,
2013). This kind of production can only be achieved when the domestic
market is large enough to support the products and when the cultural
industries are sufficiently developed to manufacture them. Something
similar can be said about Mexico, where Televisa, the largest mass media
company of the Spanish-speaking world (Alvarado Cabrera, 2018), pro-
duced about 90,000 hours of content for free-to-air and pay-TV, repre-
senting 36.9% of the segment’s net sales in 2016 (Alvarado Cabrera,
2018). Even audiences in Northeastern Mexico, with close geographical
proximity to the United States and who are historically familiar with
U.S. culture heavily favor local and national programs (Lozano, 2011).
Hoskins and Mirus (1988) have also created a useful concept for exam-
ining the attraction of national programming to national audiences: the
cultural discount.
A particular programme rooted in one culture, and thus attractive in that

environment, will have a diminished appeal elsewhere as viewers find it dif-
ficult to identify with the style, values, beliefs, institutions and behavioural
patterns of the material in questions. Included in the cultural discount are
reductions in appreciation due to dubbing or subtitling … As a result of the

diminished appeal, fewer viewers will watch a foreign programme than a
domestic programme of the same type and quality, and hence the value to
the broadcasters, equal to the advertising revenue induced if the broadcaster
is financed from this source, will be less … the cultural discount explains
why trade is predominantly in entertainment, primarily drama, program-
ming. (Hoskins & Mirus, 1988, pp. 500–501)
Primary, Local or National, Cultural Proximity

Cultural proximity has evolved since 1991 into what might be seen as
national and regional versions of the theory. At the national level, it seems
to have become commonplace that most (but not all) national publics
prefer nationally based television programming. Research by Buonanno in
Western Europe since the 1990s has shown an evolving preference for
national programming, when available (Buonanno, 1999, 2002). Similar
national preferences seem to have evolved in many parts of Asia. That
might initially have been due to fairly strong protectionism (Chan, 1994),
but as quotas and other protections were relaxed in the later 1990s and
2000s in many countries, national preferences seem to have persisted,
notably in India, China (Sinclair & Harrison, 2004), Korea (Hyun, 2007),
Japan (Ito, 1991), and others.
One could argue that the kind of national or local preference predicted
by cultural proximity is latent but dynamic, depending on the evolving
sense of collective identity in a given cultural space, and how cultural
industries evolve in that space. Many countries were created artificially by
colonial powers during the colonization process, such as the composition
of Iraq from separate Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite provinces (under the
Turkish empire) after World War I (Lapidus, 2014). A survey of “Third
World” broadcasting in 1976 showed that using radio and television to try
to establish national identity in newly established nations that had not had
identities focused on those territories was both a goal of almost all coun-
tries and a challenge for many (Katz & Wedell, 1976).
Artificially defined borders can, over time, come to house strongly felt
national identities, as in Latin America. Anderson showed how states
could often do much with their own tools (schools, holidays, museums,
maps, anthems, military service) and could do even more in cooperation
with cultural industries and artists to create imagined communities
(Anderson, 1983). However, the imagined national communities of Latin
America have been evolving since the period 1820–1830s, whereas many
other states date to changes after World War I or World War II, post-
colonial struggles in the 1960s–1970s, or even later. So, while Latin
American countries have national cultures that prefer national broadcasts,
many other states have not yet achieved that.
Secondary, Regional (Geo-Cultural), or

Cultural-Linguistic Cultural Proximity
Cultural proximity is thus very dynamic, as it evolves with both national
and transnational developments. It should not be seen as a static and as an
inherent quality, as Iwabuchi (2002) has pointed out. The perceived cul-
tural proximity of Japan to other Asian nations grew slowly after World
War II, despite the resentment many other Asian peoples felt toward
Japanese colonialism in the war, as it came to be seen instead as an attrac-
tive model of Asian modernity. To some degree, Japan has now been sup-
planted in that position by Korea (Hyun, 2007). One of the ways in which
potential cultural proximity, based on earlier historical interactions and
shared cultural resources, can be developed in the TV era is by the growth
of some country as an early producer and exporter of television, as in the
case of Brazil and Mexico (Sinclair, 1999). The regional aspect of cultural
proximity has been a useful insight for scholars in Latin America, where
regional television markets grew, starting with the exporting of scripts in
the 1950s, and whole programs in the 1970s, including across language
lines (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013).
Brazilian telenovelas, for instance, were exported into Spanish-speaking
Latin American countries starting in 1975. Strong intra-regional flows
continue (Lopes, 2014), even as contents from other regions, such as
Korean wave dramas, have begun to show up in some markets. This goes
to show that regional cultural proximity still works to some degree, but
that genre proximity—like the appeal of melodrama—across cultures is
part of a set of competing proximities (La Pastina & Straubhaar, 2005). A
number of high producing countries (Brazil, Mexico, Hong Kong, Egypt,
India) pushed forward to export to other countries within their geo-
cultural regions, such as Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, and the
Arabic speaking Middle East (Sinclair et al., 1996), or to cultural-linguistic
markets, like the Lusophone linguistic space, where Brazil exported tele-
novelas to Portugal starting in 1976 and Lusophone Africa after that
(Cunha, 2011). Thus, one strong empirical observation against the logic
of dominated cultural flows was the emergence of culturally proximate or
culturally similar regional markets (Sinclair et al., 1996; Wilkinson, 1995).
Although some authors see cultural proximity as a factor in intra-
European television co-production and flows (Trepte, 2008), most
European scholars, such as Buonanno (1999), Schlesinger (1993), and
others, have noted that there is little common cultural basis for TV flow or
demand across language and cultural barriers within Europe, despite such
ambitious projects to encourage these exchanges as Television Without
Frontiers (Presburger & Tyler, 1989). One of the most comprehensive
European studies to date by Bondebjorg et al. shows that “television audi-
ences around Europe tend to prefer their own national drama production
above everything else, but US and UK drama forms are also extremely
popular all over Europe and in many other parts of the world” (Bondebjerg,
2016, p. 26). This shows a pattern that we will return to in Chap. 4, that
audiences may prefer national programming first, while preferring US and
Anglophone drama second, over regional production (Milly Buonanno,
2004b, 2008). Despite the theoretical predictions of cultural proximity,
that also seems to be happening in Latin America. As we will see, that
depends on social class and national context.
Ongoing Competition with Imported U.S. Television

Programs and Channels
Even though the growth of national television producers and regional
producers/exporters may have actualized a sense of cultural proximity by
appealing to aspects of identity and history, they have to contend with the
continued export power of the United States. The U.S. had been export-
ing television worldwide since the early 1950s (Bielby & Harrington,
2008), building on Hollywood films, many produced by the same compa-
nies, widely exported since the 1920s (Miller et al., 2005). Thus, there has
been a long cultivation of a kind of cultural familiarity with the U.S., par-
ticularly in Western Europe and Latin America, which has led some to call
the U.S. “everyone’s second culture” (Gitlin, 1998). Buonanno (1999)
found that while European countries were producing and consuming
more of their own national dramas and other programming, their second
preferences were U.S. programs and channels, not regional ones; cultural
proximity only applied at the national level (Buonanno, 2004a).
While U.S. television programs had receded to the margins of television

schedules for the largest television networks in Brazil and Mexico, for
competing stations in those countries and for many smaller networks
around Latin America, U.S. programs were always a widely and cheaply
available resource to fall back on. A new stream of U.S. programs and
entire cable channels flowed into Latin America and the rest of the world
in the late 1980s–early 1990s with the growth of pay-TV (Duarte, 2001).
While the uptake of cable or satellite pay-TV was initially low in most of
Latin America (Reis, 1999), it was higher in Argentina (Park, 2002) and
Colombia (Forero et al., 2009) due to government limits on the develop-
ment of commercial broadcast TV networks. Pay-TV and TV over the
Internet began to grow, as we note below, as more Latin Americans moved
into the lower-middle and middle classes in the 2000s, which is also cov-
ered in more depth in Chap. 5.
Capitals, Class, Viewing Options,

and Viewing Choices
Cultural proximity is also limited by factors largely related to social class

stratification. National audiences or other cultural groups originally united
by language and/or culture in ways that gave rise to the theory of cultural
proximity (Straubhaar, 1991) seem to be increasingly fragmented by eco-
nomic, cultural, and linguistic capital in the senses defined by Bourdieu
(1984, 1991). Increased economic capital gives audiences greater access
to more kinds of television (multichannel TV, Internet TV, OTT, etc.),
which may challenge the kind of loyalty to national TV implied by cultural
proximity by providing many more alternatives. Increased cultural capital
gained from family background, education, travel, and so on may give
audiences the cultural knowledge that might make previously unfamiliar,
foreign television programs more interesting or relevant. Increased lin-
guistic capital would work in a manner very similar to cultural capital but
based specifically on language learning, leading to broader interest in
other cultures’ television.
Cultural proximity also evolves with the changing nature of television,
which has moved from dominance by a few broadcast channels to a much
larger, more fragmented universe of competing pay-TV and Internet
channels (Lotz, 2014). One remarkable feature about most Latin American
countries was that pay-TV or multichannel television penetration remained
very low by global standards for middle income countries until the mid-
to-late 2000s, with the exception of Argentina and Colombia, where mul-
tichannel penetration had been much higher for a long time (Straubhaar
et al., 2015a). People in the economic elite in many Latin American coun-
tries had long been able to access foreign programming through subscrip-
tion services that were mostly unaffordable for the majority of the
population (Porto, 1998). However, changing income distribution in key
Latin American countries seems to be expanding these possibilities well
beyond the elite. In Brazil, for example, prior to the economic slowdown
that began in 2014, estimates were that close to 40 million people had
risen from the working class or working poor into the ranks of the lower-
middle class (Zizola, 2014), where it was now feasible for them to have
pay-TV, or broadband Internet to use Internet-based television more eas-
ily (see Chap. 5 for more information on this).
This study posits that this wealth that enables more parts of the audi-
ence to obtain more viewing choices and options is increasing across more
parts of the population in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, Chile, and
Mexico. This rapidly increasing economic capital is a major intervening
factor in the evolution of cultural proximity. Even more importantly, per-
haps, in most Latin American countries, at least until the major growth
economic growth of lower-middle classes in the 2000s, only elites or
upper-middle classes have had the education, employment experiences,
travel opportunities, and family backgrounds that give them the cultural
(Bourdieu, 1984) or linguistic (Bourdieu, 1991) capital required to seek,
understand, and enjoy programs in other languages, from other countries
(Straubhaar, 2007).
Methodology
This study is based on secondary analysis of data from TGI Latina, a bian-
nual marketing and media consumption survey conducted in eight Latin
American countries by the Miami-based marketing intelligence firm
Kantar Media. It had fieldwork by Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião Pública
e Estatística (IBOPE), in Portuguese and its other subsidiaries in Mexico
and South America.
The analysis presented in this chapter focuses on data from 2004
through 2014, which covered eight countries in Latin America: Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. For each
country, a probability sample was projected to represent the total
household and individual population in potential markets of interest. With

the exception of Mexico, where the sample represents 20 cities across
Mexico, most of the samples are limited to a few major metropolitan
areas—eight in Brazil, far fewer in most other countries. This is important
because people in major metro areas are richer, better educated, and more
connected to a variety of communication technologies than are the
national general population. For example, in 2012, 64% of the Kantar
metro sample in Brazil had access to the Internet, while the number in the
general population was 44%. So, although the total number of respon-
dents for all eight countries was 61,400, which represents a universe of
more than 176 million people in the region covered, we have to remem-
ber that we can generalize to major metropolitan areas but not national
general populations.
TGI Latina surveys are conducted door-to-door, with a combination of
personal interviews and a paper survey left behind by the interviewer to be
retrieved at a later date. Interviewers followed a skip pattern for sampling
that was based on the physical location of respondents’ homes. Since
response rates were low among some important demographic groups–
notably, households at the bottom and at the top of the SES scales, and
those in remote areas–TGI Latina weighted the responses to better repre-
sent the overall population.
Measurements
This study uses TGI Latina data to look at changes over time in respon-
dents’ self-reported interest in television programming from their own
nation, the region, the United States, and Europe. The theory of cultural
proximity predicts that respondents would prefer first their own national
programs and channels, then regional ones, then those of the U.S. or
Europe. This was represented by viewing interest for national, Latin
American regional, U.S. and European television programs and films. Four
questions asked respondents to state their interest in TV programs and
films from (nation, region, etc.) on a scale from “very uninterested” to
“very interested.” We use the combined values “interested” and “very
interested” to indicate interest in TV programming from each of the four
origins (national, regional, US and European). We then examined the
relationships between these scales of interest in programming to educa-
tion, which we conceptually define as cultural capital; an index of socio-
economic status, which we conceptually define as economic capital; and an
index of forms of foreign language learning, which we conceptually define

as linguistic capital.
Data Analysis
The TGI Latina 2004–2014 data was run through Choices 3, a specially
designed analysis software at Kantar Media. The team ran crosstabs of the
designated indicators for viewing interest in U.S. programming and the
different capitals, and then used the Significance option in Choices 3 to
calculate chi-square statistics and flag those significant at the 0.01 level.
We used a more demanding level of significance, P = 0.01 versus P = 0.05,
to limit the risk of Type I error.
Limitations
This study allows access to conceptually useful data but is limited in three
important ways. First, it is a study of major metro areas, not national pop-
ulations, as noted above. Second, in order to have access to the data, we
had to analyze within the analytical programs of Kantar Media, which
essentially limited us to cross-tabulations with significance analyzed by the
Chi-Square statistic; more advanced statistical procedures and measures
were not possible in Kantar’s system. Third, because of the large sample
size and our need to rely on cross-tabulation, we run some risk of Type I
error here, finding false positives in significance due to our large sample
(61,400).
The Context of Multichannel Viewing Growth

In overall terms, viewing options increased substantially from 2004 to
2014. The average proportion of households in all eight Latin American
countries studied which had only broadcast television declined from 72%
in 2004 to 45% in 2014. Households with cable television rose from 20%
to 36%. Satellite television homes rose from 7% to 18%. Overall, there was
a fairly steady growth in multichannel television in most of the eight coun-
tries, from a regional average under 30% to about 55%. There was a rapid
uptake in Colombia, 2006–2009, while some others had ups and downs
despite the general growth trend. The opportunity for viewing many more
kinds of channels went up considerably in most metro areas in the ana-
lyzed countries from 2004 to 2014, diminishing the monopoly by national
broadcast channels and providing more competition for national pro-

gramming. So one could ask whether a decline in national cultural prox-
imity or an increase in the attraction of U.S. or European programming
might be related to the increasing availability of those programs on cable
or satellite multichannel TV. (This is treated in greater detail in Chap. 5).
Preferences for National and Regional

Television Programs
TGI Latina data from 2004 to 2014 shows changes over time in respon-
dents’ overall interest in television from their own nation, compared to
programming from the rest of the Latin American region, the United
States, and Europe. The theory of cultural proximity predicts that respon-
dents would prefer first their own national programs and channels. It then
predicted that after that, viewers would prefer regional programs, then
those of the U.S. or Europe. In all Latin American countries combined in
2014 (the set of columns at the left of Fig. 3.1), 59% of respondents said
they were interested or very interested in domestic TV film or programs,
while 52% said they were interested or very interested in U.S. TV program
and film, 31% said they were interested or very interested in other Latin
American programming, and 30% said they were interested or very inter-
ested in European TV programming. This reinforces the primary or
national aspect of cultural proximity, and challenges the secondary or
regional aspect, while reinforcing the idea that U.S. programming is likely
the second choice after national programming for many countries in the
world. However, we do see some major differences between countries,
visible in the other sets of columns by country. The countries are ranked
left to right in terms of the level of their metro area audience’s interest in
national programming and some changes over time, which we exam-
ine below.
General Preferences for National Programming

and Channels
In Latin America, audiences do indeed tend to prefer domestic content, at

least in the case of seven out of eight Latin American countries surveyed
(see Fig. 3.1). Peru is an interesting exception in that preference for both
national and U.S. programming went up from 2004 to 2014, with
Fig. 3.1 Latin American TV viewing interests (interested and very interested) by
origin in 2004, 2014. (Source: TGI Latina)
preference for U.S. programs slightly, but not significantly higher than for
national ones. Overall, we see some changes from 2004 to 2014, but also
a large amount of stability in terms of preferences for national programs.
Figure 3.2 shows the preferences for national programming, comparing
2004 to 2014 (Fig. 3.3).
Even though larger segments of most countries’ audiences had increased
viewing options in 2014 with the rapid growth in multichannel
Fig. 3.2 Overall programming origin preferences, eight country average

2004–2014. (Source: TGI Latina)
households 2010–2014, the audiences in most Latin American countries

surveyed (with the exception of Venezuela) showed a strong continuing
preference for domestic TV programs, channels, and films. In Argentina,
Brazil, and Peru, preference for national programming increased some-
what from 2004 to 2014. In Chile and Colombia, it continued almost
unchanged, and in Ecuador and Mexico, it declined slightly, while in
Venezuela, interest in national programming declined substantially, from
63% to 43.8%. In exactly those years, Venezuela went from being a strong
producer of telenovelas to a net importer of them, with only one new
national telenovela per year on average by 2014 (Acosta-Alzuru, 2015).
The Venezuelan government took away the license to broadcast for RCTV,
a strong producer of telenovelas, in 2007, and later imposed conditions on
contents from another major producer Venevision, which led them to
hesitate to invest in expensive productions like telenovelas (Acosta-Alzuru,
2015). These interventions could at least partially explain the Venezuelan
Fig. 3.3 Changing program preferences in Venezuela. (Source: TGI Latina)
audience’s loss of interest in at least the entertainment aspects of national

programming.
Genre Preferences and Domestic Bias

The idea of overall preference for national, regional, US, or European
programming might seem a bit abstract. To what degree do audience
members surveyed in these Latin American countries actually think in
those terms? Is asking people whether they tend to prefer national pro-
grams to U.S. ones in general meaningful or valid? To verify the meaning
of national origin preferences and to expand upon what they mean in
terms of more concrete audience preferences, we compared the general
preferences across the total sample in all eight countries for two kinds of
specific national genres to the same preferences among those who had
specified a greater preference for national programming (4 or 5 on a five-
point scale). In Figs. 3.4 and 3.5 we looked at two genres in which survey
Fig. 3.4 Genres x national origin preferences. All countries. (Source: TGI Latina)
respondents had a chance to prefer national versus international versions

of the same types of programming: news and telenovelas or soap operas.
News
Preferences for domestic news did not vary more than a couple of points
between the general sample and those who specifically preferred national
programming. Furthermore, these preferences stayed fairly constant from
2004 to 2014. Thus, interest in national news did not vary much by pref-
erence for the origin of programs or over time.
Telenovelas
For soap operas or telenovelas, there was a much larger, significant differ-
ence in preference between the general sample and those who opted for
national programs. The general sample was less interested in soap opera by
an average of five points, compared to those who preferred national pro-
grams in general, who were notably more interested in soap opera. This
Fig. 3.5 Trends in preference for regional Latin American programming.

(Source: TGI Latina)
difference makes sense since the prime time telenovela is the flagship
national program for most national networks in Latin America that have
the audience size and economic wherewithal to produce them (Sinclair &
Straubhaar, 2013). Interestingly, however, preference for national tele-
novelas also seems to have tapered off over time among both the general
audience (from 45.9% in 2004 to 42.3% in 2014) and the audience more
interested in national programming (from 50.9% in 2004 to 46.6% in
2014). One likely interpretation might be that telenovela interest in both
groups declined somewhat as more options became available to them, as
increasing numbers of people had access to multichannel television with
its much greater variety of choices. However, this decline is relatively
small: interest among the general audience is still over 42% in 2014, and
interest among the audience with preference for national programming
remained over 46%.
Regional Programming Preferences

In cultural proximity theory, regional television programming occupies a
secondary position in audience preference. The theory presumes that
national programming in most genres will be more popular if it is avail-
able, but that regional programming would be next in preference in genres
where national production is not available. For much of the development
of the Latin American regional television market, the most notable
imported genres were telenovelas—that not every country could afford to
produce (Rogers & Antola, 1985); highly produced variety shows like
Televisa’s Siempre en Domingo and Sábado Gigante; sports like soccer
games, and comedy shows, as not every country could afford scripted
programs like the popular El Chavo from Mexico (Arriaga, 2006; Sinclair
& Straubhaar, 2013).
In countries with large numbers of domestic television productions,
like Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, the distance between domestic and
regional program preference is largest. This is because they have long been
major producers of the main genre involved in Latin American television
trade: telenovelas (Roncagliolo, 1995; Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). In
Mexico, in 2014, over two-thirds of respondents stated they were inter-
ested or very interested in domestic programming, while over half stated
they were interested or very interested in TV programming from the U.S.,
and just over a quarter said they were interested or very interested in TV
program from other Latin American countries, which was a notable
increase from 2004. Like Brazil, Mexico had been a largely self-sufficient
exporter of television to the rest of the region but has begun to import
more formats and do more co-production in the last decade. In Brazil, in
2014, over half stated they were interested or very interested in domestic
programming, while a close half said they were interested or very inter-
ested in TV programs from the U.S., almost a third said they were inter-
ested or very interested in TV programs from Europe and over a quarter
said the same of program from other Latin American countries.
The reverse is also true. Countries that produce the fewest telenovelas
are the most interested in regional imports. That is notable in Chile, which
produces some telenovelas but fewer than the major producers, as well as
in Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela, which used to be a major producer but
no longer is, as noted above.
National Program Preferences and SES

From its original development (Straubhaar, 1991), one of the most widely
acknowledged limits on cultural proximity among audience members has
been social class (SES). National programs are fairly consistently popular
across most audiences and audience segments. However, a number of in-
depth interviews over the years 1989–2006 by Straubhaar in São Paulo
and Salvador in Brazil led him to wonder if elite and upper-middle-class
audiences were not somewhat less interested in national television and
much more interested in finding alternatives to it through multichannel
television (Straubhaar, 2003, 2007). As noted above, when SES is broken
down into cultural capital, economic capital, and linguistic capital, each of
those components has separate impacts, but it is useful to start with social
class or SES as a whole.
Figure 3.6 indicates that, as a baseline for comparison, overall or aver-
age domestic or national preference across eight Latin American countries
has not varied that much from 2004 (59.3%) to 2014 (59.2%), across
most SES groups or social classes. This supports the idea of a relatively
stable national preference based on cultural proximity over time. As
Iwabuchi first observed, both primary cultural capital (national or local
preference) and especially secondary cultural capital (regional or cultural
Fig. 3.6 Latin American regional viewing interest x SES. All countries. (Source:
TGI Latina)
linguistic group preference) are socially constructed and change over time
(Iwabuchi, 2002), as the examples of changing preferences in Peru and
Venezuela over time above show. However, in 2004, the top two SES
groups in these eight Latin American countries had a significantly lower
preference for national programming than the lowest 40% in SES terms,
which had a significantly higher national preference. This pattern remained
consistent across the years until 2014, although the differences were not
always significant in statistical terms. A similar pattern was shown by
better-educated audiences and by those who were well above average in
their fluency in English.
Analysis/Conclusion
In most countries then (with the exception of Peru, where U.S. program-
ming is preferred at higher rates than national programs—still unusual in
Latin America), the concept of cultural proximity clearly applies when dis-
cussing national TV preference in opposition to foreign TV preference. It
seems that at least in Latin American countries where national production
has remained strong, national preference remains relatively high.
Examining the results, cultural proximity is still a good overall explanation
for local/domestic programming preferences, as predicted by Straubhaar
(1991) and others; well over half of all respondents in all income groups
stated they are interested or very interested in national television program-
ming. Even the elites manifested an interest in national programming
which, while lower than their interest in U.S. programming, remained
much higher than interest for European or regional/other Latin American
programming. It is notable that the predictions by dependency theory and
cultural imperialism theory that elites would be co-opted into a more posi-
tive orientation to dominant cultures, like the U.S., seem to be true
(Salinas & Paldan, 1979).
By contrast, the poorest 40% of this Latin American audience, across all
eight countries, show a greater interest in national programming in rela-
tion to their interest in foreign television. This fits with earlier studies that
found that national cultural proximity was strong overall, but varied by
class (Straubhaar, 1991, 2003).
It is also worth noting that this sample of major metropolitan areas was
biased toward audiences with greater income, greater education, more
contact with foreign cultures, and so on than a national sample that would
include more rural areas and smaller towns. This sample should be more
challenging to cultural proximity, since it contains more people with the

constituent elements of higher-class status that, as observed in this data,
tends to reduce cultural proximity.
However, going a bit more into detail reveals that preference for one of
the signature forms of Latin American television, the telenovela, has
declined somewhat, particularly among those who say that they don’t have
an intrinsic preference for national production. Preference for national
news, however, remains high. One possible explanation for this is that
foreign entertainment can be substituted more easily for national enter-
tainment than foreign news for national news in terms of proximity and
relevance. The take-up of multichannel pay-TV has increased notably in
Latin America, from 20% or less in most countries, to approaching or
exceeding 50%, in ten years. As Internet penetration is growing even faster
than pay-TV in most Latin American countries, according to the same
data from TGI Latina, national television producers face new competition
from services such as Netflix in some of the areas where they had been
strongest, like television drama, particularly telenovelas but also series in
some countries.
One implication of these findings for cultural proximity theory is that it
may have to be seen as less broad, covering all national production, and
perhaps more as a continuing, but changing factor that may vary consider-
ably by genre over time. Preliminary qualitative interviews among young
people in the state of São Paulo by Straubhaar (2015) show that U.S. dra-
matic and comedy series are becoming increasingly popular among people
under 40, and that national production of series, while increasing, has a
hard time competing with the diversity and perceived quality of the series
offered by the combination of pay-TV and Netflix (Straubhaar et al.,
2015). So, as Iwabuchi (2002) cautioned about the dynamic historical
construction of cultural proximity, even a general favorable disposition
toward national production will not necessarily save it from the competi-
tion by attractive imported programs, channels, or streaming options,
especially when those come in genres historically underrepresented in
national production, such as dramatic or comedy series, action–adventure
series, police and detective series, or feature films.
Indeed, given these factors, one might expect that, given the close geo-
graphical proximity, some common historical past and somewhat close
cultural ties, that regional content would closely follow national prefer-
ence, as predicted by earlier academic work on cultural proximity, noted
above. However, it is U.S. TV programs, channels, and films that follow
the national preference in most cases, with exception of Peru, where pref-
erence for the U.S. programs surpasses national ones slightly, and
Venezuela, where U.S. programs are the least preferred, perhaps because
the campaign against U.S. popular culture, along with other U.S. global
manifestations of power by the Chaves and Maduro governments
(Petras, 2015).
A key theoretical issue raised here is the direct empirical challenge of
these results to the secondary or regional aspect of cultural proximity. In
Latin America in the past, when some genre such as drama or melodrama
was underrepresented in national production, there was a tendency, par-
ticularly in the era of dominance by national broadcast networks, to import
such genre programs from within the region (Rogers & Antola, 1985).
That phenomenon, visible already in the 1970s–1980s, was part of what
gave rise to cultural proximity theory (Straubhaar, 1991) and theorization
about flows within geo-cultural regions (Sinclair, 1999) in the first place.
Furthermore, the combination of increasing national production and
increasing regional flows in more expensive genres, like melodrama and
scripted comedy, seemed to be part of what forestalled any rapid spread of
pay-TV in Latin America in the 1990s (Reis, 1999). It seems that cultural
proximity theory applied reasonably well to Latin American regional pro-
gramming in the broadcast era, but it may well have changed since the late
2000s, in the pay-TV, satellite, and cable television era that is now grow-
ing rapidly in Latin America with the growth of a large new lower-middle
class in many countries in the region (Ferreira et al., 2012). As noted
above, upper and upper-middle social classes have historically been more
disposed to foreign television programming (Straubhaar, 2003). Parallel
work from the same data analyzed here on preferences for U.S. and
European programming shows that higher levels of economic capital, cul-
tural capital (education), and linguistic capital (intensive study of English)
all connect to greater preference for foreign, non-regional television. Data
reported here shows that socio-economic status, as a combined index of
those factors, relates to lower preference for national programs and greater
preference for foreign ones. Empirically, we know that considerable eco-
nomic mobility has taken place after 2000, across the region but particu-
larly in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico (Straubhaar et al., 2015).
Many in the Latin American audiences increasingly have the money for
pay-TV and broadband Internet. Many also are keeping their children in
school much longer, so cultural capital, per se, which may be linked to
greater comprehension of imported programming, is also increasing.
These social factors among the audience create a dynamic in which tech-
nological options for other kinds of TV viewing may have more impact
now than before 2000.
Several authors who have worked with applying cultural proximity the-
ory in other regions, such as East Asia (Iwabuchi, 2002), note that cul-
tural proximity at the regional level is a very dynamic concept, changing as
the relationships between countries in the region develop over time. Some
countries, such as Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico, are engaged in a
greater economic and cultural approximation with the U.S., notably evi-
denced by the recent Pacific free trade negotiations, in which these coun-
tries participated. Brazil may also be moving somewhat more cautiously in
this direction. Others, notably, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela,
have supported more left oriented governments, in which both commer-
cial national stations and imported commercial channels, have been under
greater challenge and in which anti-U.S. rhetoric is more visible.
However, those governments have recently been under stress and chal-
lenge across Latin America, as the government change in Argentina in
2015 indicates, so this is also very dynamic over time. The region is mov-
ing in several different directions, as a wide variety of political commenta-
tors have noted, all with implications for television. As noted above,
audience preferences are also perhaps changing with new technologies
that provide wider viewing choices, matched with increasing affluence and
greater education, moving more people into the middle classes. Latin
American upper-middle classes have long diverged from broad popular
sentiment to have a somewhat greater interest in imported U.S. culture
and television programs. It may be that Latin America is coming to resem-
ble Europe, where national programming is most preferred, but regional
programs lag behind preferences for U.S. programs (Buonanno, 2008).
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CHAPTER 4
The Persistence of the Popularity of US

Television
One of the key issues that lead us to rethink the ideas of national and
regional cultural proximity is that the presence of US television remained
strong in Latin American television broadcasting and yet increased in cable
and satellite-based pay-TV, and again with streaming. While the main
national television channels have heavily relied on national programming
for decades—Brazilian TV Globo, for example, had over 80% of national
programming since the 1980s, and similarly, with Mexican Televisa—
many other TV channels kept using a great deal of imported program-
ming, mostly US, but also Japanese, European, and recently Turkish
and Korean.
There was also a continuing, often dominant US presence in film, both
in theaters and on television itself. From the 1980s on, quite a bit more
US programming came into Latin America, on via cable channels like
MTV, HBO, CNN, drama and comedy channels, and so on to viewers
who could afford them, in terms of economic capital, and those who could
understand and enjoy them, in terms of cultural and linguistic capitals
(Bourdieu, 1986; Straubhaar, 2003; Straubhaar et al., 2019). (Chap. 5
will examine the impact of pay-TV more fully). More flowed in from the
new media of websites, digital music services, and music videos from MTV
to YouTube (Duarte et al., 2007). Then since 2010, streaming services
like Netflix brought a huge amount of US drama, comedy, feature films,

Switzerland AG 2021
documentaries, and others into Latin America, which is covered in Chap.

6. The inflow of US programming, from the late 1980s on, was particu-
larly visible on cable and satellite TV, which were largely filled with US
channels, although European and Japanese channels were prominent in
some countries to serve immigrant populations that still spoke those lan-
guages and felt nostalgia for those cultures. We will examine these trends
in terms of theories of cultural and media imperialism, and also in terms of
globalization. In terms of audience preferences, we turn to the appeal of
the foreign and try to understand what leads some audiences to seek and
access programming from outside the nation and region, specifically pro-
gramming from the United States and Europe.
Structural Factors Favoring the Commercial System

of US Television
A great deal of US influence on Latin American television and its audi-

ences relates to economic, political, and social structures that have been
deeply influenced by the US and other industrialized countries. The ques-
tion is complicated, since Latin American had its own core commercial
system, left as a post-colonial legacy by the Spanish and Portuguese
empires (Lockhart & Schwartz, 1983; Sinclair, 1999). That left not only
a pattern of family commercial empires that found their way into radio and
television, but also modalities of state-media interaction like corporatism,
clientelism, and authoritarian populism that powerfully structured media
(Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). So when US influence started permeating
the region more strongly after Latin American independence in the early
1800s (Chasteen, 2001), the roots of media development in Latin America
had been characterized by the interaction of a post-colonial Iberian legacy,
the interests of emerging nation-states and businesses, regional patterns of
state-media interaction, and the neocolonial influence of the US. Some of
the latter was driven by US policy, from the Monroe Doctrine through
various other interventions, that were ostensibly enacted to keep post-
colonial Latin America from re-colonization by other powers, but also
served to carve out an American sphere of economic markets, resources,
and political allies (Knight, 2001; Livingstone, 2013).
Latin American newspapers and commercial media groups evolved
early, primarily in an interaction with the emerging nation-states over the
creation and control of national identity (Anderson, 1983; Fox, 1997).
4 THE PERSISTENCE OF THE POPULARITY OF US TELEVISION 89
However, US influence on media grew rapidly (Waisbord, 1996). US

advertisers and advertising agencies like J. Walter Thompson began to
operate in Latin America in the 1920s (Fejes, 1980; Janus, 1977; Scanlon,
2003), along with US radio broadcasting companies and equipment mak-
ers like GE (Schwoch, 1990), direct shortwave broadcasting from the US
into Latin America (Fejes, 1986). US policy favored US commercial inter-
ests, such as film exports to the region (Boyd-Barrett & Mirrlees, 2019).
As the twentieth century developed, Latin American entrepreneurs com-
plemented and also competed with US interests. Local media companies
were usually based in large family owned media empires, who often had
radio and newspaper interests, and saw commercial television as a new way
to make money (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). Another key aspect of this
intertwined dependent development was the growth of groups like the
Inter American Press Association, from 1926 on, which brought US pres-
sure to help defend freedom of the press in Latin America (Gardner,
1965), but also served to reinforce and defend both Latin American and
US commercial interests, sometimes against what were seen as within
Latin American nations like Bolivia as progressive reforms (Knudson, 1973).
One useful theorization for this kind of growth of intertwined industry
in Latin American history is dependent development (Cardoso, 1970,
1973; Evans, 1979), in which the national governments, national capital,
and foreign capital compete and cooperate to gain profit, influence, and
power. Evans calls this the tripod of dependent development (1979) and
it applies quite well to broadcast television in Latin America, where very
strong industries grew, but were still strongly influenced by national gov-
ernment and by foreign capital, particularly at key moments in the start or
redevelopment of broadcasters, like the start of TV Globo in Brazil in a
joint venture with Time-Life, which was ended by government interven-
tion (Straubhaar, 1984).
That example is revealing of the complexity of dependent development.
The military government of Brazil initially tolerated the 1964 Time-Life
and TV Globo joint venture, even though it violated the Brazilian consti-
tution, which prohibited foreign ownership or foreign managers of media
(Calmon, 1966), but forced Time-Life out as soon as TV Globo was prof-
itable (Straubhaar, 1981). The military wanted a strong truly national
commercial network to help reinforce national identity and to grow com-
mercial development in Brazil, to turn Brazil into a consumer society,
which they thought would reduce the appeal of socialism (Mattos, 1982;
Mattos, 2002). Time-Life initially recommended large scale programming
of US imports, but that strategy yielded low ratings, so the second Time-
Life representative in Brazil recommended using its money for a talent
raid on other broadcasters to build up a strong line of national genre pro-
gramming in telenovelas, variety shows and music, which did indeed turn
TV Globo into the strongest national network in Brazil (Straubhaar, 1981,
1984). That Time-Life representative, Joe Wallach, then nationalized as a
Brazilian citizen so he could become the financial manager for TV Globo,
building up national affiliates across the country and greatly increasing
national advertising (Wallach, 2011).
All these forces have promoted the adoption in Latin America of com-
mercial approaches to broadcasting, which often favor entertainment,
although national newscasts are usually very popular, along with talk
shows and political discussions (Straubhaar, 1984). That keeps certain
entertainment genres and modalities of programming, like action-
adventure, animation, and drama series, open to the prodigious output of
Hollywood, even though Latin American companies have also been very
successful at creating their own hybrid, regional genres, like telenovelas,
music programs, and variety shows, drawing on US models but often
developing distinct national and regional versions, as noted in Chap. 3.
However, Latin American producers have only recently begun to create
certain kinds of television that have been popular: dramatic series, action-
adventure series, cartoons, documentaries, and other large foreign genres
that have remained popular with Latin American audiences (Sinclair &
Straubhaar, 2013; Lopes & Lemos, 2019).
Cultural Imperialism and the Deeper Structural

Factors Favoring the Popularity of US Television
Cultural imperialism theories tend to see US influence in Latin America as
a part of a larger form of imperialism (Schiller, 1969). Imperialism theories
tend to see dominant countries as seeking control over others to expand
and control markets for their own goods such as cars and other manufac-
tured goods, seek lower cost resources and raw materials for goods as
varied as oil and orange juice, seek lower cost labor pools such as the
maquiladora factories in northern Mexico, and find investment opportu-
nities for capital, such as when ABC and Time-Life sought investment
opportunities in television in the 1960s–1970s (Galtung, 1971; Harvey,
2005; Magdoff, 1969; Wells, 1972). A number of Latin American authors
have written within this framework, along with dependency and depen-
dent development, mentioned above (Dos Santos, 1978; Ianni, 1979).
Within this larger matrix of imperial interests and patterns, cultural impe-
rialism is often seen as the ideological mechanism through media and
other cultural forms for drawing people in Latin America into accepting
the forms through which imperialism operates (Beltran & Fox de Cardona,
1980; Dorfman & Mattlelart, 1975; Schiller, 1969).
Dos Santos and others note that in Latin America, these mechanisms
are frequently structured by class (1978). Dos Santos particularly notes
that a key mechanism of both dependency and imperialism is to draw
Latin American elites into identifying their own interests with those of the
imperial or dominant powers. He and others argue that there is a cultural
dimension to this in which national elites come to prefer the cultural prod-
ucts of the US and Europe, to show their own social and cultural distinc-
tion from others in society (Dagnino, 1973).
We are going to argue that this aspect of cultural dependence, or impe-
rialism, is particularly key for the tendency by upper-middle classes and
elites to seek out US television programs and channels, the adoption of
pay-TV, and, later, streaming television in Latin America. We explore
some of the mechanisms for this later in the chapter, how diverse aspects
of social class affect interest in US and European culture and media, with
elites and upper-middle classes who possess forms of cultural capital
(Bourdieu, 1986) oriented to the US or Europe in Latin America often
coming to favor imported US or European genres such as high quality
drama (Vilela, 2019), cultural elements such as gay/lesbian themes in US
television such as HBO (La Pastina, 2002) and depictions of social democ-
racy in Scandinavian shows (Jacobsen & Jensen, 2020).
The deeper structural context for the acceptance and popularity of US
television includes the long history of deep exposure to US film, music,
magazines, and comics in Latin America. Exposure to extensive ongoing
exports of these popular US media to Latin America since the 1910s–1920s
seems to have cultivated an audience over time by dint of constant expo-
sure, to the point where American popular culture seemed like a familiar
second cultural identity (Gitlin, 1998). It is noteworthy that one of the
first denunciations of cultural imperialism in Latin America was an analysis
of how Disney comics showed US consumer society as a model for Latin
Americans (Dorfman & Mattlelart, 1975). The argument here is that the
long exposure to US culture across the twentieth century probably did
create a strong underlying audience for a variety of US genres. For
example, writing about European audiences, Bondebjorg et al. say, “US-

UK drama has become a closer encounter for European audiences after
decades of being exposed to rather large quantities of such products”
(Bondebjerg et al., 2017, p. 26).
However, attempts to examine the effects of US programming on Latin
American audiences through television, including as a direct example of
cultivation theory, seldom showed significant results (Elasmar, 2002;
Salwen, 1991). Part of the problem was that US programming was not
prevalent enough on the main television stations in Latin America to pro-
vide the ongoing, extensive exposure that cultivation and other theories of
strong effect assumed (Straubhaar, 2003).
So we have an interesting paradox. Latin America has been heavily
exposed to US music, film, comics, and so on for decades before the arrival
of television. Furthermore, there is evidence that US programming was
prominent in Latin American television schedules in the early 1970s
(Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974). However, there is also evidence that in the
1970s–1980s, more and more Latin American television networks created
more and more of their own programming, particularly in prime time
(Straubhaar, 2007). Several studies in the 1980s that looked at both pro-
gramming schedules and which programs were drawing the strongest
audiences found that national and regional programs had the largest audi-
ences (Antola & Rogers, 1984; Straubhaar, 1981; Straubhaar, 1984), as
noted in Chap. 3.
What has resulted in Latin American television broadcasting is a blended
system in which national programming on the main national channels is
the predominant audience favorite, as noted in Chap. 3, but in which
U.S. programming is also available and popular with some. In this sense
Latin America was an early post-colonial forerunner of what is emerging
as a dominant global system, in which national culture on television is usu-
ally preferred, when available (Buonanno, 2008; Straubhaar, 1991).
However, second place is often contested between regional cultural flows
and the continuing power and popularity of US culture (Gitlin, 1998).
Quite a bit of research on Latin America in the 1980s–1990s stressed the
growth of regional programming flows and their popularity (Sinclair et al.,
1996; Straubhaar, 1991). However, as we shall see below, when audience
preferences were examined for the 2000s–2010s, US programming was
consistently rated higher than regional television programs, except in a few
smaller countries that did not produce the most popular Latin American
genres, such as telenovelas, for themselves.
Key empirical questions, therefore, are in which kinds of networks,

aimed at what kinds of audiences, did US programming persist on broad-
cast television? What did satellite and cable pay-TV networks do to
strengthen the presence of US programming? (Covered more in Chap. 5.)
What are US-based streaming networks, like Netflix, HBO Max, and
Amazon Prime, doing to expand it now? (Covered more in Chap. 6.)
How do audiences respond to that programming in terms of their viewing
preferences?
The Persistence of US TV Programs

on Broadcast Channels
Nearly all television networks and stations in Latin America have usually
shown some US programs and films. For some, it was to feature particu-
larly popular US films and series within a largely national program sched-
ule. Other stations and networks showed more US programming as they
tried to find audience segments who wanted something other than national
telenovelas, variety shows, music, and news.
A thorough examination of the programming by stations in São Paulo,
Brazil, in the period 1971–1983 showed that the dominant network, TV
Globo, showed very little US programming in prime time, except for
some movie nights, but tended to show quite a bit in late night after 11
p.m., and some in morning times devoted to cartoons for children
(Straubhaar, 1981; 1984). Over the years, some networks went head to
head with TV Globo with telenovelas and news, such as TV Manchete and
more recently TV Record (Lopes & Lemos, 2019), or with a much larger
emphasis on national variety shows, on SBT (Sistema Brasileira de
Televisão). Several of those succeeded in drawing away key audience niches
from TV Globo, such as SBT and TV Record, directly targeting the lower-
middle and working classes with variety shows, reality TV, and alternative
types of telenovelas (Borelli & Priolli, 2000). These networks also tended
to feature somewhat more US programming than did Globo, particularly
series and movies.
SBT and TV Record began to draw away working class audiences with
more reality programming and variety shows that featured more working-
class people on screen. Interviewing working class residents of Salvador,
Brazil in 2003–2005, Straubhaar found people turning away from TV
Globo because they did not see people like themselves on screen, while La
Pastina interviewed people in the rural Northeast who also complained

that they did not feel that they belonged to the Brazil shown on TV Globo
(La Pastina & Straubhaar, 2014).
Upper class audiences were also less engaged with telenovela-style pro-
gramming but watched them to know what was going on in the national
discussion (Leal & Oliven, 1988). Straubhaar found similar trends in
interviewing in São Paulo and Salvador, that elites and upper-middle
classes still consumed some popular culture and news via broadcast televi-
sion (2007), but depended more on elite Brazilian media, particularly
magazines and newspapers. For television, both interviews and surveys
showed that better educated people tended to prefer foreign films and
television, usually from the US (Straubhaar, 1991).
The Structural Context for Latin American

Elite Audiences
From a historical or political economic analysis, elites and upper-middle
classes in Latin America are drawn by conditions of cultural dependency
toward a focus on imported culture. Dependency theorists argued that the
system of dependency tended to push elites toward engagement with the
educational systems and cultures of the foreign powers on which they
were dependent (Chilcote, 1974; Dos Santos, 1973, 1978).
The pattern started in the colonial era. For example, in Brazil, the
Portuguese allowed no universities or printing of books in Brazil before
1808 when the invasion of Portugal by Napoleon forced the crown and
the imperial bureaucracy to move to Brazil. Their goal had been to force
the Brazilian elite to stay immersed in Portuguese culture and dependent
on Portuguese institutions like universities and presses (Maxwell, 2004;
Paquette, 2013).
The process continued in the post-colonial era with Great Britain,
France, and the US all competing for intellectual and cultural hegemony
in Latin America. Great Britain and the US tended to move in most assert-
ively to replace the Spanish as trade and investment partners, with the US
most prominent, at least outside Argentina and Chile (O’Brien, 2007).
The US also pressed most into the areas of mass media and popular cul-
ture, through advertising, radio, and film (see above). By the twentieth
century, there was considerable competition by France and the US to
influence and guide university growth (Ben-David, 2017). While the US
was most visible, French scholars and university ties helped found some
major schools like the University of São Paulo (USP) (Dausch et al., 2016).
When Straubhaar visited the two main communication research facul-
ties, USP and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro regularly in
1977–1979 to research a dissertation on Brazilian television (1981), he
found the faculty very divided between whether they had done graduate
work in France, learned French and studied the French canon of literature,
or engaged the US equivalent (2007). Very few had done both; so there
was a sort of critical path dependency in their careers (Schreyögg & Sydow,
2010), with much of what they did depending on which post-colonial
power they had engaged through graduate study. France, Great Britain,
and the US all actively promote learning their languages and going to
study in their countries (Phillipson, 2012). From Straubhaar’s observa-
tions in Brasilia, Rio, and São Paulo, 1977–1979, all three countries com-
peted actively to attract language students, send students abroad to their
countries, and promote their national cultures in Brazil via film, music,
traveling cultural and academic events, and events at their own cultural
centers, engaging in what is often called cultural and public diplomacy to
advance their images and interests (Cull, 2008).
Through observation and interviewing in 1977–1979 in major Brazilian
cities, and again in 1989–1990, Straubhaar found that while working
poor, working class, and middle class people were primarily interested in
national television (Straubhaar, 2007), upper-middle classes and elites1
had a number of experiences that tended to maintain connections to the
kinds of dependency on foreign cultures discussed above, as well as the
acquisition of specific kinds of cultural capital that reinforced their disposi-
tion to pay more attention to foreign media like television. As Bourdieu
(1986) developed the concept of cultural capital, he linked it to certain
kinds of formative experiences and also to participation or competition in
certain kinds of fields of activity. Latin American researchers and
1
Brazilian social classes can be distinguished by educational levels, which is most relevant
to our analysis here. Class levels are established by the Brazilian national census bureau
(IBGE). Their findings as of 2016 were summarized in Nes (2016). “Classes A and B: usu-
ally composed of those who have completed higher education. The younger generation in
these classes tend to be fluent in several languages. Class C: most people in this class have
finished high school and there is also a significant quantity of people who have completed
higher education or have at least a technical level degree. Class D: people who tend not to
finish high school. Class E: people who do not attend or finish elementary school and illiter-
ate people.”
journalists often use a system of classes A–E to distinguish social classes.

Upper-middle class (often referred to as Class B) and elite families (Class
A) often engage with foreign cultures through their education, their work,
their travel, their learning of languages, and their engagement with cul-
tures and cultural products or experiences that are prestigious, which are
often those from dominant countries like France, Great Britain, and the
US (Straubhaar, 2007).
Both Class A and B are more likely to go to university (Nes, 2016), but
the elite, Class A, are more likely to go abroad for education, usually to
France, Great Britain, the US or one of the original colonial powers,
Portugal or Spain, which also actively recruit students from Latin America.
Higher education has been connected to a greater propensity to watch US
or European television in surveys (Straubhaar, 1991; Straubhaar et al.,
2016), which is explored below and in Chaps. 5 and 7. So has income, or
economic capital, and languages learned, or linguistic capital (Straubhaar
et al., 2016). What is harder to study through surveys is the disposition to
be interested in foreign culture that is passed on through family patterns,
such as what kinds of movies they watch, where they travel to, what they
talk about, what seems to have prestige within the family or among peers.
Bourdieu (1986) explored that as a push for social distinction, which we
will explore in depth in Chap. 7, as it relates to television consumption by
the upper-middle class and elite. These factors can be seen as individual
patterns of choice and agency as in research traditions like uses and grati-
fications (Rubin & Perse, 1987) or reception studies (Livingstone, 1998),
as family traditions and dispositions (Bertaux & Thompson, 1997), as
competition in structural fields like education, elite culture, and social
mobility (Bourdieu, 1986), but also in a more political economic context
as the continuation of patterns of colonial and post-colonial dependency
(dos Santos, 1973).
Impact of Transnational Pay-TV on the Increased

Availability of US TV
Although the 1990s advent of satellite and cable television devastated
incumbent, usually government-controlled, television networks in many
parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe, India, and the Arab World, the
mass turn to these new technologies came only 10–15 years later in Latin
America, in part because of the resistance of the strength of national
television shown in Chap. 3. This was in contrast to the expectations from

some dependency and imperialism writers, who expected the impact of
new foreign information technology to be much faster and much more
devastating to national media industries in Latin America (Mattelart &
Schmucler, 1985).
The first wave of US cable and satellite television in Latin America in
the 1980s was simply individuals with their own dishes, apartment build-
ings (via satellite master antenna systems), and local cable systems setting
up antennas and distribution systems to pirate US television channel sig-
nals that were on C-Band satellites whose footprints covered Mexico,
Central America, the Caribbean, and some other parts of Latin America
(Straubhaar, 1988; Straubhaar, 1990). The next wave was when transna-
tional channels, based in partnerships between US cable and satellite tele-
vision operators, began to arrive in Latin America in the 1990s (Duarte,
2001; Duarte & Straubhaar, 2004). The main services were based on
major US satellite television services, such as DirecTV, which had partner-
ships with Editora Abril (Brazil) and others, and Sky Latin America, which
partnered News Corp., Liberty Media, Televisa, and TV Globo. (This is
covered in more detail in Chap. 5).
Why Audiences Began to Choose Foreign TV

More Often
Availability alone, although necessary, does not account for audiences
choosing to access a particular type of TV programming, even when a new
technology makes it easier. Audiences engage in a series of decision-
making processes when deciding which media, and from what origin, to
spend their time with. Audiences are active in selecting what content from
what origin would best satisfy or gratify their own needs (Rubin, 1994).
Audiences spend their time and attention (and money) in hopes to gain
something back from it: entertainment, information, knowledge, relax-
ation, pleasure, escape, social status, or even greater community contact
(Severin & Tankard, 1992), to name a few.
Some of the first major in-depth studies of foreign reception of a US
global hit television series were the studies by Ang (1996) in Holland and
Liebes and Katz (1990), and collaborators in Israel, about reception by
different ethnic groups of the US drama series Dallas, which had been
exported to dozens of countries. (It had much less success in Latin America
where it seemed very much like a foreign telenovela, which wasn’t as inter-
esting as their own.) Liebes and Katz concluded that there was a strong
attraction to a series like Dallas. They thought that at one level the series
is a very “primordial tale” that asks very basic, but also mythological ques-
tions of a society, which gave it a universal potential. Reception also dif-
fered greatly among different ethnic groups like Russian versus Mid-Eastern
immigrants to Israel (Liebes and Katz 1990: 141).
The Growing Appeal in Latin America of the Big

Wave of US Programs on Pay-TV
After years of surprisingly low uptake in many countries in Latin America
(Reis, 1999), multichannel penetration received a boost in the mid-to-late
2000s, making it more possible than ever to access foreign television pro-
gramming and movies. This change toward new television technology use
in audience behavior was driven by two major changes. The first was a
wave of economic growth and expansion in the late 1990s through the
2010s that greatly increased the lower-middle class and middle class in
most countries in Latin America, as well as lifting many in several countries
into the upper-middle class. This growth in individual or family economic
capital (Bourdieu, 1986) made several kinds of new technology purchases
or subscriptions much easier to make, which resulted in a huge increase in
the number of people with pay-TV and the Internet to over half the popu-
lation in most countries, up from 20% or less in most countries, according
to the TGI data. We will examine the literature within the region on this
to put our data into perspective. That issue is treated in more depth in
Chap. 5.
Second, that same economic growth went along with a substantial
increase in education levels in many countries. If we take theoretical per-
spectives from Bourdieu (1986), we can break down social class into eco-
nomic capital, which allows new purchases of new technologies and
services, and also cultural, linguistic, and symbolic capitals, which seems to
change people’s knowledge, interests, and their abilities to enjoy new
forms of culture from outside their own national or regional cultures. We
explore those and related theories in this chapter, then apply them to
understanding the new, resulting television program preferences of Latin
American audiences with increased US content on pay-TV after 2004 in
Chap. 5, and to the new wave of streaming technologies in Chaps. 6 and 7.
What are some of the social and individual dispositions influencing

Latin American audiences in selecting an exposure to programming from
the United States and Europe? On the one hand, Bourdieu’s concepts
(1986) of cultural, economic, and linguistic capitals tap into economic or
social advantages and gains that can be perceived to be accessible through
the use of foreign cultural production, such as foreign television, as well as
the necessary social and economic conditions to access and enjoy such
programming.
The concept of cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, looks into indi-
vidual disposition internalized as a global identity, or openness to and
affinity toward cultural diversity (Türken & Rudmin, 2013), which would
then lead into an interest in TV programming from beyond the national.
Furthermore, age or generation is a major issue, too, since youth have
often been supposed to be more international or global in their interests
(Banks, 1997). Both of these concepts and audience data about them are
examined in detail in Chap. 7.
Changes in Latin American Audiences

for US Television
Increased channel availability fueled by the growth of multichannel televi-

sion penetration throughout the ten years for which we have TGI data
apparently somewhat altered the original preference for domestic pro-
gramming across the region. (For information on the TGI survey and
method, see the details in Chap. 3.) It remains high in most countries,
even increasing in some. However, there were some declines for it within
some of the eight Latin American countries that might be connected to
multichannel availability, as well as, in the case of Venezuela, political
upheaval and a radical decrease in national telenovela production, as ana-
lyzed in the previous chapter.
During this period, we see a modest increase of interest in programs
and films from the United States, with 48% of Latin Americans living in
major metropolitan areas in eight countries2 stating they were interested
or very interested in television programs and films from the United States
in 2004 while in 2014, 53% of Latin Americans expressed interest in such
2
Since the TGI sample is only of major metropolitan areas, not a genuine national sample,
we have to be very careful about generalizing to either national or regional populations as
a whole.
foreign TV programming. While this is not an extreme growth, Latin

Americans demonstrated consistent, somewhat increased interest in pro-
gramming from the USA throughout ten years of analysis, which, coupled
with further analysis presented in this chapter, leads us to believe that
interest in USA programming will continue to be a part of Latin Americans’
media menu. And, as data indicates, the gap between domestic and
U.S. foreign TV programming preference has shrunk significantly
throughout this decade of analysis. In 2014, 60% of Latin Americans dem-
onstrated interest in domestic programming, compared to 48% who
showed interest in programming from the USA (see Figs. 4.1 and 4.2).
However, although interest in domestic programming rose and fell slightly,
remaining fairly steady, interest in programming and film from the US
grew slowly but steadily from 2004 to 2014 (Fig. 4.1). In contrast, overall
interest in both other Latin American and European contents was notice-
able but limited.
Fig. 4.1 Programming preferences in Latin America by origin of programs,

2004–2014
Fig. 4.2 Interest in programs and films from the USA by country: 2004, 2007,
2008, and 2013
In 2007, as Fig. 4.2 shows, there is a slight peak of interest in program-

ming from the USA, with 53% of Latin Americans in the average of all
countries (at left) stating interest in U.S. programs, an increase from 50%
in 2004 and decreasing again to 50% in 2008, while interest grew again
slightly in the last year of our analysis, 2013. In 2007, there was also a
spike in multichannel penetration in certain Latin American countries (as
shown in Chaps. 3 and 5), specifically in Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and
Mexico. In 2014, interest in domestic programming remained at a similar
61%, while interest in programming from the USA increased to 53%.
The novelty factor of seeing cultures very different from their own, of
testing out their own interest in other cultural productions, coupled with
external factors such as advertising of specific programs are possible expla-
nations for the peak and subsequent slight decline of interest in program-
ming from the USA. That certainly seems to be the case with Brazil and
Mexico. Also of interest is the sharp decline in interest in programs and
films from the United States by Venezuela, likely fueled by political con-
flicts between the two countries, as discussed in Chap. 2, but also
potentially by a diminished perception of this foreign cultural production

in terms of cultural and social capitals (Bourdieu, 1986) (Fig. 4.3).
Interest in foreign programs and films from the USA is also interesting
because, as a foreign, non-Latin American cultural production, it manages
to have greater appeal or interest than programs and films from other
Latin American countries, which goes contrary to the prediction of
regional cultural proximity, as explained in the previous chapter. Although
U.S. TV productions are more distant, culturally (in terms of cultural
proximity explained in Chap. 3), and should receive a much larger cultural
discount (Hoskins & Mirus, 1988), they consistently receive more interest
by Latin American audiences than regional TV, which shows that audi-
ences perceive a certain value in cultural productions from U.S. program-
ming, which is not as highly perceived in other foreign productions from
Latin America or European countries.
In 2004, 26% of Latin Americans said they were interested or very
interested in European TV programs, while in 2014, 30% said they were
interested or very interested in programs from this region. Similar to
Fig. 4.3 Interest in programs and films from Europe by country: 2004, 2007,
2008, and 2013
U.S. programming, interest in European programming showed moderate

but incremental growth in the period. In 2012, we saw a second smaller
spike in multichannel penetration, mainly in Brazil and Argentina, which
might help explain the increase of interest in programs and films
from Europe.
Increased availability of foreign channels in Latin America through
increased multichannel penetration has certainly allowed more audiences
to be exposed to foreign televised cultural production, but it has not
altered (at least not yet) the general pattern of television programming
preference. Domestic programs and films are still preferred in all but one
country (Peru), although there is a moderate increase in interest in pro-
grams and films from the USA and also from Europe. What then makes
audiences show interest in U.S. programs, and why do they place more
value on U.S. programming than European programming in Latin
America?
Cultural, Economic, and Linguistic Capitals

and Viewing Preferences
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu conceptualized that the prefer-

ence toward certain cultural goods, such as television programming,
would be associated with and emphasized by cultural, social, and eco-
nomic capitals. Bourdieu defines capital as accumulated knowledge, abil-
ity, and disposition from labor within specific fields of activity, which allows
agents to gain advantage from what they have accumulated (Bourdieu,
1986). In Latin America, television has moved from the dominance of a
few national broadcast channels to a larger and fragmented universe of
competing pay-TV and Internet channels (Lotz, 2014; Sinclair &
Straubhaar, 2013). The boom of multichannel TV penetration in the
mid-2000 has increased the offering of foreign (and national) specialized
televised cultural goods to Latin Americans and, with it, different percep-
tions of what could be the social and personal gains of accessing such
goods. National audiences, then, seem to be increasingly fragmented by
cultural, economic, and linguistic capitals in the senses defined by
Bourdieu (1986).
Cultural Capital
Cultural capital is established with the understanding of its potential for
helping an individual to navigate in the dominant culture, norms, and
social language in society (Sullivan, 2001); knowing what to say, how to
say it, how to understand issues, and when to express oneself to achieve
some advantage. According to Bourdieu (1986), it can be acquired with
educational gains but also exists in an internalized state, what an individual
knows and prefers. Cultural capital is primarily learned from parents and
education, but also from peers and work (Bourdieu, 1986), and now, from
media themselves.
Cultural capital is necessary for both the understanding and enjoyment
of the culture provided by foreign television programming. In Latin
America, to choose to access news and information from a prestigious
international news organization such as CNN or BBC, for example, one
would need to have a certain level of education to understand and enjoy
the information transmitted by such organization. However, it would also
be an asset to those who perceive it as a valuable cultural good, since dis-
cussing information accessed through such organizations could provide
social prestige. These audiences have the necessary cultural preparation
and find cultural value in accessing foreign television programming that is
not found in national programming. This does not mean, however, that
accessing foreign television programming excludes accessing more proxi-
mate programming. Knowing what is said both on CNN and on the
national telenovela has social value as they show the individual to be
knowledgeable about different things. As we will define and expand upon
in Chap. 7, a cosmopolitan person, which upper-middle and elite classes
increasingly try to be, is familiar with both national and global cultures,
popular and elite cultures (Lindell & Danielsson, 2017).
Cultural capital has been measured through different variables, such as
artistic sensibilities and technical expertise (Benson, 2006) but it is often
associated and operationalized with the educational achievement of the
participant of the study or his/her parents, who also pass on cultural capi-
tal (Wilson, 2002; Bourdieu, 1986; Sullivan, 2001). This chapter mea-
sures cultural capital by highest academic degree achieved by the
respondent, categorized as lower education (complete primary education
or lower), average education (complete or incomplete secondary; com-
mercial or preparatory), and higher education (complete or incomplete
undergraduate or graduate degrees).
So the key questions are: Do Latin Americans with higher educational

achievements report greater interest in foreign media? Do we see any
changes in such patterns throughout our ten years of this analysis?
Consistently, throughout ten years of analysis, Latin Americans with
higher educational achievement, or cultural capital, show interest in pro-
grams and films from the U.S. at higher rates than do their counterparts
with lower educational achievement. In all of our years analyzed, Latin
Americans with higher educational achievements showed a significant pos-
itive association with interest in U.S. foreign television programming,
while those with lower educational achievement showed a significant neg-
ative association with interest in this TV programming origin. In 2004, as
Fig. 4.4 indicates, 54% of Latin Americans with a higher educational
achievement stated they were interested or very interested in U.S. pro-
grams, while 41% of those with a lower educational achievement indicated
such interest (the regional average was 48% for that year). This pattern
held up in every country.
Interest in U.S. TV programs and films by those with a higher educa-
tional achievement (cultural capital) increases consistently and substan-
tially throughout our decade of analysis. In 2014, 62% of those with a
higher educational achievement stated they were interested or very inter-
ested in TV programs and films from the USA. The same cannot be said
about those with a lower educational achievement. There was only a mod-
erate increase in interest in U.S. foreign TV by those of a lower
Fig. 4.4 Interest in programs and films from USA by cultural capital 2004–2014
educational achievement segment, peaking in 2010 (47%) and decreasing

consistently after that to end the decade at 42%. In 2014, however, the
regional average was at 53%, which shows us that the gap in interest in
U.S. programming widened substantially within our decade of analysis.
Educational achievement, as cultural capital, then became a strong predic-
tor for programs and films from that foreign origin (USA). Not only do
we see cultural capital continuing to impact U.S. foreign TV program-
ming, we see it play an increased influence. Those on the dominant end of
cultural capital increasingly have the cultural means to understand and
enjoy U.S. foreign TV programming, and they are progressively placing a
social value in this type of cultural production.
Cultural capital is also a predictor of interest in European programs and
films. As with the U.S. programs and films, from 2004 through 2014,
Latin Americans with higher educational achievements showed a signifi-
cant positive association with interest in European foreign television pro-
gramming, while those with lower educational achievement showed a
significant negative association with interest in this TV programming ori-
gin. However, as opposed to a widening gap by education, as seen in the
changing interest for U.S. TV programming, the gap in interest in
European TV programming decreased between those with a higher and
lower educational achievement during our decade of analysis. As Fig. 4.5
shows, in 2004, 36% of those with a higher education indicated interest in
programs from Europe, while only 19% of those with a lower education
Fig. 4.5 Interest in programs and films from Europe by cultural capital
2004–2014
indicated such interest. In 2014, 38% of those with a higher education

indicated interest in programs from Europe and 23% of those with a lower
education stated the same. In the years of 2007 and 2012, when we see
peaks of interest in European TV programs, are years when we also see
peaks of interest from respondents with an average and lower educational
achievement, while relatively stable for those with a higher educational
achievement.
While cultural capital is a predictor for both U.S. and European pro-
gramming interest, it is increasingly stronger for U.S. programs and films,
while potentially weakening in strength for European programs and films.
It is possible that the cultural production from Europe is perceived as less
socially valuable or more culturally distant for Latin Americans, at least in
terms of cultural capital. Cultural capital alone, though, does not fully
explain interest in foreign television programming.
Economic Capital
Economic capital is the “money or assets that can be turned into money”
(Benson, 2006, p. 189) necessary to access a particular cultural good, such
as television and, specifically in the case of this chapter, foreign television
programming available on subscription services. Bourdieu stated that eco-
nomic capital is at the root of other types of capital (1986), often a neces-
sary base to acquire cultural and linguistic capitals. They can, however, act
independently. Latin America is a region historically marked by income
inequalities, which would make economic capital a substantial necessary
condition to access foreign televised programming. However, in the past
couple of decades, the region has experienced substantial growth in the
economy of many of its nations, most remarkably in Brazil, Chile, and
Mexico, and, with that, changes in social class, marked mainly by increased
growth in the size of the lower-middle class and its purchasing power.
After a decade with marginal middle-class fluctuations in the 1990s,
Latin America’s middle class grew exponentially, from 100 million people
in 2000 to around 150 million by 2010 (Ferreira et al., 2012, xi). This is
a historical growth which has allowed, among other things, a whole new
segment of Latin American population to have the economic capital nec-
essary to access multichannel television, and with that, more televised cul-
tural goods, including much more international television. Although this
new-found economic capital by a large group of individuals in Latin
America did enable them to have considerable new purchasing power,
they may not have as much cultural capital or social capital as previous
middle classes (Bourdieu, 1986). That has potential conflicts between old
and new middle classes, because as Benson stated, “the social world is
structured around the opposition between two forms of power: economic
and cultural capital” (2006, p, 189).
Previous studies assessing economic capital have measured it through
income level and purchasing power (Wilson, 2002). This chapter uses an
aggregate measure to discuss income and purchasing power in relation to
SES. To control for the differing economic contexts of the eight countries
covered by this study, which varies greatly from country to country and
yearly in unstable economies. TGI Latina survey uses a definition of socio-
economic status that places respondents into one of four strata: Top 10%,
Next 20%, Next 30%, and Bottom 40. The SES is calculated based on a
score of six factors, including (1) Employment situation of head of house-
hold, (2) Business-related decision expenditures, (3) Educational achieve-
ment of head of household (two items), (4) Telephone ownership, (5)
Employment of domestic help, and (6) Household goods ownership (ten
items). Although this variable does account for income and purchasing
power, it is not an exclusive measure of income, but it stands as a proxy for
economic capital.3 Do Latin Americans with higher economic capital
report greater interest in foreign media? Do we see changes in such media
patterns throughout this decade of economic growth in Latin America?
We see that Latin Americans with higher economic capital, the top 10%
of SES, are certainly more likely to be interested in programs and films
from the U.S., as Fig. 4.6 indicates. And indeed, there is a very clear rela-
tionship between economic capital and interest in programs from this ori-
gin. In 2004, 58% of Latin Americans from the top 10% segment (the
dominant end of economic capital) said they were interested or very inter-
ested in programs and films from the U.S., a higher percentage than the
dominant end of cultural capital. For that same year, 53% of the next 20%,
3
There is a potential problem conceptually with the inter-correlation between a measure
of SES that includes education as one factor and education per se. It might have been cleaner
to simply compare income as a measure of economic capital with education as a measure of
cultural capital. However, within the TGI data we were analyzing, there was no standardiza-
tion of income across countries or over the years. In some years, the data were given in local
currencies, some of which fluctuated quickly in their dollar value. So we decided to use the
composite SES estimates as our best estimate of economic capital and simply acknowledge
the comparison of economic and cultural capitals is limited by the inter-correlation between
the two operational measures of SES and education.
Fig. 4.6 Interest in programs and films from U.S. by economic capital 2004–2014
48% of the next 30%, and 43% of the next 40% (those with the lowest
SES), indicated an interest in U.S. programming, showing a clear relation-
ship between economic capital and U.S. foreign programming interest.
Considering the economic growth in the region, which will be dis-
cussed in more detail in Chap. 5, we would expect a decrease in the dispar-
ity of interest in U.S. programming by economic capital, if increased
disposable income to finance pay-TV would be the main drive for access-
ing foreign TV programming. This is not, however, what we see. Latin
Americans from the top 10% of SES showed a consistent increase in inter-
est in programs from the U.S., from 58% of those in that SES bracket
stating interest in 2004 to 66% of those in that bracket stating interest in
2014 (regional average is 53%). In 2004, 43% of Latin Americans from the
bottom SES (lowest 40%) indicated an interest in U.S. programming, and
in 2014, 46% of those in that bracket said the same. That is a slight
increase, but much lower than the increase among the richest 10%. We do
see a similar pattern with economic capital as we do with cultural capital in
relation to U.S. programming interest, where we see a consistent and sig-
nificant difference between higher and lower economic capitals and their
preferences for U.S. television. We also see a widening gap between the
opposing ends of economic capital and U.S. TV programming interest
throughout the decade.
There is a similar relationship between European programming interest
and economic capital, as shown in Fig. 4.7. Unlike what we see with
U.S. programming interest throughout the decade, economic capital is
consistently relevant as a predictor of European programming interest,
but there is no widening of a gap among opposing ends of economic
Fig. 4.7 Interest in programs and films from Europe by economic capital
2004–2014
capital—it is consistent. For all SES brackets, there is a similar variation of

interest throughout the years. This does not seem related to the growing
lower-middle class or other economic changes discussed in Chap. 5.
Economic capital then seems to be a strong predictor for foreign pro-
gramming preference, perhaps stronger than cultural capital (in terms of
education), and we have found significant relationships throughout each
year of our analyses for the opposing ends of the economic capital spec-
trum for both U.S. and European program interest. While we see a widen-
ing gap between those at the dominant end of the economic capital and
those at the bottom in interest in U.S. programs, we see a consistent dis-
tribution of interest in European TV programming throughout our decade
of analysis.
Consistent with our cultural capital analysis, U.S. programming, in
terms of economic capital, seems to be increasing in value among the
higher economic brackets of Latin America, and at a higher rate than for
those in a lower economic bracket. Since we don’t see an increasing eco-
nomic capital gap for interest in European programming (it remains pretty
consistent throughout the decade), economic capital can be considered a
consistent predictor of interest in European programming.
Before we can reach any definitive conclusion, as we discuss accessing,
understanding, and demonstrating interest in televised programs from
other languages, there is an obvious third capital that we need to address:
linguistic capital.
Linguistic Capital
A third capital applicable in identifying audience’s preferences of television
as a cultural good is linguistic capital. According to Morrison and Lui,
“linguistic capital can be defined as fluency in, and comfort with, a high-
status, world-wide language which is used by groups who possess eco-
nomic, social, cultural and political power and status in local and global
society” (2000, p. 473). According to the authors, linguistic capital has a
concrete exchange value in markets (Morrison & Lui, 2000). Knowledge
of a high-status language, such as English in Latin America, for example,
can be seen as very useful for better work opportunities, especially in a
globalized society, but also as a sign of social “distinction” (Niño–Murcia,
2003). In Latin America, since colonial times, language has played a major
role in identifying and reinforcing social stratification (Niño–Murcia,
2003), and currently, in addition to knowledge of “proper” national lan-
guages, English is perceived as the strongest linguistic currency. It is rele-
vant then to speak of the importance of linguistic capital in Latin America.
The “disposition about language acquired in the course of learning to
speak in particular context,” or linguistic habitus (Chávez, 2014, p. 28) is
a form of linguistic capital which can be used as an advantage in social and
market contexts. Being part of a contextual speech community, or know-
ing foreign languages well enough to understand the cultural norms trans-
mitted through it, gives individuals greater access to other cultures. A
linguistic habitus acquired through learning and exposure to a foreign
language, such as English for many Latin Americans, may enable compre-
hension, interest, and a disposition toward foreign cultural goods, such as
foreign television, which can then translate into a linguistic capital. And,
linguistic capital can serve as a base to cultural and economic capitals; it is
“both the medium and outcome of the pursuit of enhanced life chances”
(Morrison & Lui, 2000, p. 473). Within the context of this study, lan-
guage can serve as both enabler of foreign television content consumption
and barrier to its access. As such, linguistic capital can be understood in
connection with cultural and economic capitals but can act independently
as well.
In terms of foreign television programming, knowing the language of
televised transmission would allow audiences to understand the content in
ways not possible without that, so it is in some cases a necessary condition
for the understanding and enjoyment of such content. But audiences can
also have a constant informal education about languages through media,
with current vocabularies and idiomatic expressions. So, while learned cul-
tural capital helps people choose and enjoy more difficult imported con-
tent on television, watching that content also further adds to their cultural
and linguistic capitals, as well as their symbolic capital, or prestige
(Bourdieu, 1979).
This study utilizes the linguistic habitus (a set of learned habits and
dispositions, Bourdieu, 1986) of learning English, combining several dif-
ferent measures of where respondents have learned English into an English
Learned variable. Do Latin Americans with an English linguistic habitus
or capital report higher interest in foreign media? Has this changed
throughout our ten-year analysis?
Learning English is a strong predictor of interest in programs and films
from the U.S. Linguistic capital, as with cultural and economic capitals,
seems to be stronger as a predictor of interest in U.S. programs with time,
as the graph shows. While the average Latin American interest in U.S. pro-
grams increased moderately throughout the decade of analysis, for those
who learned English, the growth is more substantial, especially after 2011,
when the gap starts to widen more substantially. In 2010, 64% of Latin
Americans who learned English said they were interested in programs and
films from the USA, while 53% of all Latin Americans surveyed stated the
same. In 2011, 67% of Latin Americans who learned English demon-
strated interest in U.S. programming while 52% of the general survey
population said the same. This pattern continues until our last year, 2014,
where we see an increase of interest by those who have learned English
and a stable pattern by the whole Latin American population. It seems
that a good part of the increase in interest in U.S. programming can be
explained by examining those who have learned English. Of course, in
Latin America, learning English goes along with other aspects of class
status, either having or wanting increased economic, cultural, and sym-
bolic capitals (Fig. 4.8).
The linguistic habitus of having learned English is also associated with
interest in European TV programs and films. Certainly, only a segment of
European programs are transmitted in English, and there might be other
languages, which might be more useful for the best comprehension of
programs from other countries. But the proposition here is that learning a
high-status language, English in this case, is associated with increased
interest in foreign cultural goods, as it would have increased perceived
value. And this seems to be the case. Latin Americans who have learned
English are consistently more likely to express interest in programs and
Fig. 4.8 Interest in foreign programs and films by linguistic capital 2004–2014
films from Europe than the whole population for this study. In other
words, linguistic capital is also a good predictor for interest in European
programming. However, as opposed to interest in programs from the
USA, we don’t see a spike in 2011 even though there is moderate growth.
And, therefore, we don’t see a widening of a gap, but rather a stable dis-
tance between those who have learned English and the general survey
population. In 2004, 26% of all Latin Americans surveyed expressed inter-
est in programs from Europe, and 35% of those who learned English said
the same. In 2014, 30% of all Latin Americans surveyed expressed interest
in programs from Europe, and 40% of those who learned English said
the same.
Certainly, not all of the eight Latin American countries behave the
same. In 2004, there was a wider gap between linguistic capital and inter-
est in programs and films from the U.S. in Brazil and Peru, followed by
Mexico and Argentina. The smallest gap, or countries where linguistic
capital is a weaker predictor of interest in U.S. programming, is seen in
Chile and Venezuela, as Fig. 4.9 shows. By 2007, Brazil was one of the
countries with the widest gaps between those who have learned English
and the general country population, while Peru had closed its gap
Fig. 4.9 Interest in U.S. programs and films by linguistic capital by countries
2004. (Source: TGI Latina)
somewhat. Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina seemed to have an increased

gap between those who have learned English and their general population
in 2007.
By 2014, most of the Latin American countries, with the exception of
Chile and Venezuela, have a substantial gap between those who have
learned English and their general population in interest in programs and
films from the USA. So, not only is linguistic capital a strong predictor of
interest in foreign programs and films, but is increasingly so in Latin
America and this phenomenon is widely distributed among six out of the
eight Latin American countries surveyed here. The general interest in
U.S. programming of those with a linguistic habitus acquired through
learning English in different venues and forms is comparable to the impact
on preferences from having the cultural capital associated with a graduate
degree. So, in general, linguistic capital is even more related to interest in
U.S. TV programming than is general cultural capital. That fits with a
number of studies over the years that have shown a strong relationship
between language abilities/preferences and program preferences
(Waisbord, 2004; Wildman & Siwek, 1988).
Age
As many market studies have shown, age is a strong predictor for television
program preference. Furthermore, since the global spread of MTV in the
1990s, scholars have hypothesized that there is a reciprocal relationship
between youth interest in foreign programs and music: that they are drawn
to it more than adults are, and that they are then further globalized by
their exposure to it (Banks, 1997). So we anticipate that age is related to
preferences for program origin, particularly in terms of Latin Americans’
interest in programs and films from the USA and from Europe.
Indeed, we find that there is a significant association between age and
foreign program interest in each of the years analyzed, and for both pro-
grams from USA and from Europe, with younger audiences showing a
positive association with these interests and older audiences showing a
negative association with these interests. So, to some degree, watching
films and programs from the USA and Europe has been and continues to
be largely a youth phenomenon. That fits well with ideas of younger gen-
erations being more open to foreign cultures and more ingrained in global
connections (Mirrlees, 2013).
In 2004, 54% of younger audiences (under 24) stated interest in
U.S. programs and films, followed by 48% of a more middle age range
(25–49) and 36% of the older audiences (50 plus). These distances
remained pretty steady throughout the longitudinal analysis, but interest
in U.S. programs slowly grew among all three age groups. By 2014, 60%
of younger audiences stated interest in U.S. programs and films, followed
by 53% of the middle age range and 43% of the older audiences. While age
is a significant factor in interest in foreign programs, and certainly in inter-
est in programs from the USA, cultural, economic, and linguistic capitals
all seem to gain strength throughout the decade of analysis, while age does
not. While in 2004, age would be just as strong as a predictor to interest
in U.S. programming than the capitals, by 2014 it is a weaker predictor
than the capitals.
A more nuanced overall argument about the impact of age might be
that while youth were typically much more interested in U.S. program-
ming in the 2000s, other age groups have gradually become more inter-
ested, diminishing the impact of age difference. That could be an argument
against the sometimes too blunt statement that youth are inherently more
U.S.-focused in their media choices than older groups. But one could also
postulate that the youth remains early adopters of everything
new—including the foreign programming brought by the introduction

and expansion of pay-TV—and that their extraordinary interest became
dissipated among the general population as it caught up to them over the
years (Fig. 4.10).
Conclusion: Predicting Foreign

Television Preferences
Companies trying to reach Latin American TV audiences have to consider
the several reasons why some audiences might prefer foreign material on
television, beyond Latin America, despite the continuing pull of cultural
proximity demonstrated in Chap. 3. First, the economic capital or overall
SES status of more elite Latin American audiences gives them greater
income to provide more access, opportunities for travel, education, lan-
guage study, and so on, which enables them to both access pay-TV, where
more U.S. and European television programming is to be found, and to
be able to afford the travel, education, and so on that lets them enjoy and
understand it. Second, and in direct connection to it, their education in
specific provides cultural capital, which might enable them to better
understand and enjoy programming from beyond Latin America. Third,
also closely related, their linguistic capital, operationalized here as under-
standing of English, also enables those with fairly advanced ability, or capi-
tal, to enjoy programming from beyond Latin America.
The capitals had previously been theorized by some (Straubhaar, 2003)
as qualities that might enable, or even lead, audiences to choose television
programming that comes farther away from their own local or national
cultural experience. Other earlier work, particularly on the rise of MTV,
had also hypothesized that young people, overall, might have become
more globalized by their experience, acquiring a kind of generation-based
capital, that might make them more inclined to want to watch television
from beyond Latin America. We found some evidence of that in the early
2000s but found that the connection between youth and more globalized
television tastes declined over time in ways that the capitals (economic,
cultural, linguistic) did not.
Another strong connection for explaining preferences for U.S. and
European programming is cosmopolitanism. As operationalized in TGI
questionnaires, we found that those who were deemed more cosmopoli-
tan did in fact prefer U.S. and European programming much more than
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
45%
50%
55%
60%
65%
70%
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
45%
50%
55%
60%
65%
70%
24 and younger 24 and younger
25-49 25-49
Fig. 4.10
2004
2004
50 and older 50 and older
those places.
25-49 25-49
2005
2005
25-49 25-49
2006
2006
25-49 25-49
2007
2007
25-49 25-49
2008
2008
24 and younger
24 and younger
25-49
2009
25-49
2009
50 and older
50 and older
24 and younger
24 and younger
25-49
2010
25-49
2010
50 and older
24 and younger 50 and older
25-49 24 and younger
2011
25-49
2011
50 and older
24 and younger
Interest in programing from USA by age
25-49
2012
Interest in programing from Europe by age
50 and older 25-49

2012
Interest in U.S. programs and films by age: 2004–2014

2013
50 and older 25-49
2013
24 and younger
4 THE PERSISTENCE OF THE POPULARITY OF US TELEVISION
50 and older
2014
50 and older 25-49
2014
50 and older
ones. They were cultural omnivores, and they liked programs from all
117
liked non-regional television programs more than national or regional

did non-cosmopolitans. However, we did not find that cosmopolitans
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CHAPTER 5
Changing Class Formations and Changing

Television Viewing: The New Middle Class,
Television and Pay Television in Eight Latin
American Countries 2004–2020
This chapter explores how rapidly changing social class structures in Latin
America in the last couple of decades have impacted television viewing. As
pointed in a recent journal article by Castro, Duarte, & Straubhaar (2019,
p. 120):
Latin America has historically presented one of the most volatile economies
in the world. Between 1970 and 1998, the region underwent an economic
crisis every two years leading Latin Americans to get used to understanding
“crises as a routine” (Becerra & Mastrini, 2010). However, between 2004
and 2013 the region experienced unprecedented growth that benefited
people from the lower socioeconomic strata significantly more than in previ-
ous periods. From 2005 to 2012, public spending on social policies increased
at double the rate of economic growth in the region and the percent of
people living in poverty dropped from 34 to 21 percent. As a result, one-
third of Latin Americans joined the middle class (in 1990, that figure was 17
percent) and, for the first time, this middle class outnumbered those living
in poverty.
The economic bonanza allowed for more people to join in the con-
sumption of paid media entertainment, as demonstrated by the significant

Switzerland AG 2021
growth of pay-TV subscribers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia,

Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela in the 2000s and 2010s. The eco-
nomic crisis of 2014 in Brazil and similar crises in other countries have
since reduced the number of people who were able to keep paying for pay-
TV, but research has shown that people try to hang on to pay-TV even
when the economy declines and it becomes harder for them to pay for it
(Castro-Mariño et al., 2019).
This is significant because cable television growth in some parts of Latin
America, especially Brazil, had trailed behind many countries of the world
(Reis, 1999), where cable and satellite television grew explosively in the
1990s (Balio, 1998). Beyond the business and political barriers to entry in
Brazil (Duarte, 1996), it had been theorized as being due to the fact that
Latin America was already covered by well-resourced commercial televi-
sion stations, which provided a great deal of entertainment that was closely
tuned to national interests, gaining significant advantage from cultural
proximity (Straubhaar, 1991). Along the same theoretical framework, can
we say that more Latin Americans are turning to pay-TV largely because
of increased affluence that permits them to afford it? Is it more due to
increased education that gives them the cultural capital that might lead
them to be more interested in the largely imported programming it brings
in? Another explanation is that pay-TV is an icon of social status that is
coveted regardless of one’s ability to pay or appreciate it, which is what
was discovered in an early study of the Dominican Republic (Straubhaar &
Viscasillas, 1990).
This chapter uses TGI’s 2004–2014 market data to conduct a deeper
investigation of social stratification and media use in major Latin American
metropolitan areas. By adopting data from a syndicated survey, this analy-
sis relies on existing tools used in the TV business to examine the role of
class in multichannel TV adoption. Several other sources will be used to
update trends from 2015 to 2020.
Social Class and Television in Latin America

Social class has long been considered crucial to what happens with televi-
sion viewing in Latin America. For a long time, it seemed that most people
in the majority of Latin American countries, regardless of social class, were
happy to tune in to one or two dominant broadcast television networks
that monopolized viewing across social classes from the 1960s through
the 1980s (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). In a couple of countries,
Argentina and Colombia, cable and satellite TV use was notably higher
5 CHANGING CLASS FORMATIONS AND CHANGING TELEVISION VIEWING… 125
due to government controls over broadcasting (see Chap. 2). It was only
in the 1990s that this trend began to change.
In Brazil, for example, although TV Globo continued to dominate rat-
ings, often still getting audience shares above 50%, SBT and TV Record
began to make inroads in the audience by targeting the lower-middle class
and working class, whose tastes had not been fulfilled by TV Globo (Borelli
& Priolli, 2000). Both these networks showed that there was potential for
segmented television in this Latin American country, particularly if the
segmentation of the audience was focused on social class. In Mexico, both
commercial broadcasters with national coverage–Televisa and Televisión
Azteca–have largely stuck to the “populist”1 entertainment formula per-
fected by the former during its years as the sole television company in the
country. The entry of TV Azteca in 1993, however, brought with it some
limited attempts at differentiated targeting. During its first decade, Azteca
based its domestic fiction offering on telenovelas produced by the produc-
tion company Argos with very different plots, such as portrayals of politi-
cal corruption, antihero protagonists, and comparatively liberal portrayals
of gender relations (Pérez, 2005). Some evidence suggests that these fea-
tures are more appealing to more educated viewers (Pérez, 2005), which
in Mexico cluster in the upper socioeconomic strata. As of 2014, Argos
productions were presented in Cadenatres, a Mexico city-based broadcast
television channel that targeted middle and upper-middle-class audiences
(Lopes & Gómez, 2015).2 On the other end of the spectrum, Colombia
and Argentina had different broadcast industries that prompted audiences
to seek pay-TV alternatives earlier. During the strong economic growth of
the 2001–2011 period, the size of the middle and upper-middle classes
almost doubled, as can be seen in the following table from Pew, based on
World Bank data. Colombia was slow to allow the development of nation-
wide commercial television networks in the 1990s, which probably
encouraged audiences to acquire pay-TV to get more diversity and more
entertainment programming, in particular (Table 5.1).
Argentina presented a somewhat similar situation, as cable TV had a
heavy penetration into the mass audience ever since the 1970s, due to
1
A famous quote attributed to Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, CEO of Televisa from 1973 until
his death in 1997, was that the company made television for the “popular” and “modest”
middle class (trans. “clase media popular”), which he contrasted to the “exquisite” class (“la
clase exquisita”) (Paxman & Fernández, 2013).
2
Cadenatres was shut down on October 26, 2015, to allow Grupo Imagen, the commu-
nications subsidiary of GEA, to focus on building the Imagen Televisión national network,
which launched on October 17, 2016.
126
Table 5.1 Pew income distribution 2001 vs. 2011

2001 2011
J. STRAUBHAAR ET AL.
Pop (Millions) Poor Low Middle Upper Middle High Pop (Millions) Poor Low Middle Upper Middle High
Argentina 37.3 20.9 56.5 15 6.6 1 40.7 2.7 3.7 32.5 23.5 4.3
Brazil 177 16 52.2 17.5 10.6 3.7 196.9 7.3 43.6 27.8 15.9 5.4
Chile 15.6 3.5 51.2 25.3 14.6 5.4 17.3 1.6 33.4 33.8 23 8.2
Colombia 40.6 23.8 58.6 11.2 5 1.5 47.1 10.4 54.9 20.7 10.8 3.2
Ecuador 12.8 29.1 58.9 7.7 3.3 1 15.2 7.4 60.1 21.1 9.6 1.8
Mexico 105.3 12.5 63.3 16.9 6.2 1.2 119.4 3.1 59.1 25.7 10.2 1.9
Peru 26.4 20.5 59 14 5.3 1.2 29.6 8.1 54.5 24.8 10.7 1.8
Venezuela 24.9 9.8 60.9 20.2 8 1.1 29.5 5.9 49.4 29.5 13.4 1.9
Note: The poor live on $2 or less daily, low income on $2.01–10, middle income on $10.01–20, upper-middle on $20.01–50, and high income on more
than $50; figures expressed in 2011 purchasing power parities in 2011 prices. * indicates that the share is less than 0.05%. Population estimates are midyear
figures. Source: Pew Research Center (2014)
interference in broadcast television and network development by Peronist

and military governments that took over broadcast stations, managed
them badly, and set the stage for cable to emerge as a strong alternative for
local television production. The economic boom of the turn of the twen-
tieth century also helped move many Argentines into the middle and
upper-middle classes, which helps explain why Argentina and Colombia
remained the countries with the greatest pay-TV penetration.
Elite Desires for Diversity on TV

There is some evidence that audiences from higher income levels and/or
with greater levels of educational achievement do not feel identified with
TV aimed at a general market. At least in Mexico, individuals with lower
socioeconomic status evaluate over-the-air television channels more favor-
ably than those from higher SES, and Brazilian ratings find the same pat-
tern (Straubhaar, 2007). Similarly, qualitative findings from a study of
college students in Colombia found that some of them perceived broad-
cast television contents—reality shows, telenovelas, gossip programs—
were aimed at people of lower SES (Arango-Forero & González-Bernal,
2009). Initially, the elites resorted to public broadcasting to find more
upscale television content. Public broadcasting has historically leaned
toward educational and “highbrow” cultural programming for its enter-
tainment offerings, with a deliberate exclusion of popular television shows,
often carried by the dominant commercial networks (Fuenzalida, 2001).
However, the reach of public TV in most countries—with the exception of
Chile—has historically been very limited in comparison with that of pri-
vate broadcasters, and the educational functions have in some degree been
co-opted by specialized cable networks, such as the Discovery Channel
and its subsidiaries, as well as the international channels from European
state-run media.
As in much of the rest of the world, global television networks and
operators in Latin America took advantage of satellite delivery technology,
both through direct-to-home and through cable TV systems, to deliver
new options to these elite audiences. Upon its introduction in the late
twentieth century, subscription-based television in Latin America was for
the most part an expensive and limited service. Initially, its main purpose
was utilitarian: in Mexico, the first cable operations brought English-
language programming to Americans living just south of the border
(Crovi, 1996). In Brazil, the first pay-TV service, Editora Abril’s TVA,
targeted a similar population of immigrants from Italy, Germany, and else-

where by including foreign channels in their original languages. In the
large countries, such as Brazil and Argentina, some of the first paid TV
services simply carried programming from major production centers to
remote areas, where broadcasting was made difficult by the countries’
topography or the communications policies (Possebon, 2009; Becerra &
Mastrini, 2014).
Due to the nature of cable television pricing—with single companies
taking over local markets—and the generally unstable economic perfor-
mance of most Latin American countries, the cost of cable TV packages
was for the most part out of the reach of a big portion of Latin American
households, with only those in the top socioeconomic tiers being custom-
ers of the service. This largely prevented the development of a true multi-
channel television industry until around the mid-1990s (Duarte, 2001),
when a confluence of economic, technological and policy variables trig-
gered a boom in pay-TV demand, and in turn, of foreign investment in
the nascent field.
In more recent years, the expansion of multichannel TV demand
attracted the attention of domestic and foreign media companies, increas-
ing the competitiveness of the field. In the largest markets, emerging
regional players such as América Móvil and the Spanish telecom Telefónica
have challenged the broadcasting giants—Globo, Televisa, and Grupo
Clarín—buying cable and other telecommunications providers, or by
establishing alliances with new foreign entrants, like Dish. At least in
Mexico, the increased competition has led to the launch of budget-priced
basic packages (Gómez & Sosa, 2010).
Beyond the Elite Audience on Pay-TV

There was a tipping point in several countries where the content of pay-
TV became more accessible in many ways to audiences beyond the elites.
First, once the infrastructure was built and expanded, operators could
deliver cheaper versions of their services. Second, networks invested in
subtitling and especially dubbing more content, making it accessible to
those without foreign language skills (Duarte, 1996). Third, more local-
ized productions started to take over the schedule as several of the major
domestic media companies began to create their own pay-TV channels,
recognizing that increasingly mass audiences were now demanding
national programming on pay-TV, which these companies were well
positioned to supply. Some countries also began to require international

pay-TV channels to carry a minimum of nationally produced program-
ming, further boosting the domestic producers. In 2011, the Brazilian
government passed the SeAC Law (Law no. 12,485/2011), regulating
paid television (including cable, DTH, MMDS, etc). The SeAC Law
imposed quotas for Brazilian content to TV programmers and increased
the amount of the Contribution for the Development of the Film Industry
(CONDECINE) tax, artificially growing the demand for Brazilian films
and TV programs. More than $600 million Brazilian reais were made
available to independent producers in 2012. In theoretical terms, pay-TV
began to serve an audience demand and, in some cases, policy require-
ments for cultural proximity. This moved pay-TV beyond just supplying
the kinds of drama, comedy, news, movies, music, and documentaries
from the US, and other Anglophone countries, Europe, and East Asia that
appealed mostly to the cultural elites.
TV Globo expanded into pay-TV early, in 1991 with Globosat, a
C-band satellite pay-TV service with its own set of channels. It expanded
gradually with four channels in 1996, devoted to movies, news, shows,
and sports. The bungled start with the antiquated C-band technology did
not keep Globo from eventually controlling the market, investing heavily
to build the largest multichannel cable operator in the country—NET
Brasil—and hedging its bet by joining the direct-broadcast satellite (DBS)
consortium SKY Latin America, backed by Murdoch’s News Corp.,
Televisa (Mexico), and Liberty Media (US pay-TV group) to offer both
national and international channels to Latin America via direct-to-home
satellite service under the SKY Brasil banner (Duarte, 2001).
Despite having pioneered pay-TV in Brazil and built a cable operation
initially larger than Globo’s, the competing local media conglomerate
Editora Abril that brought well-known cable networks like MTV and
ESPN to Brazil eventually succumbed to the competition and withdrew
from electronic media altogether. In Mexico, Televisa started an early
dominant operation in cable TV, consolidating it by acquiring or allying
with other regional operators. It also started SKY México (Straubhaar
et al., 2016). In the last ten years, Televisa has consolidated its control of
the Mexican pay-TV field by acquiring several of the largest regional cable
companies and establishing informal alliances with the largest remaining
independent cable operator Megacable (Harrison, 2013). At the same
time, the company continues to be the main owner of SKY México, which
operated as the only DTH TV service in the country for four years after
Murdoch acquired DIRECTV in 2004 (Gómez & Sosa, 2010).3
The Growth of the Middle Class in Latin America

The growth of the middle classes in Latin America at the turn of the cen-
tury garnered considerable global attention. A World Bank report indi-
cated in 2013 that members of what it considered middle classes
outnumbered the poor for the first time in Latin America and the
Caribbean (Ferreira et al., 2012). Economic mobility in the region
improved greatly as formerly impoverished members of society increas-
ingly found stable income in the formal employment sector.
Defining precisely who belongs to the middle class can be a compli-
cated prospect, particularly in a context of accelerated change. The World
Bank defined middle classes in Latin America as persons with a per-capita
daily income of $10–$50 purchasing power parity, which López-Calva and
Ortiz-Juarez (2014) estimated enough to stabilize households to keep
them from slipping into poverty. After a decade with marginal middle-
class fluctuations in the 1990s, Latin America’s middle class grew substan-
tially, from 100 million people in 2000 to around 150 million by 2010
(Ferreira et al., 2012, p. xi). Among individual Latin American countries,
the middle classes in Argentina, Chile, and Peru saw a substantial increase
of more than 10 percentage points in that time frame, although the nature
of the increase might differ. The biggest increase was seen in Brazil, whose
middle-class growth accounted for more than 40% of the increase in Latin
America (Ferreira et al., 2012, p. 139). Other countries in the region,
such as Uruguay, actually saw a decrease in that timeframe. Between 1995
and 2012, extreme poverty in Latin America was cut in half (Ferreira et al.,
2012, p. 19). Also, according to the World Bank, real incomes grew more
than 25% between 2001 and 2011 with GDP growing steadily in those
years, with a minor dip in 2009 and regaining its strength in the follow-
ing years.
3
In 2008, a joint venture of the American companies Dish and Echostar with the Mexican
Grupo MVS launched Dish Mexico, which broke Sky’s monopoly over the direct-to-home
market in Mexico. The service, which targeted lower-income consumers with budget-priced
basic packages, reached more than half a million subscribers by mid-2009 and triggered a
reduction of prices on the part of the Televisa-owned CATV operators.
One problem with generalizing about the region as a whole is that eco-
nomic growth per country and the impact that has on social classes within
countries have been very uneven. If we look at the development of classes
across countries from 2004 to 2014, the share of different countries in
upper versus lower classes is very different. Since each country maintains
prosaic politically influenced definitions of social class, the multinational
research company Kantar has developed its own definitions for its TGI
Latina syndicated service. It defines the top 10% (elite) in SES terms versus
the next 20% (upper-middle class), the next 30% (lower-middle class), and
the lowest 40% (working class, working poor, and poor) (Wicken, 2006).
For example, in Fig. 5.1, we can see how much of the upper-middle class
(next 20% after the top 10% or elite) in the whole sample is located in each
country. One line shows the average (20%) across all eight countries.
Comparing each country to that line shows how much the country is
higher or lower than the regional average. The regional upper-middle class
is more highly concentrated in Chile and Brazil than in Peru and Venezuela.
We need to remember, however, that the TGI sample does NOT represent
Fig. 5.1 Percentage-specific countries have of the total members of the upper-
middle class (next 20%) in the eight country sample
all people in those nations, but major metropolitan areas that hold most of
the population, but also over-represent those who are most affluent and
best educated.
The rising economic status of the new lower-middle class enabled them
to have considerable new purchasing power, but they lacked in education,
cultural capital, or social capital in comparison to long-standing middle
classes (Bourdieu, 1986). As shown in Fig. 5.2 below, education levels are
significantly higher among the elite and upper-middle class than among
the lower-middle class.
This trend held true even though education levels and, to a large
degree, incomes, among the working poor, working class, and new middle
class were rising, thanks to programs like the Brazilian Bolsa Escolar (school
scholarship), the Mexican Progresa/Oportunidades (progress/opportuni-
ties), as well as a similar, highly effective program in Chile, which paid
poor parents to keep their children in school rather than having them
work to help support their families (Soares et al., 2007). Along with the
economic downturn, educational programs have also been slashed in the
70.0%
60.0%
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Top 10% Next 20% Next 30% Next 40%
Fig. 5.2 Higher education for different social levels in Latin America
last few years. The Brazilian program, for instance, has been considerably
scaled back under the Bolsonaro government, from 2018 on (Eiró, 2019).
The Role of the Lower-Middle Class

Much of the discussion regarding current developments in both television
and digital media in Latin America revolves around the emergence of the
new lower-middle class though, which had been estimated at over 40 mil-
lion people in Brazil (Zizola, 2014), and about 22.5 million in Mexico4
(Fig. 5.3).
However, any forecasts based on the consumption patterns of the
group defined as middle-income should be taken with caution. As the
World Bank correctly predicted, the poorest, least educated, and least well
connected of the new lower-middle class had a somewhat tenuous grip on
Fig. 5.3 Percentage-specific countries have of the total members of the lower-
middle class (next 30%) in the country sample
4
This number is based on the 20% estimation proposed by the Mexican Secretariat of
Economy in the text of the National Program for the Protection of Consumer Rights (Diario
Oficial de la Federación 2014).
Table 5.2 Latin America GDP declines in the second half of last decade (annual
variation in %)
Country 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
Argentina 2.7 −2.1 2.7 −2.5 −2.2

Brazil −3.5 −3.3 1.3 1.3 1.1
Chile 2.3 1.7 1.2 3.9 1.1
Colombia 3.0 2.1 1.4 2.5 3.3
Mexico 3.3 2.6 2.1 2.2 −0.3
Source: FocusEconomics (2020). Economic Growth (GDP, annual variation in %). Retrieved October 18,
2020, from https://www.focus-economics.com/economic-indicator/gdp
their middle-class status, and many slipped back into poverty more easily
than better-established parts of the middle class during the recessions that
faced several countries after 2014. The stagnant or decreasing GDP of the
last five years (see Table 5.2) has indeed abbreviated a considerable part of
the social mobility gains of the previous decade in several countries and,
with it, the levels of consumption of many items, including media, such
as Pay-TV.
This has happened more acutely in Brazil and some other countries. In
Brazil, pay-TV declined about 3% per year since its high point in 2014,
due to “the competition from OTT services and the current decline in the
purchasing power of the population” (de Lopes & Lemos, 2019).
Breaking Down Class with Bourdieu’s Capitals

to Predict Multichannel Growth
Bourdieu’s account of class using the concepts of disposition, habitus, and

multiple forms of capital, including cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984;
Bourdieu et al., 1977; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Calhoun et al., 1993)
may provide greater insight into the varying degrees of adoption of multi-
channel television for information and entertainment among each social
segment of Latin American society. Greater spending power, or economic
capital (Bourdieu, 1984) does permit greater numbers to afford television
sets, better sets, access to pay-TV services, or increasingly, access to stream-
ing TV. But greater spending power may also lead to more positive dispo-
sition toward consumption of entertainment and information value of
television, as well as the symbolic capital that television ownership pro-
vides. According to Bourdieu (1986), symbolic capital results from the
possession of desirable goods, acquired characteristics (like education) or

qualities that are considered desirable or positive by society, that give
increased status. The possession of a television, or cable television (or now
streaming TV, as we will note in Chap. 6), is a status marker in these soci-
eties, signaling class mobility for newly stable households.
Cultural capital is directly linked to education. Cultural capital can be
learned from parents, from peers, from work, but tends to be heavily
linked to things learned in formal or informal education (Bourdieu, 1984).
Because of the role that education plays in producing and reproducing
class status and tastes, this chapter will also investigate the potential role of
education in enticing people to subscribe to multichannel TV services.
Previous surveys and in-depth interviewing show that higher levels of edu-
cation tend to give people more understanding of foreign cultures and
languages, which tends to let them appreciate more the elements of for-
eign cultures (see Chap. 4 for more detail).
Straubhaar’s (1991) study of Brazil and the Dominican Republic
included two surveys that showed that upper-class people, particularly as
defined by education rather than just income, were more likely to prefer
foreign television programs than were people of the middle, lower-middle,
and working classes. Subsequent in-depth interviewing suggested that the
critical formative elements of cultural capital that might lead viewers to
prefer foreign programs or channels are included not only in education,
per se; but also learning another language, particularly English; travel and
study abroad; and working with people from other countries (Straubhaar,
2007). For this analysis, we will use education, a variable strongly related
to all these things, as a good indicator of cultural capital. We shall thus
review the impact of education on national versus international viewing
preferences and, by consequence, on the related decision to pay for multi-
channel television, which in Latin America, has been largely dominated by
imported channels.
Based on the previous review of the theory, we would expect to find
that use of multichannel or pay-TV began to grow more rapidly in the late
2000s or early 2010s as incomes grew in Latin America. This is because
incomes grew more rapidly starting in the late 2000s and a certain level of
disposable income or economic capital is required to let people in devel-
oping countries consider the extra cost of pay-TV. This chapter will assess
if indeed income is related to multichannel penetration in Latin America.
However, we expect to find that the growth in usage of multichannel
pay-TV in Latin America is even more closely connected to education than
to income. This is because cultural capital is even more important to a

preference for multichannel than is economic capital, per se, as cultural
capital is linked to the preference for more outside or imported culture via
television. Thus, this chapter will also assess the relationship between edu-
cation and multichannel penetration in Latin America.
If we break down the association between income and education to
pay-TV adoption to see what reasons people give for such an expenditure,
then we would expect to see some reasons more associated with income
and others more associated with education. For example, we might expect
income to be more associated with wanting “to be up to date with the
latest technology,” since having the economic wherewithal to pay for new
technology is a clearer requirement than higher education. Likewise, we
would expect “to have better reception” to be more associated with lower-
income respondents, especially among the poorest, since broadcast recep-
tion on the peripheries of large metropolitan areas—where the poor
lives—has been spotty, previously leading some to get large, old-fashioned
C-band satellite antennas simply to get signals for national networks
(Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). In other words, these pay-TV buyers are
still focused on national programming and simply using the service to gain
better quality signals.
More central to our concerns about cultural capital and economic capi-
tal, we would expect education to be somewhat more associated than
income with both the desire “to have more television channels” and “to
receive entertainment and information from other places.” Theoretically,
in terms of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984) and cultural proximity
(Straubhaar, 1991, 2007), education (representing cultural capital) should
be more associated with a preference for more non-broadcast channels,
especially more foreign channels, than income.
Methodology
For the purposes of this analysis, three variables were adapted from the
TGI Latina data set, as previously procured from Kantar Media.5
5
Kantar Media was a partner in the publication of a 2015 compendium report entitled
“The Evolution of Television: An Analysis of 10 years of TGI Latin America” (Straubhaar
et al., 2015). Much of the TGI Latina data set referenced in this book was originally config-
ured for that publication.
Multichannel penetration. Respondents were asked whether they had

access to cable, satellite, and/or microwave (MMDS) television services.
For this study, usage of any of the three services was counted for an esti-
mate of Multichannel TV penetration.
Income/Socioeconomic status. As noted before, the TGI Latina survey
has established a comparable regional definition of socioeconomic status
that places respondents into one of four strata: Top 10%, Next 20%, Next
30%, and Bottom 40%. The approach aims to overcome national idiosyn-
crasies by assigning respondents a score based on six factors, including (1)
Employment situation of head of household, (2) Business-related decision
expenditures, (3) Educational achievement of the head of household (two
items), (4) Telephone ownership, (5) Employment of domestic help, and
(6) Household goods ownership (ten items) (Wicken, 2006).While this
composite measure does not allow for the identification of precise cutoff
points for lower-middle and middle classes in Latin America, for the pur-
poses of this analysis the two lowest SES groups—the Next 30% and
Bottom 40%—will be used as proxies for the lower, lower-middle, and
middle-income groups, representing 70% of the population.
Education. Respondents were classified in one of five categories of edu-
cational achievement depending on the last level of education reached or
currently being pursued: Primary (equivalent to elementary); Secondary
(equivalent to U.S. middle school, 7–9th years); Tertiary (equivalent to
high school, as well as commercial/technical training); University; and
Postgraduate.
Findings: Income and Multichannel Penetration

We analyzed whether the pay-TV penetration rates in the eight Latin
American countries studied accelerated their growth in the second half of
the period spanning 2004 through 2014, a decade identified by econo-
mists as an era of expansion for the middle and lower-middle socioeco-
nomic strata in Latin America. According to time series data for all
countries, that appears to be the case, although the intensity of this expan-
sion was more acute in certain countries. Overall, it is clear that the num-
ber of broadcast-television only homes, without multichannel or
non-pay-TV penetration, in the eight countries studied went strongly and
quickly down, from over 70% of homes without multichannel, to just over
50%. Conversely, use of both satellite and cable-based multichannel televi-
sion went up, as is clear in Fig. 5.4. After slow growth in the 1990s and
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Mulchannel Penetraon: Recepon = Cable
Mulchannel Penetraon: Recepon = Satellite/Parabolic/Digital
Mulchannel Penetraon: Non-mulchannel HH (no addional TV recepon)
Internet Used in the last 3 months
Fig. 5.4 Multichannel penetration in Latin America 2004–2014
early 2000s, multichannel television began to cover a near majority of

homes in these major metropolitan areas, while the number of broadcast-
only homes declined. This impressive expansion has only been surpassed
by the growth of Internet adoption, which as we will see in Chap. 6, now
represents a significant competitive threat to broadcast and satellite/cable
television, as it does in the US and elsewhere. Since TGI Latina does not
include smaller towns and rural areas, our analysis does not intend to be
truly national, but rather an analysis of major metropolitan areas, although
it is reasonable to expect that pay-TV penetration will be considerably
lower in these lower-income and rural markets.
The increased pay-TV penetration did not take place at the same pace
and relative size across the region, as shown in Fig. 5.5. Among the stud-
ied countries, Colombia attained the highest multichannel penetration
rates at the end of the analyzed period: Argentina, Peru, and Chile fol-
lowed, finishing with a clear majority of respondents having pay-TV. At
the other end of the spectrum, Venezuela was the only country that saw a
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2007 2011 2014
Argenna Colombia Venezuela Chile Peru Mexico Brazil Ecuador
Fig. 5.5 Multichannel penetration by Latin American countries 2004–2014
decline in multichannel penetration in the last two time points, although

taking the whole ten-year period, it still saw an increase.
In the assessment of the relationship between income and multichannel
penetration through the four benchmark years (2004, 2007, 2011, and
2014), the eight countries showed an initially varied pattern of growth in
multichannel penetration in 2004–2007. As shown in Fig. 5.6, the two
lower income groups, which include both the “new” lower-middle (or
vulnerable) class, the next 30%, and those under the poverty line, show the
strongest growth throughout the period, which tends to confirm the over-
all expectation of this study. It is also clear that growth in pay-TV subscrip-
tions in the two poorest groups picked up overall in 2011–2014, when
incomes grew the most in the majority of the countries.
Overall, the average across all eight countries showed slight growth in
the poorest 40% and the next poorest 30% (the lower-middle class)
between 2004 and 2007. However, in the second period, between 2011
and 2014, multichannel penetration grew considerably among the lower-
middle class.
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2007 2011 2014
Fig. 5.6 Multichannel penetration by income level: Combined Latin America
Figures 5.6 and 5.7 show multichannel penetration within the lower-
middle class (next 30%) and bottom 40% (the working class, working
poor, and poor) per country, across the four-time periods initially analyzed
in the original study of TGI trends (Straubhaar et al., 2015). In some
countries, such as Peru, Colombia, and Chile, multichannel television
penetration grew noticeably in those two income groups. In some coun-
tries, such as Brazil, Ecuador, and Mexico, there was a high increase of
multichannel among the “next 30%” income group, but still a consider-
able increase among the bottom 40% income group. In Brazil in particu-
lar, between 2011 and 2014, the rate of pay-TV usage among groups
representing the two lowest-income groups more than doubled. By 2014,
in both Brazil and Mexico, the SES group referred to as the “next 30%”—
those less affluent than the two top strata, but who still have a stronger
purchasing power than the poorest 40% of the population—were approach-
ing a pay-TV penetration rate of 50%.
In some countries, like Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, there was
either stagnation or even a slight decrease between the lowest two SES
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2007 2011 2014
Argenna Brazil Chile Colombia Ecuador Mexico Peru
Fig. 5.7 Multichannel penetration Next 30% (income level) by country
groups from 2004 to 2007—followed by a progressively accelerating

growth in the latter part of the study period (Fig. 5.8).
Both Argentina and Colombia started from a much higher base of sub-
scribers to pay-TV in 2004 than in the other six countries. This is due to
some of the particularities of pay-TV development in those two countries.
In Argentina, control of broadcast television by Peron and the military
had shattered the existing stations in the 1970s (Fox, 1997), weakening
them even after the end of military rule, and opening a door to cable pre-
cisely when the technology was spreading. In Colombia, although there
were two fairly strong national commercial channels, the audience seems
to have fragmented earlier than in most other Latin American countries,
particularly among youth, drawn by the greater diversity and perceived
quality of pay-TV channels (Arango-Forero, 2013). Peru started from a
very high level of penetration among the richest (84% in 2004) and a
somewhat higher level among the poorest (14% in that same year), but
growth among the latter was still lower than in Argentina or Colombia,
perhaps due to lower levels of income among the poorest in Peru at the
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2007 2011 2014
Fig. 5.8 Multichannel penetration Bottom 40% (income level) by country
beginning of the studied period. Among the richest, the pay-TV penetra-
tion remained rather consistent, growing, and stumbling at low rates
across all countries (Fig. 5.9).
Findings: Education and Multichannel Penetration

Income certainly plays a role in multichannel penetration but, as we have
previously stated, we believe that education plays a crucial one as well.
Here we analyze trends in multichannel adoption according to respon-
dents’ education achievement. The trends presented in Fig. 5.10 are simi-
lar to those observed in the analysis based on income: slow growth or a
slight decrease in the first two time points, followed by a faster penetration
growth in 2011 and 2014.
The accelerated adoption of pay-TV among respondents with a lower
education achievement is particularly pronounced. In general, respon-
dents who have achieved a tertiary/higher education and those who have
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2007 2011 2014
Fig. 5.9 Multichannel penetration Top 10% (income level) by country
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2007 2011 2014
Graduate College Terary Secondary Primary
Fig. 5.10 Multichannel penetration by education achievement: Combined

Latin America
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2007 2011 2014
Fig. 5.11 Multichannel penetration by education achievement (TERTIARY

ONLY) by country
achieved a secondary education showed the most growth from 2004 to

2014, closely followed by those achieving primary degree or lower.
Figures 5.11 and 5.12 present multichannel distribution by countries for
those with a tertiary and those with a secondary education.
This analysis confirms the importance of education and, therefore cul-
tural capital, for multichannel penetration in Latin America. Although we
saw an increase in multichannel TV use related to income, the increases
related to educational achievement are larger (see Table 5.3).
Also, the overall gains in multichannel penetration among the educa-
tion achievement group were, in general, higher in comparison to the
income groups. Therefore, this study confirms the assumption that cul-
tural capital was more important to a preference for multichannel TV than
economic capital.
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2007 2011 2014
Fig. 5.12 Multichannel penetration by education achievement (SECONDARY

ONLY) by country
Table 5.3 Comparison of SES and education on pay-TV penetration rate

increases
2004 2007 Diff. 2011 Diff. 2014 Diff.
SES
Top 10% 65% 64% −2% 72% 13% 82% 14%
Next 20% 43% 44% 2% 55% 25% 69% 25%
Next 30% 27% 29% 7% 39% 34% 57% 46%
Next 40% 16% 18% 13% 24% 33% 36% 50%
Education
Graduate 61% 59% −3% 68% 15% 81% 19%
College 52% 53% 2% 59% 11% 71% 20%
Tertiary 36% 41% 14% 47% 15% 59% 26%
Secondary 31% 31% 0% 39% 26% 54% 38%
Primary 16% 14% −13% 22% 57% 38% 73%
Education, Income, and Reasons for Getting

Multichannel Television
There are a number of reasons why a person or household might decide to
pay for multichannel television, even though its costs, historically, have
been fairly high. These reasons, when compared and broken down by
income/purchasing power and education, can help us understand the dif-
ferences in impact between economic and cultural capital in this funda-
mental decision, which gives people access to many channels produced
beyond their nations or even the region of Latin America.
The top reason for paying for multichannel TV from 2004 to 2014, as
identified in the TGI survey, was “to have more television channels.”
Those channels could be either national or foreign, news or entertain-
ment, and so on. A parallel study to this, doing a deep dive into the TGI
data on Brazil, finds that some better-educated groups in some regions of
Brazil, who seemed to be looking for more diversity on television, had a
greater interest in foreign channels in the mid-2000s, when the primary
diversity on multichannel television came from abroad, the region, the
U.S., or Europe. Interest in imported material among some of these best-
educated Brazilians declined after the period 2008–2010. As noted above,
one possible reason is that TV Globo was developing more and more of its
own channels for pay-TV as the 2000s turned into the 2010s.
Overall, this explanation for multichannel adoption increased across the
board through the studied period, but the growth was most pronounced
for the respondents in the top-income bracket; by 2014, a majority said
this was the main reason behind their possession of pay-TV. Per our the-
ory about the importance of cultural capital, education would be more
associated with wanting more channels than income. As the theory goes,
that would be because education is more directly associated with cultural
capital, which has historically been linked to having a preference for more
channels beyond the national broadcast channels. Historically, those chan-
nels came from outside the nation, even outside the region, from the
USA, Japan, and Europe. However, as noted above, recently Latin
American companies have started creating their own cable channels, which
muddies this picture somewhat. By 2014, it is quite possible to imagine
that someone desiring more channels would actually be thinking of the
extra national channels that could then be found on pay-TV. We found
this pattern of connection between wanting more channels and education
in 2004, before the rapid growth in incomes that lifted many out of the
working class into the middle class in both countries, particularly Brazil. In
2004, when incomes for the lower-middle class had not yet grown, educa-
tion was logically a better predictor. After that, however, things proceeded
to get more complex and by 2014, links between this reason and educa-
tion were mixed.
Our next theoretical expectation, overall, was that people from higher
levels of education would more often say that they got pay-TV to get
“entertainment and education from other places,” since that probably
most closely measures preference for foreign versus domestic channels. In
Chap. 4, we found that those with more education and income do in fact
prefer programming from the US and Europe more than to those with less
education and income. Theoretically, that would be because education is
more directly associated with cultural capital, which in some historical
studies of Latin American audiences has been associated with a preference
for foreign television versus national, while middle-class, lower-middle
class, and working-class audiences have tended to prefer national pro-
gramming, theoretically from a sense of cultural proximity (Straubhaar,
1991, 2003, 2007).
The percentage of respondents who cited this reason increased margin-
ally from 2004 to 2014 and, by 2011, this reason drops to the third most
likely reason to access multichannel television. Interestingly, the differ-
ences between the highest- and lowest-education achievement groups
stating this reason for using multichannel television diminished between
2004 and 2014. At the top bracket for education, those with complete or
incomplete graduate degrees in all countries considered, the stated reason
of “acquiring multichannel television for entertainment and education
from other places,” actually initially dropped and ended up virtually the
same as in the beginning of the 2004–2014 period initially analyzed.
A similar relationship was seen between income and this specific reason
for buying multichannel television. It is important to note that higher-
education groups and higher-income groups were still more likely to state
this reason than any other group in all four benchmark years analyzed.
That indicates that both economic capital and cultural capital are associ-
ated with this reason for getting pay-TV. Clearly, from Bourdieu’s (1984)
initial theorization on, the two forms of capital are related. Those with
great income usually tend to have higher education as well. So, although
we had expected there to be a clearer, larger association between wanting
foreign content and cultural versus economic capital, that was not clearly
supported overall. So some more theoretical thinking about the relations
between cultural capital, economic capital, cultural proximity, and the

desire for more foreign content is needed.
One other possible reason is “to be up to date with the latest in tech-
nology,” as Fig. 5.13 shows. This was one of the least likely reasons to be
mentioned for subscribing to multichannel television in the Latin American
countries surveyed, but yet a growing segment of the population identi-
fied this reason—around 5 to 12% overall. It was somewhat more com-
mon among the more well-educated and higher-income brackets, which
makes sense since they will likely have the economic surplus to go for new
technologies simply because they are new and fashionable.
The response that people got multichannel television “to have a better
[quality of] reception” consistently increased over time as a reason to get
pay-TV among most people. It was the third most likely reason for sub-
scribing to multichannel television in 2004, but became the second most
likely reason by 2011. People of lower income and education achievement
started identifying this reason as one of the top reasons for accessing
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
To have more To receive To have a To be up to date Other
television entertainment better reception with the latest
channels & information from in technology
other places
2004 2007 2011 2014
Fig. 5.13 Reasons for multichannel for all Latin American countries (Total
responses)
multichannel television as soon as 2004 in some countries and in all eight

countries combined as early as 2007 (See Fig. 5.13). This reason may have
become even more pressing as some countries, like Brazil, phased out
people’s access to old C-Band satellites that were primarily intended for
internal distribution of channels to repeaters and affiliates. Particularly in
Brazil, millions of people acquired these old, large dishes to get a good-
quality signal of national channels (Fig. 5.14).
40%
2004
30%
20%
10%
0%
To have more Entertainment & To have a beer To be up to date with Other
television channels informaon from recepon the latest in
other places technology
40%
2007
30%
20%
10%
0%
To have more Entertainment & To have a beer To be up to date with Other
television channels informaon from recepon the latest in
40%
2011
30%
20%
10%
0%
To have more Entertainment & To have a beer To be up to date Other
television channels informaon from recepon with the latest in
Fig. 5.14 Reasons for multichannel adoption by educational achievement (com-

bined Latin American countries)
60%
2014
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
To have more Entertainment & To have a beer To be up to date Other
television channels informaon from recepon with the latest in
Graduate College Terary Secondary Primary
Fig. 5.14 (continued)
For example, in Brazil in 2004, 60% of the poorest 40% of respondents

gave this response, compared to 33% of the richest 10%. This issue in 2004
seemed to be more important to the poorest, who are probably also those
who live in poor, peripheral areas on the outside of cities where reception
is worst. This obviously overlapped the least educated, too, but income
presented a clearer, more significant connection (See Fig. 5.15).
The Bust Years: 2014–2019

While the original analysis relied on TGI Latina data between 2004 and
2014, a period characterized by unprecedented economic prosperity in
the region, there is no denying the Latin American scenario has changed
significantly since then. As noted in a recent paper:
The pattern of alternating crisis and growth periods, while minimized

throughout the beginning of the 21st century, was not totally eliminated
and a new crisis took place starting in 2015. As China’s economy stuttered,
demand for commodities that represent Latin America’s main exports
decreased sharply, pushing overheated local economies down spiraling down
into recession. This time the economic downturn is not only affecting the
poor. A significant percentage of those who climbed to a middle-class status
on the last boom are at risk of falling back into the poverty they have just
escaped. A survey by Latinobarómetro suggests that this economic downfall
is expected to have new and unexpected social impact. Some 50% of Latin
40%
2004
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
To have more To receive To have a beer To be up to date with Other
television channels entertainment & recepon the latest in
informaon from technology
other places
40%
35%
2007
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
other places
45%
40%
2011
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
other places
Fig. 5.15 Reasons for multichannel adoption by income (combined Latin

American countries)
50%
40%
2014
30%
20%
10%
0%
other places
Fig. 5.15 (continued)
Americans surveyed thought that the improvement in their living conditions

was permanent and giving up what they just earned—including their new
media consumption habits—was a painful proposition that became all too
real, starting in 2015. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians, for example,
gave up cable TV in 2016. (Castro-Mariño et al., 2019: 120)
So, it is important to consider the impact of the economic downturn of

the last five years in the adoption of pay-TV. Compared to earlier years,
overall pay-TV subscription rates in 2019 were stably high in Argentina
(80%); increased in Mexico (75%), Venezuela (68%), and Chile (68%);
somewhat lower in Colombia (57%) and Ecuador (40%); and notably
lower in Peru (36%) and Brazil (33%) (Business Bureau, 2020, p. 18)
Among the lower SES, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina saw very little
change in Pay-TV penetration in the last five years. Colombia saw a growth
of 6 percentage points while Mexico is down the same amount since its
peak in 2016. All other countries in the group (Argentina, Chile,
Colombia, Mexico) maintained only small variances (1 ppt) among the
middle-class and upper-class groups, but Brazil had the distinction of
being the only country to see a significant decline (6 ppt) during this same
period (Straubhaar, 2020).
Such trends contradict common sense, as we have been taught by econ-
omists that people are rational consumers and, during difficult economic
times, they are expected to use their money more parsimoniously.
Moreover, this would be reasonably expected to mean that the elite, which
usually fares better during economic crises, would be less—not
more—likely to cut costs, including pay-TV. So why would the Brazilian

elite be cutting the cable or satellite cord more than lower classes?
While this question probably deserves a study of its own, it is relevant
for the current analysis to speculate on its connection to the economic
versus culture capitals. The recent paper in Cuadernos quoted above spe-
cifically checked the impact of these types of capitals on pay-TV retention
when the economies started to crash in Brazil and Mexico in 2015 and
theorized that:
It would seem that once the new entrants to the consumer market got a
taste of pay-TV services, they were not necessarily rational and objective
about the decision to eliminate the recently acquired expense during uncer-
tain times to offset some financial hardship, real or potential. Within the
comfort of their homes, Brazilians and Mexican residents of different social
groups enjoyed the multiple channel selections and kept the families safe
from the elevated street violence that tends to accompany economic down-
turns in these countries (Muggah, Szabó de Carvalho & Aguirre, 2018). As
highlighted in the literature review, it also seems likely that having been
successfully domesticated into the home, these services would now be costly
to drop in terms of family well-being and satisfaction. Pay-TV seems to have
become, thus, a hedonic good (Medina et al. 2016). (Castro-Mariño et al.,
2019: 131)
In other words, the lower social classes apparently embraced pay-TV as

a socioeconomic status symbol and a safe form of entertainment that they
were more hesitant to give up than the elite. To be sure, the elite had other
considerations going for them. They were more educated and supposedly
more prone to act more rationally about it, with plenty of other status
icons to hold on to. Moreover, they can afford other relatively more
expensive forms of entertainment (e.g., dining, theaters, etc.) and are
ready to become early adopters of the new Internet streaming services like
Netflix. As we shall see in the next chapter, education is key to adopting
more sophisticated technology such as Internet and streaming.
The expectation that lower classes would be more attuned to over-the-
air free broadcasting programming, while the elite would prefer cable
channels that have more international content has also been challenged by
ratings data. When asked, the industry experts reveal a startling scenario
(Straubhaar, 2020). The lower, middle, and higher classes in countries like
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico all spend slightly more
than half of their time watching TV tuned to broadcasting channels. More
importantly, while the lower classes watch more television in total hours,
the higher classes spend a higher proportion of their time tuned to broad-
casting. One could speculate that sports and news in traditional channels
still command their attention, but more studies are necessary to consider
the impact of education on such trends. In 2020, IBOPE is expected to
release its integrated ratings service called TGR that will allow for the
analysis of education and viewing preferences.
Analysis and Conclusion

In this chapter, we analyzed how growth in income among the lower-
middle class would be strongly associated with growth in multichannel.
The next-to-lowest 30% income group (using TGI analysis terms for com-
paring social class across countries), which includes the “new” lower-
middle (or vulnerable) class, showed the strongest growth in pay-TV use
throughout both the initial period and the five years before 2014.
Respondents from that income group had a greater increase in multichan-
nel use between 2011 and 2014. The bottom 40%, some of whom are also
part of the “new” lower-middle class, but also including those under the
poverty line, showed virtually no increase in the first few years considered
(2004–2007), but had strong gains in multichannel penetration in the fol-
lowing three benchmark years. In Chile, Peru, and Colombia, this income
group showed quite an increase in that second time period. Brazil and
Mexico showed a very similar multichannel penetration pattern between
the two lower-income groups.
This tends to confirm our implicit hypothesis that strong growth in
income in the lower-middle class, essentially constituting a new lower-
middle class, as observed by the World Bank and other studies cited above,
would be associated with growth in pay-TV, which had been seen as some-
thing of a luxury for such people until the late 2000s, or early 2010s.
We also anticipated that education might be even more strongly associ-
ated with the growth of pay-TV than income. That is because education is
more directly associated with cultural capital, which in some historical
studies of Latin American audiences has been associated with a preference
for foreign television versus national (Straubhaar, 1991, 2007). That is
examined in detail in Chap. 4.
Historically, pay-TV was associated with the importation of foreign
channels, but that has been changing since the late 2000s because in some
Latin American countries, such as Brazil and Mexico, strong national TV
companies have been increasingly including their own domestic channels

on multichannel TV systems. Outside providers like Dish have also been
offering low-cost packages that include more national channels to attract
subscribers from lower income and education groups. That would change
the expectation of a greater preference for pay-TV among the richer and
better educated somewhat, by giving the least educated more domestic
channels that they would have an easier time relating to (Straubhaar,
2007). We found this latter expectation confirmed in the accelerated
adoption of pay-TV across our eight Latin American countries among
respondents with a lower education achievement after 2011.
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CHAPTER 6
Streaming Television, Netflix, and Transverse

Transnationalism
Introduction
One of our arguments in this book is that Latin America experienced an
increased availability of transnational programming: with increased multi-
channel and streaming television, and with increased transmission of pro-
gramming from abroad through both of those technologies. This chapter
examines the growth of streaming television services in Latin America, the
barriers they face in terms of infrastructure and class structures, the com-
petition between national, regional, and global streaming companies, and
their various strategies. In particular, this chapter will focus primarily on
Netflix and its novel strategies for a transverse, transnationalism program-
ming strategy, and connection with its audience.
We will begin by considering Netflix’ and other global streaming com-
panies, such as Disney+, Prime Video, and HBO Max’ strategy in Latin
America in theoretical and policy terms. Are they counting on the appeal
of their largely US catalogue of programs, which creates a new wave of
unbalanced flow of television from the US? If so, theoretically that might
be a new wave of media imperialism, a new unbalancing of television flows
in favor of even more dominance by both US companies and US catalogs
of programming. Is Netflix in particular also counting on the transverse,
transnational appeal of its new television programs out of Europe, East

Switzerland AG 2021
Asia, and elsewhere? That requires some new theorization, hence the
introduction of the concept of transverse flows. We will base this in part
on Netflix’ own industrial practice of targeting people in taste clusters
across national boundaries, cultural boundaries, and what are usually seen
as the major markers of individual identity.
Eras of Television and Streaming

Levinson describes the three ages of television as the network television
age, illustrated as “appointment television” (Caminos et al., 2019, p. 12)
lasting until the 1990s, followed by cable and multichannel TV age of the
first decade of twentieth century, subscription based and with less supervi-
sion, and into an age of Internet television of the second decade of the
twentieth century, where audiences could select, from a set menu, the
programming they what to watch, when, and how much of it in one sit-
ting. Not only has Internet television revolutionized how we consume
television, but also the availability of such programming which is now
globally available: it is in this new age of television that global players such
as Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, Hulu, and others.
This chapter focuses on how this third age of television, Internet or
streaming television, is changing how Latin Americans consume television
and what they consume, and considers how some of these global media
players’ strategy and programming flow, specifically Netflix. Theoretically,
this chapter and Chap. 7 consider the appeal of foreign programming in
Latin America’s Internet or streaming television, mainly from the US, as
an unbalanced flow, a new wave of media imperialism. At the same time,
these global players have made cultural productions out of Latin America
accessible and available in other countries at an unprecedented rate, poten-
tially a counter-flow. These global media players, while US-based, are
counting on the transverse, transnational appeal of new television out of
Europe, and elsewhere. In this chapter, we consider the concept of trans-
versality, as the intersection of spaces of existence. Additionally, under-
standing that availability alone does not explain consumption, this chapter
considers how Latin American consumers choose to watch the available
national and foreign programming, considering cultural proximity, cos-
mopolitanism, and cultural capital.
6 STREAMING TELEVISION, NETFLIX, AND TRANSVERSE TRANSNATIONALISM 161
Transversality
The concept of transversality, borrowed from mathematics, relates to the
intersection of spaces of existence. We primarily use it in its sense of new
flows of television cutting across the existing flows. Before the increase of
first pay-TV after 2000 and then streaming television viewing after 2010,
many Latin American countries had radically increased their own national
production and started to sell programs, particularly telenovelas, variety
and game shows, and comedy shows, across the region. US inflows had
continued with program sales and increased with satellite and cable pay-
TV channels. All those are well established since the 1970s, focused on
known genres flowing largely within cultural boundaries or earlier paths of
exportation set down by Hollywood across the twentieth century.
However, the new streaming inflows, particularly from Netflix, are more
polycentric and transverse, bringing and promoting more programming
from more diverse places. Published interviews with a number of people at
Netflix show that they see their audience growing fastest outside the US,
that it is increasingly both important and easier to produce outside the
US, and that they think US audiences will also like programming from
elsewhere. For example, in 2020, Netflix’ president was asked what the
next big moves for Netflix were. He said, “What’s next is becoming a great
Turkish developer of content, becoming a great Egyptian developer of
content, and sharing that with the world” (Spangler, 2020).
Furthermore, the mechanism of algorithmic streaming is fundamen-
tally different. It involves amassing considerable data about the viewing
habits and preferences of individuals in different cultures and targeting
them across cultures by genre preferences instead of traditional cultural
boundaries. Elkins summarizes and then cites a Netflix interview, “Netflix
uses its complex systems of content tagging and viewer data to locate ‘the
most relevant global communities based on a member’s personal tastes
and preferences’ (Gomez-Uribe, 2016)” (Elkins, 2019, p. 382). These
taste communities are defined across traditional linguistic and cultural
boundaries, helping Netflix target individual viewers across those bound-
aries, cutting across traditional ideas of audiences and flows in a trans-
verse manner.
However, the older flows and cultural boundaries are not done away
with. Lobato notes that “any single form of television will have multiple
geographies simultaneously” (2017, p. 3). Considering that televised pro-
gramming allows us to experience virtual, cultural spaces that we interact
with, these spaces can be of different levels of localities and cultures: local,
regional, national, and transnational. Overall, this book argues that Latin
American audiences continue to be exposed to television at many levels.
For those who only have access to broadcast television, or who are really
still more interested in it, then the main broadcast channels continue to
offer primarily national programs, while other stations offer quite a bit of
regional and US programming as well. During the rapid growth of the
middle classes, from 2000 on, many more acquired access to satellite,
cable, and pay-TV (see Chap. 5). For those who have access to broadband
Internet and have both the economic and cultural capitals required, then
they also have increasing access to a variety of streaming services. So the
multiplicity of what is flowing to audiences in Latin America has been
increased.
Reasons Why Streaming Is Increasingly Global

There are a number of overall reasons for the global increase of streaming
television. Following is a list that draws on Dwyer et al.’s (2018) analysis
of the increase of streaming TV in South Korea, along with other factors
added by the authors. Nearly all of the same factors apply in Latin America,
showing that the region shares in a globalized phenomenon. We will dis-
cuss a number of these in greater depth, but this gives an overview.
• Increase in the number of devices that can be used with OTT (Dwyer
et al., 2018). This has been particularly important with smartphones
and mobile broadband in Asia but is still emerging in Latin America.
• VOD becoming part of the daily routine of viewing habits of audi-
ences (Dwyer et al., 2018). We will argue that this is a classed behav-
ior, rather than a mass one in Latin America.
• Less restrictive regulatory environment than for pay-TV (Dwyer
et al., 2018). For example, Brazil places much heavier requirements
on pay-TV channels to meet national content quotas so far (Carter,
2017), although the idea has been raised for SVOD channels, too.
• Market structures that privileged a few broadcasters and their pay-
TV branches, like Australia, South Korea (Dwyer et al., 2018). The
Latin American structures have privileged a few dominant broadcast-
ers and a few of them, like TV Globo, have developed a number of
pay-TV channels.
• An even more restricted oligopoly in Latin America has been the

development of region-wide dominance in telecommunications by
one Mexican (TelMex) and one Spanish company (Telefónica), that
now have streaming services of their own.
• The increasing availability of broadband, particularly when govern-
ments put serious effort into getting broadband to nearly all people,
as in Australia and South Korea, but unlike Latin America and the
US (Dwyer et al., 2018).
• Whether Netflix was the first company to introduce SVOD, as in
South Korea (Dwyer et al., 2018), or the first global one to develop
it on a broad scale as in Latin America.
• Relative price advantage compared to other services like pay-
TV. There is a large price advantage in most of Latin America, com-
pared to South Korea, where Netflix costs about the same as pay-TV,
but is still much cheaper than in the US (Dwyer et al., 2018) or Latin
America. For example, an ad in Brazil argued that the monthly fee
for Netflix was less than one would spend in a bar on one night
(Schiavoni, 2016)
• Degree of co-production and other cooperation with the local mar-
ket, to add materials to SVOD services that have local cultural prox-
imity (Dwyer et al., 2018). For example, Netflix has discovered that
it must increase its performance in this area in some countries like
South Korea to get traction in the market (Dwyer et al., 2018).
• Local content requirements. Some countries, such as Australia,
Brazil, France, and others, have threatened to extend to Netflix local
content requirements that were created for pay-TV, if Netflix or sim-
ilar services do not move quickly to fund local co-productions
(Dwyer et al., 2018).
• Audience familiarity with subscription-based television, as is true
with pay-TV. In Latin America, we will argue that this has remained
concentrated in the middle, upper-middle, and elite classes
(see Chap. 5).
• Audience familiarity, among some, with foreign content through
illegal downloading and fan subtitling (Tietzmann & Gross Furini,
2016). Illegal downloading grew with “the prevalence of long story
arcs in television series and how such format came to be as an attrac-
tion factor to audiovisual narratives, the widespread adoption of
broadband and various audiovisual replay technologies and its
c onsequences and the ubiquity of social media as an echo chamber

for fans” (Tietzmann & Gross Furini, 2016, p. 1).
• Trust in credit card operations required for Netflix, as in Brazil
(Meimaridis et al., 2020).
• Both precedents and competition for Netflix from YouTube. For
example, the channel Porta dos Fundos [Brazilian comedy group]
on YouTube (Morelli et al., 2016; Carter, 2017).
• The force of targeting audiences, primarily in the middle and upper-
middle classes by their own individual genre interests
• Freeing audiences from having to watch commercials, even though
pay-TV has been making this appeal for years.
This latter appeal seems to be particularly important in Latin America.

It is interesting that this appeal is still fresh after years of availability of pay-
TV channels like HBO. For example, in Brazil, promotional materials for
Netflix were cited in an advertising industry publication. The appeal by
Netflix in an advertisement said that in daily exposure of one and half
hours more of Netflix and one hour less of broadcast television, the viewer
would save 130 hours of advertising commercials per year.1
There are other broad appeals of streaming more specific to Latin
America, but which have equivalents in other countries. For example, as
noted above, Netflix has to create more local Korean drama to gain atten-
tion from Korean audiences. In Latin America, dramas on Netflix have
emphasized themes and images common to telenovelas. “For example,
the Brazilian trailer for Narcos, “emphasized a man born to a poor family,
in a poor country, who before thirty years of age had more money than he
could count” (Schiavoni, 2016, pp. 177–178). This extends to offering
themes and images that are seen to have resonance across the region.
When the idea of streaming was substantially new, in 2011, Netflix pro-
moted itself in ads on Facebook and YouTube (Schiavoni, 2016). Teasers
for Netflix focused on series, like Narcos, that had ties to Latin American
images and issues, like narcotics traffic, with an image of blood dripping
1
“O cálculo foi feito multiplicando a média de tempo que uma pessoa gasta no Netflix
diariamente pela média de comerciais que vão ao ar em uma hora de programação. Com a
média diária na plataforma sendo 1,5 horas e que de uma hora na televisão, 15 minutos e 30
segundos são comerciais, o Netflix poupa os assinantes de 130 horas de comerciais por ano”
(Meio e Mensagem, 2015). Cited in Schiavoni (2016, p. 172).
down from white powder to form a map of South America, and that had
ties to Brazil, in terms of the director and lead actor.
A Multiplicity of Models for Streaming

At the national level, there are very strong companies in Latin America,
like Televisa in Mexico and TV Globo in Brazil, that are creating their own
streaming platforms. These initially focused on giving online, on-demand
access to shows from the broadcast channels. However, TV Globo has cre-
ated some original content for its streaming service and has also licensed
some foreign content not available on broadcast (Meimaridis et al., 2020).
At a region-wide level in Latin America, some of the large regional
telecommunications carriers, such as the Mexico-based Telmex, Spain-
based Telefónica, and their national branches such as Telefonica Brasil’s
Vivo Play, are creating streaming packages, to add to the appeal of the
triple play (telephony, television, and Internet) packages they were already
offering (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013). There are also standalone services,
such as Netflix, Amazon, Claro, HBO, and Disney+. Likewise, a 2020
report from Latin American Business Stories (LABS) indicates a streaming
war is raging with Latin America shaping up to be one of the main battle-
fields, predicting Latin America’s video streaming subscriptions will more
than double by 2025 (Labsnews, 2020). The streaming industry in the
region is expected to surpass traditional pay-TV in subscriptions. Industry
experts are also expecting that much of the growth will be a result of new
platforms such as Disney+ and HBO Max that will arrive in 2021.
Globally, there are several quite different approaches. YouTube has
built considerable appeal, particularly among younger audiences (see
tables below), by letting people access US contents, particularly music
videos, other global contents, and content created by local producers,
either professionalized ones like the humor group Porta dos Fundos in
Brazil (Carter, 2017) or a wide variety of local YouTubers not unlike many
that emerged in the US and elsewhere but with distinctly local twists, like
Afro-Brazilian social justice YouTubers (Mitchell-Walthour, 2020).
YouTube in Latin America has a fascinating set of dynamics that we will
explore somewhat briefly below.
YouTube
YouTube is very different from most of the streaming services that we will
discuss in this chapter. It is much less like the television of a network like
TV Globo than is Netflix. YouTube’s motto is “Broadcast Yourself,”
encouraging audiences to become producers, what many now call
YouTubers. YouTube heavily features music videos ranging from profes-
sional to amateur, but is also full of make-up tutorials, how to do it videos
about everything, comedy, stunts, cartoons, videos of people playing or
even just commenting on video games. It is a rather larger universe than
most of what has traditionally been considered television, but is rapidly
becoming an important part, not least in Latin America.
YouTube has experienced fast growth in Latin America, despite the
region’s slower Internet adoption in comparison to other regions. While
the United States remains the company’s stronghold, Brazil and Mexico
are close behind in terms of hours consumed and Colombia and Argentina
are also among the top 15 countries in the world in terms of consumption
(Valderrama & Velasco, 2018). In the early 2000s, at the inception of the
video-sharing company in the United States, Latin Americans were early
to use YouTube’s social network features, but mainly as consumers, plac-
ing comments or video responses (Duarte et al., 2007). According to an
early study, Latin American users interacted more with videos produced in
different regions than other users. However, videos produced by Latin
Americans were almost exclusively accessed and responded to by other
Latin Americans (Duarte et al., 2007). To a certain extent, early YouTube
use, in Latin America, replicated the flows of early television to Latin
America, primarily responding to US content.
While the social networking, video-sharing website’s strengths lie in its
ability to connect individuals across national boundaries in an audio-vision
format (Thornton, 2010), the flow of media and communication remains
largely uneven. Latin Americans remain huge consumers but, in recent
years, have also grown in content creation and providing an audience for
those national and regional contents. Some Latin American YouTubers
have expanded into an international audience with some prominent
YouTubers, such as the Mexican Yuya and the Chilean Garmendia, who
have some of the top channels in the world in terms of subscribers
(Valderrama & Velasco, 2018).
YouTube’s Broadcast Yourself motto remains a strength of the com-
pany, in terms of user-generated content (Andrejevic, 2009). However,
users compete with traditional media, government, and other organiza-

tions, who use the platform with much more technical and financial
resources (Kim, 2012). In Brazil, TV broadcasters such as RedeTV! and
Rede Bandeirantes who do not have their own streaming platform rely
heavily on YouTube by making many of their successful programs com-
pletely available on YouTube (Meimaridis et al., 2020). While YouTube is
celebrated for its democratization of amateur content-creation and distri-
bution of audio-visuals, it currently requires considerable digital sophisti-
cation to grow and reach audiences amid the prioritization of certain
contents and habits embedded in the company’s algorithm (Valderrama &
Velasco, 2018). In this environment, traditional media work in conjunc-
tion with YouTube, which acts more as a collaborator rather than a disrup-
tor, with the exception of its competition in terms of advertising revenue,
at least for now. The survey of television fiction on both broadcast and
streaming television in Latin America and Iberia in 2018 by the Obitel
Group noted that most of the open broadcast television stations were put-
ting their streaming programming on YouTube, rather than creating their
own platforms (Dettleff et al., 2019).
Netflix
Netflix started as an online DVD rental company in the late 1990s, but by
2007, it moved its operation online, with the introduction of online
streaming, its Subscription Video-On-Demand (SVOD) service (Jenner,
2016). This move allowed the company to become the global media
player it is today, leading other companies in the transition to the third age
of television. By September 2010, Netflix started operations in Canada
(Nowak, 2010) and, a year later, into Latin America (NY Times, 2011).
Today, Netflix is available in nearly every country, streaming videos, mainly
films and series, for a flat subscription rate, and producing an increasing
amount of original content as well. And while Netflix’s catalogue of avail-
able content is impressive in its size, it is limited and curated, as the com-
pany licenses or produces new content. In this curated model, most of
Netflix’s distributed content comes from the United States (a little over
half for movies, and a little under a half for series), followed by the UK,
France, Japan, and Germany (Aguiar & Waldfogel, 2018). A study in
2018 of Netflix’s available catalogue of contents to stream in Brazil found
that over 80% were from the major Anglophone countries: US, UK,
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Penner & Straubhaar, 2020). This
unbalanced flow, stemming mainly from dominant economic and political

powers, has led to concerns of a new wave of media imperialism.
At the same time, however, Netflix has allowed for the emergence of
new cultural products, a counter-flow of television from countries in the
Global South and smaller producing countries in the Global North, such
as Denmark and Spain (Thussu, 2006). Thussu found some South-South
counterflow but relatively little evidence of counter-flow into the major
producing countries, such as the U.S. and U.K. However, Netflix raises
the prospect of promoting programs from those countries to audiences
around the world. In its 2017 catalogue, Netflix offered 273 works from
Mexico, 110 from Argentina, 99 from Brazil, and 62 from Colombia
(Aguiar & Waldfogel, 2018). While most of its works are from dominant
countries, the rate that it distributes content from Latin America exceeds
traditional international film distribution of content from the area (Aguiar
& Waldfogel, 2018). In this sense, it is a facilitator of increased flow of
media out from Latin America. The flow or trade, however, is not free, nor
completely free of regulations either and Netflix’ catalogue differs depend-
ing on the country (Aguiar & Waldfogel, 2018).
Despite challenges with weaker economies and broadband access,
Netflix currently has approximately 31.4 million subscribers in Latin
America (Statista, 2020), making the region Netflix’s third biggest
regional subscriber base, after North America and Western Europe. Since
Netflix competes, to a certain extent, with free (or cheaper) videos avail-
able through websites like YouTube and social media, and with free (or
cheaper) broadcast television, with local content, and established multi-
channel pay-TV networks, its user-centric strategy and innovative approach
has proven successful globally, and certainly in Latin America.
Netflix collects data on audience engagement with content which
includes selection, ratings, discarded content, repeat content, length of
engagement, and others. This data is collected not to sell its audience to
advertisers, as much of the strategy of television has been, but rather to
create a user experience catering to the unique user, retaining loyal sub-
scribers (Fernández-Manzano et al., 2016). Its algorithm facilitates audi-
ences’ interaction with content, suggesting the kinds of videos that
increase time spent and engagement, allowing the company’s curated con-
tent to feel personal. The company centers its decision making based on
big data, with the combination of internal data management and content
metadata, which results in strategic decisions on content production,
catalog acquisition, and at the end, what viewers see (Fernández-Manzano

et al., 2016).
In addition to its reliance on big data in the core of its business strategy,
Netflix relies extensively on social media and viral social media campaigns
to boost audience engagement and expand its audience base (Fernández-
Gómez & Martín-Quevedo, 2018). Netflix relies on traditional advertis-
ing, such as billboards, magazine, and other promotional campaigns, but
it also “uses messages posted on Twitter and other social networking plat-
forms to build expectations about live events and flesh out story lines
before, during and after series are presented” (Fernández-Gómez &
Martín-Quevedo, 2018, p. 130).
One of its more recent strategies is that of content producer, which
means that the company financed the content production and owns the
rights for distribution (Rossini & Renner, 2015). Netflix Originals gained
popularity and recognition, and it also allowed the company to move con-
tent creation alongside its business decisions and market strategies, which
is to say that big data, once again, plays a big role. Producing its own
content has allowed Netflix to glocalize (Robertson, 1995) its content.
For example, in 2013, when Netflix was starting to produce foreign con-
tent, it financed the Brazilian mini-series “A Toca,” with the objective of
engaging with a Brazilian audience (Rossini & Renner, 2015). Later on,
the highly successful Narcos, directed by the Brazilian José Padilha and
written by American Chris Brancato, engages a global audience in this
drama about the rise of drug trafficking in Colombia.
Netflix has been investing in Latin American content production with
well over 50 original productions in the region (Hecht, 2019). Among its
productions are shorter stand-up comedy specials, a response to the
mobile use of the platform. Latin America’s increased mobile adoption,
with some countries already achieving saturation point, and audience’s
preference for watching Internet television on mobile devices, as this
chapter later shows, has led to the production of content with shorter
duration, such as the comedy specials. Sandvine showed that Netflix was
growing its share of top applications on fixed Internet access in Latin
America, but it did not show as a top ten application on mobile devices
(Sandvine, 2016).
Netflix has developed a broadly transnational strategy that we will con-
sider as transverse, given the way it cuts across traditional television and
film flows. Netflix has developed far more extensive production and co-
production in a fairly wide variety of countries than any of its competitors.
That paid off for them particularly well in the COVID-19 pandemic that
shut down television production in the US for longer than in a number of
other places. Netflix was able to keep a supply chain of production going
in other countries. It is promoting productions from many of those places
across the world, including in its core markets, like the US. In effect, it has
gone for a fully global strategy long before its other competitors. For
example, the new head of HBO Max, once head of Hulu, was asked in
2020 how Netflix got ahead. He noted that “The main difference was the
fact that Netflix leaned heavily into going global. Hulu was able to launch
in Japan. But it didn’t launch globally” (Shaw, 2020).
Among its strategy to gain local subscribers, Netflix has made entire sea-
sons of popular foreign sitcoms available, alongside successful national pro-
ductions, such as biblical telenovelas from Brazil’s Record TV (Meimaridis
et al., 2020). It also offered access to foreign content that was becoming
increasingly popular, such as Korean and Turkish dramas, which have become
available in relatively few broadcast television stations in Latin America
(Vassallo de Lopes & Orozco Gómez 2019). Netflix has also invested heavily
in independent production companies. In Brazil, that strategy proved to be
highly successful and the company currently has an office in the country. The
Brazilian sci-fi drama 3% released in 2016, for example, gained popularity in
the country and specially abroad (Meimaridis et al., 2020).
Disney+, HBO, Amazon Prime

At the other extreme, Disney seems likely to continue with a line-up that
flirts with ethnic and international diversity (Valdivia et al., 2008) but
always has its core formulas and elements in place, closely controlled by
the home system in Hollywood, even when it tells a Chinese story like the
cartoon version of Mulan (Chan, 2001) or the live version of that story in
2020. Disney only plans to launch in Latin America in 2021, so we will
not consider it extensively here. After Disney has fully absorbed Hulu, it is
hard to say what Hulu’s strategy will be, although it was not really a global
player before, either. Disney has used it as a place for productions that
don’t fully fit the Disney image or strategy, so it could evolve in interesting
ways. However, Hulu is still not distributed internationally.
Part of HBO’s image, including in Latin America, has been that of a
source of quality drama. Part of the effort to define quality TV includes an
association with drama. HBO has already been pursuing some interesting
co-productions in Latin America, which seems likely to increase. In fact, as
Netflix did, HBO Max has signaled an intention to start its own greater
globalization with Latin America (Shaw, 2020), but it, too, will only
launch in Latin America as an independent streaming service in 2021
(HBO Go is currently available as a streaming service only for those who
have a pay-TV subscription to HBO).
Amazon Prime Video is increasing its presence in Latin America. It
offers Prime Video subscriptions by themselves throughout most of Latin
America but is now offering a very low cost ($2 per month in Brazil and
$46 yearly in Mexico) package of Amazon Prime shopping plus video in
Brazil and Mexico (Spangler, 2019). It is offering both classic U.S. pro-
ductions, including some from Disney for 2019–2020, and some classics
like El Chavo from Mexico. It is also increasing its presence with offices in
Rio de Janeiro and plans to produce originals in both Brazil and Mexico.
However, it is not putting Latin America as a first priority as Netflix did
and HBO Max seems likely to do (Middleton, 2019).
Broad Range of Streaming Competitors

in Latin America
In Brazil and Mexico, each streaming consumer already adopts an average

of 2.5 services, according to a survey by Ampere Analysis (2020). While
no one knows with certainty if the stacking of multiple streaming plat-
forms is sustainable, it is definitely telling of a trend in which new competi-
tors try to win customers from Netflix. The upcoming Disney+ and HBO
Max are currently fighting to be the “second choices.” A senior analyst at
Ampere, a British media consultancy, indicated that the Latin American
stacking (multiple subscription) rate for streaming platforms will get closer
to the higher levels of Western Europe (Pimentel, 2020). In terms of fore-
cast, Digital TV Research, a firm that provides business intelligence for the
television industry, predicts that Disney+ will be the second biggest
streaming platform after Netflix in Latin America by 2025, while HBO
Max and Amazon Prime compete for third place. Simon Murray, a princi-
pal analyst at Digital TV Research, believes the success of Disney is partly
due to its brand global appeal and because it has been very efficient at
pre-selling and getting subscriptions up before the launch of services.
Murray indicated Disney+ will have a very fast take-up in Latin America
and that Brazil will be its third-largest market (Pimentel, 2020). Disney
reorganized in mid-October 2020 to further emphasize streaming. “They
want to be seen as the Netflix challenger,” said Hal Vogel, a veteran media
analyst. “This signals how strongly they’re invested in taking Netflix on.”
Likewise, HBO Max is scheduled to launch in the region by 2021, with
Latin America being the first market outside the US. Digital TV Research
predicts that HBO Max will add 2.2 million users on top of its base of cur-
rent subscribers (HBO Go, and pay-TV) in the next five years. COO at
AT&T, John Stankey revealed that HBO reported 10 million clients in the
region (Pimentel, 2020) making it the number one competitor for Amazon
Prime. Given that 80% of Netflix recent growth has come from expanding
in international markets, the streaming wars will be probably fought out-
side of the U.S. where Netflix already has a sizable advantage having pro-
duced original content tailored to different cultures and languages.
Figure 6.1 shows a snapshot of the number of users of the most popular
streaming services in Latin America as of 2019. It reflects the diversity of
categories of streaming services and the kinds of players. Among subscrip-
tion video on demand, on the left of the figure, the most popular is Netflix,
followed by Amazon Prime Video, both US services. However, third is
Claro Video, a Mexican platform owned by America Móvil, related to
YouTube
Netflix
iTunes Movies
Google Play Movies
Torrents/P2P
Telecine On
Discovery Kids
FOX App
Pelis Plus
Claro Video
Amazon
Nat Geo
Repelis
Nick Jr.
SBT
Subscription VOD TV Everywhere Transaction VOD Free VOD Not Legal
Fig. 6.1 OTT players with the most users

TelMex, the largest telecommunication company in Mexico, and one of

the largest throughout Latin America. Fourth is HBO Go (a streaming
service for those who already have a pay-TV subscription to HBO), but
fifth is another distinct type of operation, GloboPlay, the streaming opera-
tion of the Globo Organization, the parent of TV Globo of Brazil.
Another type of operation is represented in the second pie chart below,
services operated by pay-TV channels that are accessible only to the cur-
rent paying subscribers of those services, a form of streaming called TV
Everywhere. All of those are from the US so far. The third pie chart rep-
resents services like iTunes that sell specific movies or television shows,
referred to as Transaction Video on Demand. iTunes and Google play are
the top services there but other services from Latin America are in third–
fifth places. The fourth pie chart represents Free Video on Demand. That
is dominated by YouTube, but the second most popular service is SBT, a
Brazilian broadcast channel and the fifth is a service by Televisa of Mexico.
The fifth category represents platforms for illegal downloading, which
have no single dominant service.
Toward a Systematic Classification of the New

Online Video Players
As the technology made it increasingly easier for video distribution and
watching through the Internet, the second decade of the twenty-first cen-
tury saw a boom in online video services across the globe. Given the global
nature of the Internet, some companies were born global and others
quickly entered an internationalization process similar to what cable TV
programmers did in the 1990s (Duarte, 2009). The expansion toward
Latin America took place earlier than previous media services, though, as
some major services such as Netflix made the region one of their first
major targets in their international expansion (Hopewell, 2019).
There are a lot of streaming competitors in Latin America. As of 2019,
there were 99 VOD platforms of various types in Argentina, 94 in Mexico,
and 78 in Brazil (Lopes & Lemos, 2019, p. 91). The numerous companies
venturing into Latin America can be grouped in a variety of ways, but we
want to propose a two-dimensional approach where we consider the struc-
tural or institutional model, the DNA of the company behind each service,
and the financial models they have adopted. As illustrated in Table 6.1,
below is one way we propose to consider the company categories, based in
large part on their origins:
174
Table 6.1 OTT players with the most users in Latin America-2019
Types of company/ Subscription Ad-supported TV everywhere Transaction Illegal Institutional
financial model VOD VOD subscription/other
Technology companies Netflix (46%) YouTube (48%) iTunes (23%) Torrents/P2P

Amazon (8%) Google Play Google Play (19%)
(3%) (16%)
Open TV networks Globoplay SBT (8%)
J. STRAUBHAAR ET AL.
(4%) Televisa Online

(3%)
Pay-TV programmers HBO (6%) Nick Jr (6%) Fox (9%) Telecine On
Nat Geo (7%) (15%)
Discovery Kids
(7%)
HBO (6%)
Fox Sports (6%)
Telcos Claro (9%)
Pay-TV distributors Claro (6%) DIRECTV/ Izzi MX (7%)
DIRECTV SKY Studio+
Independents Pluto TV Pelis Plus (8%) Crackle
Qubit.TV Repelis (7%) Canopy
Mega (7%)
Anime FLV
(6%)
Source: BB-Media 2020 (2020)

Notes: Percentage refers to proportion of financial model total. Some other services in italics added for illustration, but no percentage data available
• Technology companies—Netflix and Amazon started as technology

companies outside the traditional media industry. They leveraged
their distribution expertise to break into the media world and soon
became programmers themselves to consolidate their leadership
positions.
• Open TV networks—Broadcasters like Globo, Televisa, and SBT
(Sistema Brasileira de Televisão) launched their online platforms to
allow viewers to catch up to missed episodes of telenovelas and other
series, not unlike the original design of Hulu in the US, but soon
built standalone services that bundled all the content they produced
in large and valuable video-on-demand libraries
• Pay-TV programmers—HBO, AMC, and other traditional cable
TV networks have built an online presence, first limited to current
cable/satellite subscribers (the TV Everywhere concept) and then
independent of the pay-TV distributors. As program aggregators and
producers, these companies already have a cache of content and a
loyal base of viewers to build upon.
• Pay-TV distributors—As programmers started to show signs of
defection from traditional satellite and cable distributors, not to
mention the up-and-coming telcos, they have been seeking to stay
relevant with so-called skinny bundles that put together whatever
else content they can gather. Services like DISH in Mexico, SKY in
Brazil, and DIRECTV in other parts of the region compete
• Telecommunications companies—Around the Latin American
region, and worldwide, telecommunications companies have moved
into related areas, first mobile telephones, then Internet services, and
television distribution over the Internet. So companies still bearing
the names of popular cell phone companies, like Vivo (Telefonica,
based in Spain) and Claro (Telmex, based in Mexico), are now fight-
ing to find a niche in Internet streaming television.
• Independents—The low barriers to entry into this new media envi-
ronment have also allowed for many small independent companies
with niche content to join the list of players. From free-fighting to
do-it-yourself and even religious programs, they have dramatically
expanded the scope of programming available, but their tenuous
finances may not allow them to become long term players. Just as it
happened with cable TV networks, an eventual cleanse of the market
may take place. In this group are Pluto TV, Qubit.TV, and others.
The background of the companies helps understand where they are

coming from and their primary commitment. Technology companies like
Amazon and Netflix are coming from outside the media industry and have
no existing media business to protect, so they are open to play by their
own rules and leverage their technology background to provide superior
user experiences. The open networks like TV Globo or Televisa and pay-
TV programmers like Fox or HBO Go naturally have a lot of content to
offer, but they need to protect their existing primary business, which is still
a lot more profitable, although companies like Disney seem increasingly
willing to risk more in a move to streaming, which was one of their most
profitable business during the COVID-19 virus period of people staying
home. Pay-TV distributors like Sky or DirecTV and telecoms like Telmex/
Claro or Telefónica/Vivo/Movistar already have a business relationship
with viewers—one that has been profitable too, but they need to aggre-
gate content from others or become programmers themselves. And finally,
the independents are mostly new smaller entrants to the business relying
mostly on their production capacity in niche areas.
And when it comes to the financial models these companies have
adopted, we may observe one or more of these models for each given
service:
• Institutional subscriptions or free services—Beyond the many

irregular sources of content in the Internet, a few services like
Crackle, Kanopy, and others offer free libraries of programs that are
not necessarily supported by advertising, although Kanopy is largely
supported by library subscriptions (O’Falt, 2019).
• Ad-supported—Pluto TV is a good example of a diverse program
aggregator supported via advertising insertions (Spangler, 2020).
Universal’s Peacock has yet to launch in Latin America, but it is the
most significant example, as it aggregates all Universal content,
much like Disney and Warner Studios did.
• Transaction—The most known provider of videos that can be
rented (pay per view) or purchased by download is Apple’s iTunes,
but Amazon also provides similar services, particularly for films.
• Subscription expansions—Most cable TV networks started offer-
ing some or all of their libraries online to current pay-TV subscribers,
thus avoiding losing viewers from the more profitable distribution
partners, this was sometimes referred to under the marketing slogan
“TV Everywhere.”
• Independent subscriptions—Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and

others provide unlimited access to a library of old and new programs
and films for a low monthly subscription.
• Illegal—BitTorrent and other illegal download sites still occupy a
notable fraction of user activity
Most companies are currently offering a mixed mode of engagement

with some content offered at no cost (and supported by advertising), oth-
ers available individually for rent/sale and others yet included in a sub-
scription package.
Media Imperialism
As we can see in Fig. 6.1, there are a number of intra-Latin America
streaming services, such as Claro Video or Globoplay, which often rank in
the top five services. However, the top two services in any category are
usually global U.S. streaming services, like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Fox,
National Geographic Play, iTunes, and YouTube. So the most obvious
immediate effect of all the new global streaming systems seems to be to
further unbalance the flow of television to Latin America from the U.S. in
particular, but from the Anglophone world, Japan, and Europe as well.
A 2018 study of the Netflix catalog in Brazil showed that of Netflix
exclusive programs, 58% were from the U.S., the U.K. (8%), Canada (6%),
and Japan (6%), with all other countries less than 3% each. Brazilian pro-
duction was only a little over 1% (Penner & Straubhaar, 2020). There is
clearly an unbalanced flow, topped by the U.S., but secondarily by the rest
of the Anglophone world. It is reminiscent of the 1970s conclusion by
Tunstall, that the world’s media were Anglo-American (Tunstall, 1977).
Which doesn’t mean that the state is permanent. An analysis by Ampere
Analytics estimated that “in 2019 Netflix spent $2.8 billion on original
content, of which $880 million—just over 30%—was spent on interna-
tional originals” (Gadher, 2019). That indicates an increase in spending
on international originals.
Regarding the changes in the world toward local and regional television
production, Tunstall later noted that “the media were American,” but that
changed (Tunstall, 2008). We make a more nuanced argument for a strati-
fied multiplicity, that streaming (and pay-TV, as we saw in Chap. 5). That
is that the television of the world’s upper-middle and upper classes is and
probably will continue to be first Anglo-American, and secondarily global,
at least in the near future, but that the television of most others in the
middle classes on down will not necessarily be that, due to cultural prox-
imity (Straubhaar, 1991), governments’ desire to promote national iden-
tity, and nationally based broadcast television systems. (See Chap. 3 for
our analysis of why much of television viewing remains national).
One of the major questions for media imperialism is where production
takes place and where flows come from. One of the complex elements of
this new picture is that Netflix has been steadily increasing the amount of
production it does outside the U.S. Discussing the paralysis of most
U.S. networks’ production during COVID-19 in 2020, one industry ana-
lyst noted, “Over the past couple of years, [Netflix] has amassed a network
of studio facilities overseas, where production has been easier to restart.
‘The Witcher,’ one of Netflix’s biggest hits last year, began filming its sec-
ond season in Hungary earlier this week, for instance” (Dotan, 2020).
However, it may be that Netflix and other global distribution and pro-
gramming services and following a pattern where financial decisions about
what to produce and programming decisions about what to stream remain
in the U.S., rather like the pattern described for a global Hollywood by
Miller et al. (2005), with production taking place around the world, but
decision-making still based in Hollywood.
Platform Imperialism
Beyond the question of where television and film is produced, another
hugely important question is who controls the decision-making and who
benefits financially from owning the services. Building on past critiques of
cultural imperialism, some prominent political economists are looking
very critically at the new wave of largely U.S.-based digital media compa-
nies (Chakravartty & Schiller, 2011; Jin, 2017; Schiller, 2000), particu-
larly social media, Google, and Amazon (Jin, 2017), but also probably
including Netflix (Elkins, 2019), which comes more out of a Silicon Valley
mode of operation, at least originally, than a Hollywood one.
The key elements of the platform imperialism critique (Jin, 2017) are
that although content from a variety of places might flow through a global
platform, like Facebook or Netflix, that fundamental control and financial
benefit are clearly centered in their U.S. base of operations. The platforms
are often quasi-monopolies in their areas of function, although Netflix
faces more competition from Amazon Prime or Disney+ than does
Facebook or Google. However, the main competitors are also U.S. based
and the effective competition is still by a relatively small oligopoly (Meehan,

2020). The platform controls navigation by the user and prompts or sug-
gests content to them through accumulating big data and using algo-
rithms to refine that information into suggestions designed to hold the
user’s time and attention on the platform (Jin, 2017; Elkins, 2019).
Political economists argue that the monopoly (or oligopoly) capitalist
nature of platforms, their degree of dominance and control, and their
global reach make them imperial in their structure and operations. We see
this political economy as fundamental to understanding global streaming
services but would argue that there are other important layers of their
operations and meaning as well.
Streaming Services as Global and Cosmopolitan

In many debates in the 1990s and on, globalization was seen as a theoreti-
cal and analytical replacement for cultural imperialism, one that took more
account of active audiences, cultural diversity, the decentralization of cul-
tural production, and flow (Appadurai, 1990, 1996; Featherstone, 1990;
Straubhaar, 1991; Tomlinson, 1997). In this book, we are relying more
on a concept of multiplicity and of asymmetrical interdependence: that
nationalism/nationalization, dependency, regionalism, cultural imperial-
ism, and globalization co-exist, depending on what nation or region, what
level of activity, what classes of stratified societies, what producers and
distributors, what companies and platforms are involved, and which levels
of flow we are looking at. However, part of what makes Netflix particularly
interesting among streaming services is its explicit strategy of globaliza-
tion, at the level of production and supply of television, the promotion
and distribution of television across various cultural boundaries, and its
appeal to being global and cosmopolitan in a desirable sense, to appeal to
its target audience (Elkins, 2019).
A renewed wave of nationalism and even national mercantilism is plainly
on view in some of the world’s biggest countries, such as China, Great
Britain, Russia, and the United States, at least under Presidents and Prime
Ministers Xi, Johnson, Putin, and Trump (Blackwill & Wright, 2020),
even though these new nationalisms still play out in a globalized economy.
Dependency was created as a concept to describe development within the
post-colonial history of Latin America, and it still persists in various coun-
tries and sectors to various degrees. One factor behind Straubhaar’s (1991)
concept of asymmetrical interdependence, based on a study of Brazil, was
to acknowledge that a broadcaster in a developing country like Brazil

might be dependent on outside technology, borrow foreign (commercial)
ways of doing broadcasting, use outside funding when an enterprise is
new, borrow genre ideas from around the region, but still develop a highly
productive industry that fills its own market and even becomes a strong
exporter to both the region and the world. In other words, it might be
dependent in some areas but independent, even dominant in some others,
hence part of an asymmetrical interdependence.
Globalization has been key to Netflix’ strategy when it expanded into
Latin America in 2011 and when it expanded into the rest of the world,
then 190 countries, in 2016. Observing the simultaneous launch of a new
program, Daredevil to 190 countries simultaneously, a Wired Magazine
journalist observed, that as of 2016 (Barrett, 2016):
For Netflix, becoming a truly global network presents a path for steady
growth over the next decade and beyond. It has 75 million subscribers
today; there are seven billion more out there. For the world, Netflix’s aspira-
tion could mean much more: the first glimpse at what happens when every
part of an online entertainment empire, from interface to content to deliv-
ery, is engineered to be everything to everyone, all of the time.
Elkins observes that some streaming services like Netflix and Spotify
make being global part of their brand, asking how they imagine globality
and how they perform it (Elkins, 2019). “Netflix and Spotify each ask
their consumer and industry constituencies to view the platform as a stew-
ard of a benevolent form of globalization characterized by liberal-
cosmopolitan ideals of international connection […] by centralizing
international, intercultural connection and affinity within their public
images, the platforms attempt to legitimize their globally expanding busi-
ness and technological practices as humanistic and cosmopolitan rather
than faceless, mathematical, and all-consuming” (Elkins, 2019, p. 377).
Transverse Flows and Streaming Companies

Transversality, as we see it here, implies that this new television system,
which includes global media companies such as Netflix, allows for both
programs and audiences to cross the existing spatial lines defined by
national and regional television flows, by focusing less on where the audi-
ences are, or their language or culture, and more on their motivation for
accessing programming, past viewing behavior and interest in different
programming from other cultures, which we also explore as cultural capi-

tal and cosmopolitanism. Netflix’ strategy contradicts what we thought we
understood about the way that culture flows within boundaries of lan-
guage and culture. For example:
Stereotypes about what one region might like versus another are largely use-
less to Netflix. One might assume, for example, that Netflix’s anime stream-
ing is heavily concentrated in Japan. Yet only 10 percent of the people who
watch anime on Netflix live there. The other 90 percent […] are distributed
around the globe. (Barrett, 2016)
That allows audiences some comfort in creating new habits of crossing

spaces, based on content and recommendation. Understanding, then,
which contents are more accepted in this transversal television flow and
use, which ones are national or transnational in nature, and where the
intersectionality happens is relevant. The proximate and the transnational
are both available, on broadcast, cable/satellite, and streaming television,
although not for everyone, given that Netflix requires broadband Internet
(see below). Netflix, in particular, intersects the programming, making
space not irrelevant but “crossable.”
Netflix has declared a strategy of targeting individuals across cultures
and languages according to their genre interests, using big data to gener-
ate detailed individual profiles and algorithmic tracking and targeting of
individuals to offer them what they and those similar to them seem to like
best (Hallinan & Striphas, 2016; Burroughs, 2018; Jenner, 2018). It is
these new media players, such as Netflix and YouTube, who allow for both
the companies and the audience to intersect spaces of existence. Schrag, in
presenting Satre’s use of the concept of transversality, which focused on
ego and transcendental philosophy, stated that intentionality was social:
“What is required is an acknowledgement of the play and performance of
transversality as a play of social practices and institutional constellations
whose intentionality antedates the constituting activity of an individuated
consciousness” (Schrag, 1994, p. 272). Netflix and YouTube present con-
tent based on audiences’ individual preferences, so transversality, and the
crossing of spaces, is as much a practice of these organizations as it is an
active, individual intention of consuming specific kinds of TV program-
ming. Our book offers an audience-based understanding of how, in this
new television system in Latin America, audiences move simultaneously,
across the proximate and the distant or foreign, in virtual TV-based spaces.
Taste Clusters Across Borders

and Algorithmic Globalization
All of the major platform companies are using some version of algorithmic
identification of audience tastes to enable targeting individuals with con-
tents and, depending on their model, advertising. Among the global
streaming companies, Netflix was the first to discuss this mechanism as
crucial to their own operations, particularly their ability to conduct exten-
sive globalization of programming.
Reinforcing our concept of transverse programming, Netflix makes a
point of discussing how it crosses geographic, linguistic, and cultural
boundaries. This challenges very directly the concept of programming to
both target and reinforce national identity, which has been crucial to most
broadcasting since the 1950s in most of the developing countries of the
world, including Latin America (Katz & Wedell, 1976). This also chal-
lenges the logic of cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991), as discussed in
Chap. 3, although that theory has always acknowledged that social class
and cultural capital can lead upper-middle and elite classes away from its
logic, since they have become more internationalized, as discussed in
Chap. 4. It also challenges the extensive work done on regional cultural
commonalities and flows (Sinclair et al., 1996). Elkins observes:
If, as Netflix claims, taste cannot be reduced to demographic identity or

geographic location, then taste clusters/communities can highlight
moments of unexpected affinity between people from different back-
grounds. By using observed taste to group its audience rather than demo-
graphics based on geo-cultural and cultural-linguistic similarity, Netflix
attempts to square the highly individualized nature of its recommendation
system with the global scope of its operations. (Elkins, 2019, p. 383)
Comedy has long been thought of as rather culturally specific, that it is

harder for jokes to cross culture and language borders, even social classes,
than other genres of television (Friedman & Kuipers, 2013). Speaking
specifically of Netflix’ comedy programming, after interviews with several
of its comedy programming executives, Zinoman, writing in The New York
Times, observed:
Unlike traditional media outlets, Netflix does not fixate on categories of age,
gender or race. “We don’t pull demographic information because you would
be in danger of imparting biases of what a 75-year-old Japanese grand-
mother would want to watch versus a 14-year-old kid from Ohio,” Ms.
Nishimura said. “But there are moments in time when they are in the exact
same taste cluster. We see it all the time”. The Netflix system has more than
2,000 “taste clusters” that measure content by tone, timbre and feeling to
predict what you will want to see when you log onto the site… Ms.
Nishimura said the breakout Hannah Gadsby (comedy) show, “Nanette,”
also appeals to fans of the documentary “Wild Wild Country”: Both explore
“what motivates people under pressure.” (Zinoman, 2018)
Elkins (2019) claims Netflix did not develop the idea of the taste clus-
ter, that the concept is well known and used in psychographic marketing.
The idea is that similar taste in entertainment will bind people from across
different geographies and cultures. These taste clusters are able to associ-
ate the platform “with a vision of algorithmic culture’s globalization that
is marked by interconnection and cosmopolitanism rather than stereotyp-
ing, global uniformity, and quantification” (Elkins, 2019, p. 377).
Problems of Access to Streaming

Streaming is increasing in its competition with pay-TV. For example, “For
the first time, in Brazil Netflix has more subscribers than the entire pay-TV
market. Comparitch estimates that [Netflix] had nearly 17.9M subs at the
end of Q2 (making Brazil its second biggest market!). In the last three
years, in Brazil [Netflix’s] subscriber base has doubled, while pay-TV has
lost 15%” (Hartman, 2020). There are several problems that might keep
potential audiences away from streaming television. The largest is proba-
bly the lack of broadband access for most Latin American populations.
Getting people to use streaming television in Latin America has not
been easy. After launching in 2011, Netflix had to contend with low use of
credit cards, distrust of using them online, a habit of expecting online
content to be free, low quality of Internet services (Meimaridis et al.,
2020), and limited access to broadband (Straubhaar et al., 2019). Easton
shows a notable increase in SVOD subscriptions from 2019 to 2020, from
2.8 million in Colombia (2019) to 3.9 million (2020), from 3.9 million to
4.9 million in Argentina, from 11.4 million to 14.9 million in Mexico, and
15.8 million to 19.9 million in Brazil. He further predicts steady increases
until at least 2025 (Easton, 2020).
Another problem is income or economic capital (Bourdieu, 1984).
Even if a typical monthly subscriber fee for a service like Netflix might
seem modest at around $8, it is more than most Latin Americans outside
the middle or even the upper-middle class can afford. As Chap. 5 notes,
there was quite a bit of social and economic mobility in Latin America
from the 1990s to the 2010s. In particular, a new lower-middle class grew
that might have aspired to have pay-TV, broadband Internet, or now
streaming.
The third problem is one of getting a decent quality streaming signal to
audiences or users without creating infrastructure bottlenecks to getting a
signal or even crashing local Internet service providers with too much
demand. Some streaming services have worked hard to address that. For
example, Netflix has added its own local servers at a number of locations
in Latin America.
When Netflix launched in Brazil, it delivered 100 percent of traffic to that

market directly from Open Connect boxes in Dallas and Miami. House of
Cards got there all the same, but more slowly and at greater expense. Netflix
has worked with local Internet service providers to install Open Connect
appliances at critical points throughout the country’s data infrastructure.
Netflix loads up each box—during off-hours—with one or two copies of
what nearby customers are most likely to watch, based on internal popularity
prediction models. That means one stream over a long distance, rather than
thousands, if not more. If Netflix guesses wrong, and a substantial audience
wants to watch something that’s not pre-loaded onto an Open Connect
appliance, it takes Netflix just 15 minutes to move a show from Amazon’s
cloud to one of its boxes. The result? Eighty-five percent of Brazilian Netflix
traffic today is local. (Barrett, 2016)
Netflix Strategy in Latin America

Latin American productions have a history of success in the world film
industry, including a record of Oscar nominations and international
awards for movies like the Brazilian City of God, the Argentine film The
Secret in Their Eyes, and the Mexican Pan’s Labyrinth and Roma (Lima,
2020). There is an even larger history of successful Latin American televi-
sion production and export, first within the region by Brazil, Mexico,
Argentina, Venezuela, and more recently, Colombia, then major exports
around the world by Mexico and Brazil from the 1990s on, as noted in
Chap. 3.
The existence of strong Latin American productions in both cinema
and television was quite probably part of Netflix’ move into Latin America
in 2011 not only to distribute U.S. films and series but also to produce
locally (Lima, 2020). Brazil and Mexico produced the first Netflix origi-
nals outside the United States. The number of original Netflix produc-
tions in the region has skyrocketed with Brazil preparing to release 30
Brazilian productions by the end of 2020 (Lima, 2020), and Mexico will
have 50 projects between 2019 and 2020 produced from the recently
inaugurated Mexico City office (Villafañe, 2020). From very early on,
Netflix invested in a Latin American homogenous audience. The vice pres-
ident of International Originals for Latin America at Netflix said, “Our
foray into Latin America in 2011 reflects our belief that the entire region,
from Brazil to Mexico, wants to see their own narratives reflected on the
screen” (Lima, 2020).
Netflix started producing original content for its Mexican audience in
2015 with the comedy Club de Cuervos, which was the most in demand
streaming title in 2017 in Mexico (Parrot Analytics, 2018). As media
scholar Mareike Jenner (2018) points out in Netflix and the Re-invention
of Television, “the show is a parody of telenovelas” attempting to address a
Mexican national audience by drawing on the national media history, the
telenovela format, and “a transnational audience familiar with Mexican
exports” (p. 227). Jenner claims the Mexican market is very significant for
Netflix, since Mexico is the dominant exporter of cultural products in
Latin America.
Netflix’s first major production in Brazil, 3%, was also a take-off on
telenovela tropes and styles, but in a future science fiction dystopia, set in
a Brazilian looking slum. Curiously, although it was critiqued in Brazil for
the quality of its script, costume design, and acting (Meimaridis et al.,
2020), in comparison to the relatively high production quality of TV
Globo, it was an international success for Netflix. So these first two Netflix
experiments were both successful. One created a big hit within Mexico
and for the region, while the other used the Brazilian production capabil-
ity to produce something that was more of a world hit, but less for the
nation and region.
Netflix is looking to grow their original productions. Erik Barmack,
vice president of International Originals, said Netflix is doing more than
ten productions per year in Mexico, and more than ten in Spain. “Some in
Colombia and Argentina, our goal is to have a broader supply of program-
ming from different parts of Latin American and different genres”
(Interview for AFP, 2018). In Brazil, Netflix intends to create about 30
productions in 2019–2021 in series, films, and documentaries (Meimaridis
et al., 2020). Additionally, Barmack said the platform has 130 million sub-
scribers, and that only 60% of their audience resides in the United States.
He also said Latin America is one of its biggest markets, which is why they
have 50 seasons of television series in Spanish between originals and
acquired licenses. The company’s interest in the market and the amount of
original productions in the region make a compelling case to study the
way it creates national productions.
In 2010, Netflix extended internationally, and as of 2020, Netflix had
183 million subscribers around the world (Zeitchik, 2020). To be clear,
the number of subscribers is only the number of accounts, not the number
of users. Each account can be shared with as many as four users. In addi-
tion, Netflix expansion strategies include the production of original con-
tent “Netflix originals.” In a conference early in 2020, CFO David Wells
indicated the company is set to spend over $8 billion in content in 2018
to have around 700 original TV shows in its collection (Spangler, 2018).
Out of those 700, 80 are non-English-language productions. Those num-
bers indicate Netflix has positioned itself as a major global TV service
provider and content producer in just the last ten years. As of 2018, Netflix
claimed it was ready to invest $8000 million in original content. Barmack
said during an interview in Mexico City that the company was investing
more money internationally than any other company before. He said it
was a unique thing to want to take some of those millions of dollars to
Mexico, Colombia, or Spain (Angeles, 2018). Out of about 700 interna-
tional originals that the company intended to debut in 2018, 20 were to
come out of Latin America. It is not difficult to understand why Netflix
would invest money and resources in Mexico and Brazil, given their status
as major content exporters in the region (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013).
Lobato (2019) who refers to transnational television as the “propensity
for television distribution systems to cross one or more national borders”
(p. 50), and global television as those services that are present on many
international markets claims that Netflix operates as a transnational, global,
and cosmopolitan company. What makes Netflix particularly transnational
and cosmopolitan, Lobato (2019) argues, is its vast multilingual content,
even if much is still Hollywood-centric, its translation services, and that by
aggregating a huge amount of international content, “Netflix also enables
a certain cosmopolitan consumption experience” (p. 70). (See Chap. 7 for
a more detailed discussion of cosmopolitanism).
In an attempt to locate Netflix in the broader television history and its
role as transnational television producer, Mareike Jenner (2018) coined
the term “grammar of transnationalism.’” The term borrows from Sabina

Mihelj’s (2011) “grammars of nationhood” to address the way Netflix’
in-house contents are created for a global audience instead of a national
one: “Unlike domestic broadcasters that seek domestic appeal first and
transnational appeal second, Netflix formulates its transnationalism from
the outset” (Jenner, 2018, p. 227). Jenner first identifies the streaming
company’s strategies to position itself as a producer of “quality” TV, and
its marketing efforts to push for a binge-watching mode of consumption.
Jenner also pinpoints Netflix’ attempts to deal with comedy and quality
comedies to insert itself into the popular realm more attuned with global
audiences.
Netflix and Quality Television

What is interesting, Jenner argues, is how Netflix relies on cultural distinc-
tions to create new content. “The removal of the laugh track, quality com-
edies “focus on more complex jokes that build over several episodes
instead. And the elimination of the catch phrase, help producers and cre-
ators make the move from the typical comedy to a quality ‘smart’ com-
edy” (p. 147). (We will examine the question of cultural distinction more
closely in Chap. 7).
The strategy seems to be replicated for international audiences. When
Netflix penetrated the Mexican market, it had in its catalogue a large vari-
ety of Televisa’s telenovelas. In Brazil, Netflix could not get access to TV
Globo’s telenovelas because Globo intended from the start to launch its
own service. In 2016, Televisa launched its own streaming platform, Blim,
and removed all of its content from Netflix. Netflix launched a couple of
video ads to mock Televisa’s decision and send a very important, and in
some ways elitist message: “we do not need your telenovelas.” The video
shows a man crying in front of a television screen. A woman appears and
asks, “what’s wrong?” “Netflix got rid of my favorite show.” The worried
woman asks, “which one? Breaking Bad, Orange is the New Black?” The
man replies: “No, Rebelde” (a popular telenovela from 2004). The woman
cannot contain her laugh. The idea to compare a telenovela from 2004
with Breaking Bad confirms that Netflix is not interested in losing that
type of programming, because it has already introduced Mexican audi-
ences to its quality content, which in their ad, is implied, it is clearly
superior.
Echoing Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of cultural distinction and taste

emerges the idea of quality television. Taking Kant’s definition of “pure
taste,” Bourdieu asserts there is a distinction between certain cultural
products, and there is a refusal to consume simple and shallow cultural
goods as opposed to legitimate art:
The refusal of what is easy in the sense of simple, and therefore shallow, and
cheap, because it is easily decoded and culturally, undemanding (…) every-
thing which offers pleasure that are too immediately accessible and so dis-
credited as childish or primitive. (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 486)
Similarly, Newman and Levine imply there are class distinctions embed-
ded in the concept of quality TV, in which one is for the more affluent
audiences, that not only have the economic capital to pay for an extra
cable subscription, like HBO or Showtime, but that can actually enjoy the
cinematic aesthetic and slow pace. Whereas, the old comedy is directed at
the masses. In that sense, Bourdieu comments on the rejection of simple
and unrefined culture: “Thus, Kant’s principle of pure taste is nothing
other than a refusal, a disgust, a disgust for object which impose enjoy-
ment and a disgust for the crude, vulgar taste which revels in the imposed
enjoyment” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 488).
Jenner claims Netflix is intentionally dealing with issues of diversity and
representation in the way that traditional broadcasts cannot further reas-
sure their quality status. For instance, shows like Unbreakable Kimmy
Schmidt, Grace and Frankie, and Master of None fall into what Jenner
(2018) calls a “strand overly committed to issues of gender and sexuality,
often with an emphasis on intersectionality” (p. 148). Likewise, the pat-
tern seems to follow for their international series, like the Mexican Casa de
las Flores. The show, although, a comedy and drama styled in the fashion
of telenovelas, deals with homosexuality, transphobia, drug consumption,
and race, issues that would never see the light of day in Televisa or
TV Azteca.
Some of the elements of the “grammar of transnationalism,” a strategy
Netflix deploys to navigate between domestication and dealing with a
transnational audience, are quality TV, language and translation, humor,
and choice of actors. As with the case of Club de Cuervos, Jenner (2018)
claims that although it follows the style of telenovela, a genre commonly
linked with low culture or popular culture in Latin America, by making a
parody out of it, “it positions itself as ‘quality’ comedy, assuming a
superiority to it” (p. 227). Another aspect Jenner rescues from Netflix’
tactics is its focus on multilingualism and its importance to reach transna-
tional audiences: “The multilingualism becomes particularly important
here: for example, Narcos employs Spanish to represent Colombian cul-
ture as well as linguistic realism. A consequence of this is its popularity in
Latin American markets. Thus, Netflix’s drive towards diversity is closely
linked with its transnational expansion project” (2018, p. 175).
Multilingualism on Netflix
Multilingualism serves two purposes for Netflix. First, it reinforces its
position as a quality television producer, and second, it appeals to interna-
tional audiences that might be able to connect with different characters
presented in American television. Francisco Ramos, vice president of
Spanish-language Originals for Netflix in Latin America indicated in an
interview that “language is no longer a barrier. Only ambition and quality
are barriers” (Lang, 2020). Hinting at Netflix’ strategy, Ramos said that
what he and the company are looking for is authentic local content that
should work in its own territory first, and then travel abroad (Lang, 2020).
A similar strategy seems to apply for commissions, Ramos stated that the
best way to get local stories is to find, support, and promote local produc-
tion talent: “The first thing is, we need to empower,” he said. “We must
give power to our local executives in each country so they can create the
fabric of local relationships with the producers from those regions”
(Lang, 2020).
One of Netflix’ biggest strategies for localization is its translation ser-
vices. Lobato (2019) indicates how much of this work is done by freelanc-
ers and subcontracts from firms all over the world. These firms are part of
the GILT sector, or globalization, internationalization, localization, and
translation, a new industry that has been growing since the 1990s with the
cable and satellite boom (Lobato, 2019). Aside from the strategies men-
tioned above to attract transnational audiences, Jenner indicates Netflix
utilizes translation and dubbing to domesticate its content. Netflix pro-
vides many different subtitle languages and less in dubbing, but it is
increasing its dubbing capabilities. As Lobato claims: “Netflix may well be
the most multilingual television service that has ever existed” (p. 120). In
that spirit, Netflix announced that nine out of ten people watching the
German Netflix original Dark were watching dubbed in English. In fact,
81% of people in English-speaking countries watched Dark dubbed (Gill,
2018). Todd Yellin, Netflix’s Vice President of Product, referred that the
company’s intention to reach wider international audiences are implicit in
the way they present their content: “At Netflix we think that’s ridiculous:
Internet TV and the technology involved, the distribution network
involved, makes it so that when we come out with a great new Original,
we flip a switch and everyone gets it at the same time” (quoted in
Gill, 2018).
As for Jenner’s “grammar of transnationalism” when it comes to Netflix
originals, the company differs greatly from traditional broadcasters. Netflix
produces its original content planning to have a transnational audience
that will consume it regardless of the country of origin. Whereas, it has
been the American tradition to produce TV shows thinking about the
American audience and then find the right markets for exportation. For
instance, The Crown and Stranger Things, although seemingly very
national, one about British history and the other about life and American
culture of the 80s have been major hits worldwide. The secret to their suc-
cess, Jenner claims, lays on using popular culture as points of reference and
ignoring problematic issues of the time (Reaganism and British Empire).
Somehow, both shows managed to be incredibly specific about the two
different countries but simultaneously appealing to international audiences.
In sum, Jenner argues Netflix originals, regardless of the country in
which they were produced all include at least some of the features of the
“grammar of transnationalism” such as: “genre [quality TV], a version of
history that relies heavily on postmodernism, aesthetics, a commitment to
liberal humanism or a negotiation of translation languages that takes
diversity in skill levels and cultural preferences into account” (p. 231).
This “grammar of transnationalism” is part of Netflix strategy to offer
international and quality content to the entire world. Lobato would argue
that the concrete commitment to high quality subtitling and subbing is
equally important (2019).
Netflix Production in Latin America

As seen in the timeline, it is clear that Netflix started a slow and perhaps
hesitant investment in Mexico that then turned into a full production
endeavor. When it first went into the region it only do so with agreements
to show programming from regional broadcasting companies with a long
history in Latin America such as TV Bandeirantes and TV Globo from
Brazil; Televisa and TV Azteca from Mexico; Caracol and RCTV from
Venezuela; and Telefe from Argentina. Four years later Netflix announces
its first Latin American original, Club de Cuervos from Mexico, and it
wasn’t until 2017, that it started producing La Casa de las Flores, Las
Leyendas, Diablero, and Luis Miguel, la serie, while it also released
Ingobernable. Then in 2018, besides, releasing Luis Miguel, la serie, the
reality show Made in Mexico, a Club de Cuervos spin-off, La Balada de
Hugo Sánchez, and the now extremely popular Casa de las Flores, Netflix
also initiated production for another four Mexican originals: Seis Manos,
Monarca, Crime Diaries: The Candidate, and Yankee.
A similar narrative can be seen with Brazilian originals on Netflix. In
2016 when Netflix announced its first Brazilian original, 3%, one of the
main press talking points was that the series was being directed by Oscar
nominee Cesar Charlone who had also worked in other Brazilian interna-
tional hits like Cidade de Deus and Ensaio sobre a Cegueira. Netflix’s
Barkmack highlighted the importance Netflix places on using local talent
to produce stories that audiences worldwide will be able to relate to: “We
support Brazilian talent, and we continue to recognize their appeal around
the world. Our members globally will get to enjoy this incredible story
with complex and rarely portrayed characters who have found a home at
Netflix,” said Barmack in a press release posted on Netflix official website.
The strategy seemed to work, data from Parrot Analytics showed that half
the audience of the first season of 3% was located outside Brazil
(Lang, 2020).
A year later, Netflix was ready to announce their second Brazilian pro-
duction, O Mecanismo, a fictional drama loosely based on the investigation
of corruption between the state and privately owned oil company
Odebrecht. O Mecanismo was created by the internationally recognized
Brazilian director José Padilha, who directed the critically acclaimed Elite
Squad and produced the first three seasons of Netflix original series
Narcos. Part of the strategy to advertise quality television included men-
tioning in a press release that O Mecanismo was a Zazen production: “one
of the most award-winning movie producers in Brazil” (The Futon Critic,
May 9, 2017). Then in 2019, Netflix indicated it was teaming up with
Brazil’s top creators to produce 30 originals in the following two years.
Ted Sarandos, Netflix chief content officer said: “Brazil has extraordinary
talent and a long tradition of great storytelling. It’s why we’re so excited
to increase our investment in the Brazilian creative community. These 30
projects, which are in various stages of production in different locations
across the country, will be made in Brazil and watched by the world” (as
cited in Whittingham, 2019).
Likewise, Netflix announced in 2018 they will premier six original titles
from Colombia between 2018 and 2019. These included the crime
anthology Crime Diaries: The Night Out profiling the case of young Luis
Andrés Colmenares who was murdered in Bogota in 2010. The first sea-
son of this anthology featured the assassination of Mexican presidential
candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Other original Netflix Colombia titles
include Wild District, Always a Witch and Green Frontier. When Netflix
announced its 2018 Colombian original catalogue, Reed Hastings, Netflix
CEO, was quoted on a press release saying: “Netflix is humbled and proud
to give a voice to local talent and creators, helping them to not only reach
Colombian viewers, but also to connect people all around the world to
their unique stories.” Hastings also mentioned how the streaming com-
pany is committed to diversifying their content “via an ever-evolving plat-
form that transcends borders. We’re excited to continue investing and
exploring in the country.” The emphasis on local productions and talent
was also visible in the additional video Netflix produced to announce the
new Colombian originals. The video, titled “From Colombia to the
world” (De Colombia para el mundo), featured clips from the newly
announced series and was accompanied by the text: “These are our stories.
These are our voices. This is our moment. From Colombia to the world.”
The promotional video reinforces Netflix’ strategy of localizing its content
while at the same time producing quality television to export to the rest of
the world.
Also worth noting are the regional production houses behind Netflix’
successes. The Bogota-based Dynamo provided production services to
some of the biggest Netflix hits in Latin America including the Crime
Diaries anthology (Mexico and Colombia), Green Frontier (Colombia),
Wild District (Colombia), Narcos (Colombia, Mexico), El Chapo (Mexico,
US), and Club de Cuervos: The Ballad of Hugo Sanchez (Mexico). Their
productivity might have been possible, thanks to a film incentive Colombia
established to draw foreign shoots (Hecht, 2013). In 2012, the Colombian
government passed a law to encourage local and foreign film productions.
The film companies that use Colombian film service providers and actors
are eligible to receive a return of 40% of the costs of all services expenses
and 20% of expenses for transportation (Steckenreiter, n.d.).
Moreover, it is interesting to see that Netflix has already at least two
very successful partnerships with the two major Hispanic networks in the
U.S., Telemundo and Univision. Netflix co-produced Luis Miguel, la serie

with Telemundo, and three seasons of El Chapo with Univision and it is
serving its Latin American market differently, releasing only one episode a
week of the Telemundo co-production. Likewise, Netflix seems to be
employing producers and directors with an already established reputation
for quality productions. For instance, Manolo Caro, showrunner for Casa
de las Flores, was the director for the acclaimed Elvira, te daría mi vida
pero la estoy usando in 2015 starring Cecilia Suárez (Casa de las Flores) and
Luis Gerardo Méndez (Club de Cuervos). The collaborations and use of
the same combination of actors seem to be working for Netflix. In addi-
tion, the brothers Billy and Fernando Rovzar, who had already produced
a couple of shows for HBO Latinoamérica, will be involved in the upcom-
ing Monarca. And the same is the case for Verónica Velasco, producer of
Ingobernable, who had already produced Capadocia (2008–2012) starring
Cecilia Suárez for HBO Latinoamérica and also produced Yankee for
Netflix.
Conclusion
Transnational programming, both from the U.S. and elsewhere, has been
further strengthened and transformed in Latin America by incoming
streaming platforms that offer another substantial layer of international
content, building on earlier layers of flow such as pay-TV and the sale of
many imported programs to broadcast stations and networks. We argue
that the concept of transversality can help us understand the novel nature
of the new streaming flows that add to but also cut across existing spaces
and existing television flows. They do that by directly targeting individual
audience members as part of groups by taste and genre preferences, or
what Netflix calls taste clusters. This direct targeting of individuals, guided
by algorithms using big data that the streaming companies gather about
their individual viewers’ program and genre preferences, is a strikingly dif-
ferent kind of flow, no longer bounded, limited, or controlled by lan-
guage, culture, or national policies promoting national or regional
programming or identity. This is why we have taken the concept of trans-
versality and redefined it to apply to this substantially new form of flow. It
is transverse because it cuts across traditional flows: from the U.S. to Latin
America, within the regional market of Latin America, and within the
national markets of the countries themselves. This is made possible by the
technological breakthrough of algorithms and big data, restructuring

what was possible with previous forms and layers of flow.
In other words, we considered the history of well-established national
media markets, particularly Mexico and Brazil, which have filled their own
national spaces with national production (see Chap. 3). We have examined
regional flows, including exports by Mexico and Brazil, plus others such as
Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, exporting telenovelas, and other genres
(see Chap. 3). And we examine how those ongoing dynamics are now
interacting with streaming platforms. Transversality means that global
streaming media companies make it possible for audiences and content to
travel between national and regional television flows motivated by taste
preferences regardless of geographic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.
One of the reasons as to why streaming has become global includes the
multiplicity of models available in different platforms. This chapter out-
lined and classified in a two-dimensional approach how national media
companies, international and regional pay-TV companies, international
and regional telecommunication companies, and a variety of standalone
services have joined the streaming industry. These models lead us into a
discussion about platform imperialism (Jin, 2017), in which companies
might offer global content and cater to national, regional, and global
audiences, but operations, control, and financial gain continue to be con-
trolled by the U.S. firms. While one of the upsides of the new global
streamers, particularly Netflix, is that they are paying for dozens of co-
productions, particularly in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, the ultimate
financial, production, and distribution decisions are made in the U.S.,
rather like the current pattern of global production with a new global dis-
tribution of labor by Hollywood (Miller et al., 2005), but with a great deal
more power to target individual consumers and promote their produc-
tions via algorithmic recommendations (Elkins, 2019; Lobato, 2019).
In this chapter, we have also laid out the strategies deployed by Netflix
to penetrate the Latin American market. We have concluded that in their
first major co-productions, Netflix seems to be taking a page from the
Televisa and Globo playbooks. Their first Netflix originals in the region
are Club de Cuervos in Mexico and 3% in Brazil using familiar telenovela
tropes and familiar actors. Also, worth noting is that these two countries
have a history of being major exporters to the region (Sinclair & Straubhaar,
2013), which makes them ideal in geographic and cultural terms as initial
partners for Netflix to create content for the region.
Likewise, Netflix has taken the concept of quality TV, originally devel-
oped by HBO, and cultural distinctions (Bourdieu, 1984) to create origi-
nals that appeal to an upper-middle class and elite transnational audience.
Building on our earlier analysis of why Latin Americans choose to watch
U.S. and European television and film in Chap. 4, we note that cultural
capital from education, family connections, travel, language learning, and
so on enable those who possess those forms of cultural capital to enjoy and
prefer more foreign programming. We can see that Netflix and the others
are following this already established culture pattern, reinforced by the
fact that these better-off Latin American audiences are also the ones most
likely to have home broadband or other forms of access that let them
afford to stream hours of high quality image television.
Another important point we make here is with regard to the issue of
multilingualism. That is the efforts Netflix has taken to translate, dub, and
make its content available in different languages. Multilingualism not only
positions Netflix as a transnational and global competitor, but it reinforces
its position as a quality TV producer. Further, it appears Netflix has found a
formula for success in its Latin American market, sharing actors, directors,
and producers with HBO Latinoamérica and relying on popular genres
such as telenovelas, narco dramas, the new action super series, and bio-series.
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CHAPTER 7
Netflix, Distinction, and Cosmopolitanism

Among Latin American Middle Class
and Elite Audiences
This chapter explores two theoretical implications that seem promising to

explain some of the television preferences of upper-middle-class and elite
audiences in Latin America. We discuss how both cultural distinction
(Bourdieu, 1984) and cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2004; Szerszynski & Urry,
2006; Hannerz & Ulf Hannerz, 1996) are useful for thinking about
streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney spread through
the world, in our particular interest here, through Latin America.
Bourdieu’s theories of capital help us explain how economic and social
advantages can provide access and sufficient cultural knowledge to con-
sume and understand foreign cultural products, specifically television and
film. He also discusses in his original work Distinction (1984) how those
in upper-middle or upper classes also use their greater store of cultural
capital to draw social distinctions between them and those in lesser classes
with lower cultural capital. Recently, sociologists have been drawing on
Bourdieu to examine the ways cosmopolitanism is related to stratification
at a global scale (Igarashi & Saito, 2014). We find both distinctions
through cultural capital and its relation to global stratification to be highly
useful in understanding why upper-middle and upper classes in Latin
America seem to be pursuing high status forms of television and film from
the U.S. and Europe, while most Latin Americans, as noted in Chap. 3,
are still relatively content with nationally produced television.

Switzerland AG 2021
Here we discuss what some scholars have defined as the cosmopolitan

disposition (Woodward et al., 2008; Igarashi & Saito, 2014; Vertovec &
Cohen, 2000; Hannerz, 1990; Beck, 2006) and the different types of
cosmopolitanism such as the concepts of multiple mobilities, cultural
omnivores, aesthetic cosmopolitanism, peripheral cosmopolitanism, as
well as outline how cosmopolitanism operates in Latin America. Using
TGI survey data from 2004 to 2014 in Latin America, this chapter empiri-
cally analyzes elite preferences and cosmopolitan dispositions like being
interested in other cultures and countries, love for travel, enjoying foreign
foods, and interest in international events with preference for U.S. and
European media and programming. The theories we lay out here suggest
cosmopolitans in Latin America will tend to be less interested in local or
national programming and will favor media from the United States and
Europe. And consequently, non-cosmopolitans will have a stronger pref-
erence for local media than for any other programming. However, we
discovered that cosmopolitans often function as cultural omnivores who
like television from all sources researcher by TGI Latina, national, regional,
U.S. and European, almost equally well.
Distinction
In Chap. 4, we argued that upper-middle and elite classes are often drawn
to foreign culture, both by processes of historical class formation and by
contemporary accumulation of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986).
Many upper-middle and elite class members come from a system of colo-
nial and post-colonial education and socialization that oriented them to
the cultures of the U.S. and Europe (Dos Santos, 1973; see Chap. 4 for
more details). Periods of economic expansion, such as the 1950s–1960s or
the Latin American economic growth from the late 1990s through
mid-2010s tended to expand the middle, upper-middle, and even to some
degree, elite classes, as education and economic jobs opportunities grew,
as more people worked in international settings, traveled, and learned
other languages (See Chap. 5 for details).
Bourdieu’s concepts (1984) of cultural, economic, and linguistic capi-
tals lay out a widely used theoretical structure for examining the economic
or social advantages and gains that can be perceived to be accessible
through the use of foreign cultural production, such as foreign television,
as well as the necessary social and economic conditions to access and enjoy
such programming. Cultural capital essentially reflects a person’s
7 NETFLIX, DISTINCTION, AND COSMOPOLITANISM AMONG… 205
knowledge of things that society considers important, that help one

advance in society, and that help distinguish one person from another in
social and cultural terms. It can be broad, like knowing a great deal about
the history of nations and the world, or specific to fields, like knowing
about the fine arts or mechanical engineering (Bourdieu, 1986). Cultural
capital is primarily learned from parents and education. Early cultural capi-
tal studies observed, “how the success of children in school depended on
the level of education of their parents,” related in part to educated par-
ents’ “intimate familiarity with highbrow culture” (Prieur & Savage,
2013, p. 247). It can also be developed from peers and work (Bourdieu,
1984), and increasingly, from the media themselves. Lindell and Danielsson
argue that “media may allow one to cultivate cosmopolitan capital, defined
here as a distinct form of embodied cultural capital” (Lindell & Danielsson,
2017, p. 51).
Bourdieu indicates there is a sort of competition for status during the
consumption of legitimate cultural products as well as for refined cultural
practices (1984). He argues that there is a visible difference in preference
for certain types of music, food, sports, politics, literature, and even hair-
style among different classes. According to Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984),
those preferences are based on cultural capital, a set of knowledge, disposi-
tions, and preferences, acquired first from our families (do they listen to
classical or pop music?), then from peers (what knowledge, cultural prefer-
ences, and cultural consumption do we learn from our friends?), school
(which concentrates on teaching us the cultural capital our societies want
us to know, or which is required to get ahead in the current economy),
jobs, work colleagues, and so on. In that way, through taste and cultural
capital, which guides their cultural consumption choices, individuals con-
firm their belonging to upper socioeconomic classes, and those classes as a
whole gain tools to reinforce their domination of society (Prieur & Savage,
2013), through prestige, access to better work, access to key positions of
decision-making, and dominance in the economy. However, cultural capi-
tal is not fixed, but it evolves in relationship with the fields it is related to
(Prieur & Savage, 2013), such as education, cultural consumption, and
the valuation of different cultural areas, such as the high arts, popular cul-
ture, folk culture, and so on. Some cultural sociology research tries to tie
it in an ongoing way to familiarity with and preference for the elite arts,
such as ballet, opera, and classical music, but a key point for the argument
of this chapter is that what is considered desired cultural capital evolves
over time (Prieur & Savage, 2013):
All Bourdieu’s concepts were relational. The concept of cultural capital

needs to be placed in the wider context of Bourdieu’s field analysis in which
the very positioning of cultural tastes and propensities is always contested.
Bourdieu and co-workers (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Bourdieu 1996)
insisted on that a capital is always linked to a field, which is always in motion.
(2013, pp. 249–250)
A recent analysis notes that the fields that define cultural capital used to
be seen in national terms but are being globalized (Lindell & Danielsson,
2017). In fact, the same authors argue that cosmopolitanism can be seen
as a form of capital: “When analysed as a form of capital, cosmopolitanism
becomes set of socially recognised resources and skills used to navigate in
a globalising world, embodied and reproduced in privileged groups in
society” (Lindell & Danielsson, 2017, p. 52).
A key related debate for us is whether cultural capital is now more
about the distinction offered for a preference for elite culture, or whether
elite cultural capital is itself being redefined in terms being more about
omnivorous consumption of culture across the old distinctions of high,
mass or pop, and folk culture (Martin-Barbero, 1987; Peterson, 1992).
Martin-Barbero and Canclini both argued that part of the dynamic that
constitutes Latin American hybridity is not only about the interaction
between local and foreign cultures, but also about the interaction between
high, mass, and folk cultures, in the cultural industries and also in the lives
of Latin Americans as participants in culture (Canclini, 1995).
Scholars outside Latin America have also begun to argue that what
provides distinction to upper-middle and elite classes, those with educa-
tion, travel, family experience with a range of cultures, and so on is no
longer whether they like opera, but whether they understand and enjoy a
broad range of cultures, from high to low (Friedman, 2012; Peterson,
2005), and as we will argue, from local to national to global. Bourdieu
(1984) referred to this as the ongoing transformation of the social (and
cultural) space. Better educated people still tend to like elite cultural arts,
but research shows that they increasingly like many forms of culture,
which some have argued is a shift from cultural distinction closely related
to fine arts to distinction as the ability to like a wide range of cultural arts
and products, to being cultural omnivores (Peterson, 1992; Peterson &
Kern, 1996), which we will discuss below.
As we developed the concept in Chap. 4, cultural capital in terms of
knowledge of other countries is required both to understand and to enjoy
the culture provided by foreign television programming. To understand a

series about Danish social welfare systems (Jacobsen et al., 2020) or les-
bian culture as reflected in The L Word, which Brazilian participants once
discussed knowledgeably in a binational U.S.-Brazilian communications
seminar attended by Straubhaar, a viewer needs to know enough about
those cultures and those issues to understand what is going on in the dra-
mas. That is both conceptually and empirically connected with the educa-
tional achievement of either the participant of the study or his/her parents,
who also pass on cultural capital (Wilson, 2002; Bourdieu, 1984; Sullivan,
2001). Education, as related to class, is not always the best predictor of
cultural preferences and consumption; age, gender, and ethnicity were
found to have strong roles as well (Prieur & Savage, 2013). As we will see
below, cosmopolitan attitudes, in addition to capital, per se, also have a
strong role in predicting a certain kind of broad-ranging, omnivorous cul-
tural consumption.
However, Chap. 4 showed how education was empirically connected to
a preference for U.S. film and television. In 2004, as indicated in Fig. 4.4 in
Chap. 4, 54% of Latin Americans with a higher educational achievement
responded that they were interested or very interested in U.S. programs,
while 41% of those with a lower educational achievement indicated such
interest (the average was 48%). This pattern held up in every country,
when examined individually. Cultural capital is also a predictor of interest
in European programs and films. As with the U.S. programs and films,
Fig. 4.5 in Chap. 4 showed that from 2004 through 2014, Latin Americans
with higher educational achievement were significantly more interested in
European foreign television programming, while those with lower educa-
tional achievement showed significantly less interest in this TV program-
ming origin.
Cosmopolitanism
A useful concept to come out of the literature of globalization is cosmo-
politanism, which has been defined differently by various scholars. Hannerz
(1990) defines it as a perspective of state of mind. Szerszynski and Urry
(2002, 2006) identify it as reflecting consumers of cultural products from
different places. Hall (2002) defines it as competence in different cultural
languages or being knowledgeable about different tastes (Woodward
et al., 2008). According to them, there are potentially three levels of cos-
mopolitanism, the macro, the political, and the cultural. At the macro
level, “cosmopolitanism refers to an ambition or project of supra-national

state building” (Woodward et al., 2008, p. 208). At the political level,
cosmopolitanism is a position that embraces diversity, multiplicity, and
hybridity.
Beck (2006) explains that cosmopolitanism is a multidimensional pro-
cess that involves the creation of multiple loyalties and the spread of dif-
ferent transnational lifestyles, among others, of which Netflix’s global
programming would be a prime contemporary example. He indicates that
interdependence between people in various metropolis of the world inten-
sifies by their production and consumption. In the same vein, Szerszynski
and Urry (2002) claim cosmopolitanism is a cultural condition that
involves knowledge of places, people, and culture distant from the people
under consideration. They identified six predispositions and practices of
cosmopolitan people, which involve (1) extensive mobility, (2) the capac-
ity to consume many places and environments, (3) curiosity about many
places, peoples, and cultures, (4) willingness to take risks in encountering
the “other,” (5) skills to be able to interpret images of others, and (6)
openness to other peoples and cultures (Szerszynski & Urry, 2006). At
the cultural level, “cosmopolitanism is defined by an openness to other
cultures, values and experiences. Such a cultural outlook is identified as
underpinned by new types of mobilities of capital, people and things; elab-
orated, flexible and heterogeneous outlooks and modes of corporeal
engagement grounded in cultural-symbolic competencies founded in a
type of ‘code-switching’ capacity” (Woodward et al., 2008, p. 209).
Another approach to cosmopolitanism distinguishes between an ideal-
istic approach to cosmopolitanism, in which people are genuinely con-
cerned about other countries, seek more information about them, what to
help with crises, and so on. In contrast, a more consumerist approach to
cosmopolitanism focuses on consuming foreign goods and food, as well as
traveling abroad for personal pleasure (Woodward et al., 2008).
Cosmopolitanism and Globalization

Woodward et al. join the debate on whether cosmopolitanism is related to
issues of globalization. They claim historical and empirical research indi-
cates there is no proof that globalization is “a necessary and sufficient
condition for the emergence of cosmopolitanism” (p. 210). For them,
international travel is not a precondition in order to possess cosmopolitan
attitudes and values. They agree with Szerszynski and Urry (2002, 2006)
that cosmopolitanism is more common in people who engage imagina-

tively with other people, places, and events outside their local setting. This
imaginative engagement can come from exposure to foreign television
programming, films, or news. They believe it is through representations of
the world that cosmopolitan values surface. In this argument, actual physi-
cal travel or contact with foreign people is not required to become
cosmopolitan.
However, the opportunities to acquire such cultural practices are likely
connected to existing wealth and education, since those enable people to
acquire the knowledge and dispositions noted above. For example, with
the arrival of the streaming platform Netflix to Latin America in 2011, this
new form of access to international television and film in the region has
been restricted to a minority of the population. For instance, in Mexico in
2017, only 50% of households had access to the Internet. The average
percentage of households with Internet access in Latin America is 71.7%
(Islas, 2018). Households with broadband, which is essentially required
for use of Netflix, are even more restricted (ITU, 2016).
Cosmopolitanism and Bourdieu

Woodward et al. use Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to explain the cosmo-
politan disposition. If we follow the idea that people who adhere to cos-
mopolitan values and attitudes need to be fluent in and knowledgeable of
different cultures and tastes, then that is easily comparable to the idea of
dispositions. Bourdieu (1984) explains the habitus as a shared set of dis-
positions, principles that generate and organize practices. Dispositions are
also understood as tendencies, propensities, or inclinations, either among
groups or within an individual. Woodward et al. indicate that it is impor-
tant to understand the concept of disposition, as it will help us understand
how cosmopolitanism develops on an individual level:
The most important aspect of a disposition is its capacity to enable agents to

view events, objects and things in culturally unique but nevertheless struc-
turally grounded ways, bringing to bear a particular set of cultural under-
standings on the world. Thus, it is a disposition which can allow some agents
to think, feel and act in ways that might be called ‘cosmopolitan.’ (p. 211)
In the same vein, Igarashi and Saito (2014) using a Bourdieusian

approach linking education to the cosmopolitan disposition claim that the
education system serves to legitimate cosmopolitanism as a desirable dis-

position at the global level. In that sense, education systems contribute to
institutionalize cosmopolitanism as a cultural capital, to which access is
structurally unequal. Additionally, Vertovec and Cohen (2000) indicate
that social practices are also part of the cosmopolitan disposition, in addi-
tion to values and attitudes. Thus, the cosmopolitan can be acted and
performed. Hannerz (1990) likewise refers to the cultural skills necessary
to operate around different systems of meaning. This is a particularly cru-
cial aspect to us, since we see a certain repertoire of knowledge as likely to
let people engage with the globalized cultural offerings that a distribution
service like Netflix has. It is also interesting to think that Netflix viewers
who engage with the more globalized parts of Netflix’s catalog may also
become more cosmopolitan in the process. Poster (2011) argues:
If the figure of the cosmopolitan suggests an upper or middle class liberal

persona, then the recent articulations of global culture are well beyond
those relatively restricted limits, extending the imagined community of par-
ticipants quite broadly across the planet and throughout all social strata.
(2008, p. 699)
Whether people can become more cosmopolitan by consuming media

without the opportunities for education, travel, learning other languages,
and meeting people from other cultures face to face that are often associ-
ated with the idea of cosmopolitanism is an interesting question. As we
shall see below, what our data suggest is that people self-select to engage
with more international content on television in part on the basis of tradi-
tional predictors like education and language exposure, but also on the
basis of cosmopolitan attitudes, per se, which perhaps can be acquired
through multiple paths.
Skrbis et al. (2004) suggest there are individuals who are carriers of
cosmopolitanism and have particular sets of attitudes, values, behaviors,
and practices that differentiate them from the rest (Woodward et al.,
2008). They developed a cosmopolitan scale to explore how cosmopoli-
tanism is identified in everyday life in terms of beliefs and feelings. After
conducting a survey in Australia, the authors found that there are distinc-
tive domains for the expression of cosmopolitan attitudes. “These domains
represent two central facets of cosmopolitanism as it can be quantitatively
measured: first, the increased flow of cultural goods and an openness to
cultural difference and, second, the commitment to cultural diversity and
the acknowledgement of human rights” (p. 222). They found that the
most positive feelings toward the global are those in the area of consump-
tion, choice, and cultural openness. The authors also found different levels
of cosmopolitanism defined by the level and form of engagement. The
authors agree that cosmopolitanism develops from the expression of uni-
versal sentiments, which most people have access to, but they are influ-
enced and mediated by the particulars of each individual, such as
sociocultural location, their position in the discourses around the nation.
Multiple Mobilities
Another important contribution to the literature on cosmopolitanism
comes from Szerszynski and Urry (2006). The two are concerned with the
role of multiple mobilities on how the world is seen and lived. For them,
a cosmopolitan individual has to be a sort of connoisseur of places, people,
and cultures. They argue one of the most significant implications of the
cosmopolitan condition is the way an increased number of people are now
inhabiting the world at a distance. Szerszynski and Urry indicate there are
three types of travel related to the cosmopolitan condition. First is the
physical, bodily travel, easily understandable as the act of physically visiting
other geographical regions; second is the imaginative travel, the ability to
be transported via images of people and places often found in media; and
third is virtual travel, the ability of being in a different space through tech-
nology, as in video calls. The authors claim that because travel in these
three modalities has increased since the 1950s, the cosmopolitan condi-
tion emerged. They also place special emphasis on the imaginative travel
that television allows: “Television has transformed all our ‘little worlds’
without the need to move corporeally outside one’s home” (p. 117). That
argues for how a deliberately globalized service like Netflix might acceler-
ate the cosmopolitan project.
Being aware of other people and places, Szerszynski and Urry argue,
encourages the development of a notion of “panhumanity,” which is the
combination of a universal notion of human rights and cosmopolitan
awareness. Furthermore, the increase in physical, imaginative, and virtual
travel, according to the authors, transformed the conditions of visuality–
the capacity to imagine how other places look like. Szerszynski and Urry
argue “transformation of visual channels through their shift to the media
and to communications technology was actually helping to create the cul-
tural conditions for cosmopolitan citizenship” (p. 119). The authors make
comparisons with the work of Benedict Anderson (2006), in which he

argues the cultural industry had to make a conscious effort to produce one
imagination of the nation, that would make people living far away to feel
connected to the same concept of the nation-state. In that sense,
Szerszynski and Urry conceive that if media can construct an imaginary of
a global nation, people will eventually think of themselves as global citi-
zens. Additionally, the authors claim the language of cosmopolitanism is a
language of mobility. Being able to be mobile produces an aptitude to
understand aesthetic judgment, which stimulates global tourism and the
notions of cosmopolitanism.
Cultural Omnivores
Another term to arise out of the literature concerning consumption, cos-
mopolitanism, and distinction is that of the cultural omnivore. The term
was first coined by Richard Peterson (Peterson & Simkus, 1992; Peterson,
2005). According to Maguire (2015), cultural omnivores are people who
have diverse consumption tastes which range from elite to popular, and
they differ from “univores,” or people who only consume either high-
brow, middlebrow, or lowbrow cultural products. Although Maguire indi-
cates cultural omnivores are not necessarily only those with high
socioeconomic status, cultural omnivores are usually among this demo-
graphic. In this day and age, it is hard to find cultural snobs, or people
who only consume highbrow cultural items, although research indicates
that it is more common in some countries than others (Prieur &
Savage, 2013).
The concept of the cultural omnivore guides sociologists and cultural
researchers to reconsider the relationship between class, taste, and cultural
capital. Maguire also notes that methodological research on the subject
relies heavily on survey data to account for volume and composition of
cultural products. “The research broadly confirms that individuals with
higher levels of education and income, and in higher-status social posi-
tions, are more likely to have a greater diversity and volume of tastes than
others. Omnivorous tastes are also more common in urban and younger
consumers” (p. 214). Qualitative research on the matter additionally indi-
cates, the omnivore consumer discriminates toward taste, limiting their
openness to legitimate culture (Warde et al., 2008). Moreover, Maguire
indicates there is more to learn about cultural omnivores and their rise as
a dominant group that defines and establishes what is considered good
taste. She indicates that the factors that led to this new consumer group
include “the expansion of higher education, the commercialization of
highbrow cultural forms, and the aestheticization of everyday life, which
have increased the accessibility of elite culture; and globalization, liberal-
ism, and identity politics, which have increased the accessibility and legiti-
macy of diverse cultural forms and practices” (p. 215).
Maguire warns that how omnivores’ tastes and other factors are affect-
ing shifting patterns of taste in other non-Western cultures is understud-
ied. “Also under examined are the mechanisms involved in constructing,
legitimating, and circulating new definitions and repertoires of good taste,
and new, socially esteemed mentalities about taste and consumption”
(p. 215). These mechanisms, Maguire indicates, involve media and life-
styles that target high-status consumers and cultural intermediaries.
Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and other global streaming television
services are emerging as the newest such mechanism.
Maguire additionally cautions about the optimistic views surrounding
cultural omnivores and the democratization of culture and acceptance of
difference and openness toward other cultures. However, taste and culture
remain important instruments for social stratification: “If knowledge of
and participation in highbrow culture are no longer exclusive markers of
distinction, then omnivorousness—the connoisseurship of seemingly any-
thing—offers a means of demonstrating distinction without appearing to
be antidemocratic, of being elite but not (appearing to be) elitist” (p. 215).
Similarly, Lindell and Danielsson argue that cosmopolitanism, per se, is
becoming another form of cultural capital that elites use to distinguish
themselves from others and to maintain power in social spaces (2017).
Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism
Cicchelli et al. (2016) argue there are major differences among cosmo-
politans and cultural omnivores. More in line with the argument of this
paper, Cicchelli et al. indicate “cosmopolitanism serves strategically—even
unconsciously—as a social marker of status and thus as a barrier between
groups involved in power relations or struggle” (p. 58). Even though the
proponents of the cultural omnivore indicate it is a component of the
cosmopolitan disposition, Cicchelli et al. claim they have different func-
tions: “If the cosmopolitan virtues of openness do not prevent omnivores
to accumulate cultural capital associated with mechanisms of distinction,
both figures would not overlap” (p. 59). Therefore, they propose the
notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism to differentiate from the elitist charac-

teristic of the cultural omnivore and consider the place of minorities and
their tastes. The authors define aesthetic cosmopolitanism as “a strong
attraction and curiosity with respect to cultural practices and exotic prod-
ucts from elsewhere, having or not having localized references—authentic
or reinvented ones, and […] by its hybridization with national cultural
forms or with localized individual appropriations” (p. 60). They also add
another dimension, which involves wanting to know and understand the
Other in order to understand oneself.
Cicchelli et al. have theorized five characteristics of the aesthetic cosmo-
politan, which include (1) comparing national and foreign cultural prod-
ucts and recognizing differences; (2) shaping and reshaping aesthetic
criteria without attaching hierarchical value; (3) creating judgments and
hierarchies regarding the quality of national and foreign cultural products;
(4) developing competencies to manipulate different aesthetic codes; and
(5) preferring other cultures because they are Other. Of these five charac-
teristics, number one, recognizing the differences between national and
foreign cultural products, number three, creating judgments about their
qualities, and number five, coming to prefer the foreign cultural products
of the other, are very relevant to our investigation of why some Latin
Americans come to prefer foreign television.
Cicchelli et al. further indicate these conditions are not necessarily lin-
ear and conceive them as a set of capabilities: “reading, understanding,
deciphering cultural codes, reshaping taste and distaste, and bearing the
risk of novelty. All those skills may lead to the facilitation of living in a
global world” (p. 61). However, the extent to which an individual can
acquire all the capabilities depends on previous cultural and social experi-
ences, which further contribute to social stratification.
Peripheral Cosmopolitanism
Cicchelli et al. additionally caution about the complexities involved in
transnational and comparative studies of cosmopolitanism in non-Western
realities. They agree cosmopolitanism is in itself already ethnocentric and
the theoretical foundation remains culturally situated in the global West.
“Cultural globalization forces us to wonder if those frameworks can also
catch on with non-Western and southern realities, where demographic
trends, labor market transformations, historical trajectories (post-colonial),
education and gender issues, strong regional disparities, political
institutions are very different” (p. 64). In order for their concept of aes-
thetic cosmopolitanism to consider non-Western local ways of life, the
idea of peripheral cosmopolitanism (Prysthon, 2001) has to be evoked.
Prysthon (2001) indicates a new concept of cosmopolitanism has to be
understood from the post-colonial and Third World context of Latin
America. “Postmodern cosmopolitanism has to be constituted as a periph-
eral cosmopolitanism, due to problems of representation and because of
the inherent cosmopolitan experience lived in most of the peripheral
regions” (p. 35). In that sense, Cicchelli et al. indicate precautions must
be taken when applying a European or Western framework to other
regions with different historical-cultural conditions: “Attempts at applying
the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical formulae of research in non-
Western and Southern societies accentuate the mismatch between a frame-
work that was envisioned in Western and Northern societies and is now
enforced in another context” (p. 64).
Cosmopolitans and Omnivores in Latin America

Most relevant to the focus of this chapter is the issue of cosmopolitans and
omnivores in Latin America. Danielle Hedegard (2015) studies the impli-
cations of the presence of global culture within elite consumers. She indi-
cates global culture represents an important component of high-status
taste around the world. More importantly, consumption of global culture
or international products “have become elite status symbols in semi-
peripheral societies, where they are deployed to demonstrate cosmopoli-
tanism” (p. 53). In the context of Latin America, where societies are
highly stratified by socioeconomic status, cosmopolitan dispositions, prac-
tices, and consumption have to be understood differently from the
European or North American context. Hedegard attempts to explain how
elite valorizations of global culture work in the context of Brazil, and how
and why certain international cultural objects are framed as high culture.
She indicates Brazil has a long history of its own cultural practices and
products, as we have noted in Chap. 3.
Indeed, the emergence of genres like bossa nova, samba, tropicália,
among others, makes Brazil a culturally rich country. Nonetheless, its
position in the semi-periphery (Wallerstein, 1976), or as a middle-income
developing country (Bank, 2016), implies that elite culture will inevitably
tend to form around international culture and products. This ties into one
of the original aspects of dependency theory in Latin America, that elite
desires to consume foreign culture and products at the same levels as peo-
ple in the US or Europe would lead to a dualistic development in which
they drew national resources to themselves (and away from those in poorer
classes) to permit that, thereby worsening income inequality (Dos
Santos, 1973).
Hedegard asks what role foreign culture plays in elite tastes in Brazil
and how national or local culture fit among elites. She analyzes articles
using content analysis and interpretative frames, looking at Brazil’s most
popular highbrow publications, the magazine BRAVO! and the cultural
section of the national newspaper O Globo. The study delves into how elit-
ist cultural outlets construct high culture and elite tastes through the use
of cosmopolitan and local Brazilian cultural objects. Her findings indicate
that elite taste culture in Brazil integrates both popular and highbrow
culture from around the world (but overwhelmingly from Europe and the
United States) with Brazilian culture. “To become valorized as elite cul-
ture, non-Brazilian objects must retain their transnational connections
and non-Brazilian meanings while simultaneously becoming integrated
into Brazilian lifestyles. Non-Brazilian objects are deployed to demon-
strate transnational continuity between lifestyles in Brazil and the US and
Western Europe” (p. 53). Hedegard argues the use of symbols of European
and American culture and brands, such as Apple, Starbucks, and so on, are
deployed to indicate the connection of local elites, who valorize the same
lifestyle, culture, and practices of the consumers of the “First World,” as
noted above with the idea of dualistic development by local elites (Dos
Santos, 1973).
Elite or highbrow taste is traditionally those of high-class European
culture and genres such as opera, ballet, theater, classical music, and clas-
sical literature. Yet, the concept of cultural omnivores, those who have
enough cultural capital to enjoy highbrow culture and popular culture
such as jazz, rap, rock, and so on, has emerged as consumption patterns
shift around the world. In that regard, Hedegard notes omnivore tastes
are deployed to maintain status distinctions in two different ways:
First, elite culture uses within genre distinctions—i.e. preference for rare or
esoteric versions of cultural objects less accessible to broader society. For
example, elite cuisine now uses the concepts of authenticity, exoticism, his-
torically connectedness, and place-specificity to differentiate elite versions of
common foods such as the hamburger from popular versions (Johnston &
Baumann, 2007). Elite rap in the U.S. is similarly framed as place based
(Cheyne & Binder, 2010). High cultural capital actors choose intellectual or
ambiguous comedy over more straightforward varieties (Friedman, 2011).
The second mechanism is elite use of nuanced styles of appreciation and
modes of consumption (Holt, 1998). Hanquinet, Roose, and Savage (2014)
find that the highbrow disposition toward the formal properties of art
(Bourdieu, 1984) may have given way appreciation of art for its social cri-
tique and postmodern qualities. However, Daenekindt and Roose (2014)
find that highly educated actors prefer to experience art for its formal prop-
erties rather than functional properties or its connection to social issues and
postmodern concerns. High cultural capital actors can also prefer active
physical contact and experiences rather than passive viewing. (Hedegard,
2015, p. 53)
Furthermore, Hedegard is concerned with how little work has been

done regarding cultural capital and cultural omnivores outside the United
States and Europe. Consequently, she studies Brazilian elite culture, and
again warns about how in highly stratified societies the situation changes.
The context, she argues, is different because in the United States lower
and lower-middle classes have more easy access to social mobility through
education, rising incomes, and credit loans that allow them to rise socially
and consume products aimed at higher classes. Brazil, however, like most
Latin American countries has always experienced high levels of economic
inequality. She indicates credit loans are not as widespread, therefore non-
elites have a harder time participating in and obtaining pleasure from
products and elite culture. “This situation may mean that maintaining
elite taste boundaries requires less exclusionary work that it does in the
United States, where a large middle class can acquire the cultural objects
and styles of the upper class” (p. 54).
Hedegard initiates her discussion looking at how even within national
cultural products there are taste distinctions among upper and lower
classes. For instance, in national music bossa nova, samba, and chorinho
are preferred by Brazilian elites, while, funk, rap, and pagode are preferred
by the general population. “This work predicts elite taste will reflect class,
race, and region-based distinctions within Brazil, and that elite taste will
reject nationalized cultural practices in favor of euro-derived culture”
(p. 55). In that sense, Hedegard indicates how previous work has estab-
lished that upper-middle classes in Brazil utilize visits to Disney World and
shopping trips to Miami to reinforce status, or how some in this socioeco-
nomic class follow Buddhism to assert their cosmopolitan cultural capital.
The research Hedegard conducted on two major elite publications in

Brazil found that there is higher coverage for non-Brazilian cultural news,
than for Brazilian produced culture. From that, over 80% of the non-
Brazilian coverage was focused on European and American cultural news,
while coverage for other Latin American cultural news only accounted for
little over 7%. Thus, Hedegard claims the concept of the cosmopolitan
omnivore does not carry the same connotations in the Latin American
context as in the European: “Transnational taste is not indiscriminate,
broad, or embracing of difference. It establishes connections (i.e. symbolic
or social) between actors or groups in distinct societies that have meaning
due to similarity over difference among an ‘imagined community’”
(p. 56). Her findings indicate how the Brazilian press covers and frames
the issue of cosmopolitanism, giving preference to stories and articles orig-
inating in the United States or Europe or about artists, products, or art
that originates in the United States or Europe.
The Brazilian elite press legitimizes transnational culture as an elite
taste. Articles published on BRAVO! demand that the reader be familiar
with European or American culture, since they fail to provide context.
This magazine in particular, celebrates a wealthy, educated, and white life-
style of the well-off Southern part of the country. The articles assumed
that the reader had a high level of education and was accustomed to travel
outside of Brazil, two things that are highly restricted to upper-middle and
upper classes in Brazil. “Almost all articles required prior knowledge of
U.S. culture. This rendered even articles dedicated to widely accessible
objects—like Hollywood films—opaque to all but well-educated readers”
(p. 60). In theoretical terms, this means that readers had to have fairly
extensive cultural capital about the U.S. We find that the same conditions
seem to apply to a noted preference for television and film from the U.S.
Hedegard’s research suggests Brazilian elite culture places high value
on both popular and high culture coming from the United States and
Europe, while it only considers a subset of Brazilian culture as elite.
Cultural products coming from the rest of Latin American, Asia, and
Africa are mostly ignored or not regarded as having high cultural value.
The articles discussed in Hedegard’s work attempt to equate Brazilian
elites with their counterparts in the United States and Europe, separating
them from the rest of Brazilians who do not have access to foreign culture,
thus functioning as a tool of social distinction. “In the case of elite valori-
zation of popular global culture, objects must retain their foreign meaning
and be integrated into local lifestyles in order to give off clear signals of
status through transnational connection” (p. 62). In that way, being able
to access, consume, and understand foreign culture is regarded as “inter-
national capital” or “cosmopolitan capital,” since it has similar functions as
cultural capital. Therefore, omnivore consumption in Brazil is not linked
to openness to other cultures, or appreciation of other lifestyles, because
the value placed on European and American culture does not exist outside
Brazilian culture, which already celebrates these lifestyles or finds them
aspirational. “Instead, it relied on existing cultural knowledge that ‘reso-
nated’ with a cultural code that valorized a wealthy, white lifestyle within
Brazil (O’Dougherty, 2002; Sheriff, 2001) and emphasized a shared cul-
tural community that aligned elite Brazilians with U.S. and European cul-
tural consumers” (p. 62). Hence, knowledge of and consumption of
transnational cultural products is deployed as a form of cultural capital
among elites in Brazil. The reasoning behind this logic perhaps lies on the
assumption of the world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 1974) in which core
nations influence and control peripheral nations. If elites can associate
their values and attitudes with those of the core nations, then they also
reinforce their sociocultural status with that of the nations they relate to.
Cosmopolitanism and Globalized Media Preferences

While Bourdieu offered a useful framework in understanding audience
media preferences that pursue cultural distinction related to cultural capi-
tal, cosmopolitanism also provides another useful perspective in examining
audience behaviors according to one’s socialization. Simply put, cosmo-
politanism considers people’s relationship toward cultural Others where
cognitions, practices, and affinities are manifested in favor of cultural
diversity beyond one’s locality and community (Türken & Rudmin,
2013). Cosmopolitans, in other words, express an orientation, a commit-
ment, or an attachment to a global culture where attitudes and interests
transcend those of their current countries (Hannerz, 2006). Several inter-
connected spheres embody the cosmopolitan spirit (e.g., moral, political,
and cultural orientations; see Etinson, 2010), but cultural openness stands
as the dominant domain in cosmopolitanism (Etinson, 2010; Riefler &
Diamantopoulos, 2009; Türken & Rudmin, 2013). In this regard, learn-
ing, interests, and/or the willingness to explore various nations and cul-
tures are key in understanding cosmopolitanism. Interest in consuming
things from other cultures is sometimes referred to as banal cosmopolitan-
ism (Igarashi & Saito, 2014), since it is more material, less about ideas.
In a media environment that is globalized in part due to the import of

cultural products like television programs and films produced in countries
other than one’s own, people can achieve a sense of banal cosmopolitan-
ism where the exposure to or consumption of mediated cultures makes-up
for the lack of economic, cultural, linguistic, or social resources in devel-
oping a meaningful or thick globalized identity (Igarashi & Saito, 2014).
That is, for people who are presented with limited opportunities to travel
abroad and/or reside in a country, city, or neighborhood with little ethno-
cultural heterogeneity, they may depend on the affordability of visual
media to experience narratives that allow them to indulge with cultural
Others throughout their everyday life.
Cosmopolitanism as Branding for Netflix and Others

In laying out his idea of pop cosmopolitanism, Jenkins (2006) argues that
we have traditionally put the two ideas together, in effect defining cosmo-
politans as those who have “discriminating tastes for classical or high cul-
ture” (p. 869).
Global convergence is giving rise to a new pop cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitans embrace cultural difference, seeking to escape the gravita-
tional pull of their local communities in order to enter a broader sphere of
cultural experience. The first cosmopolitans thought beyond the borders of
their village; the modern cosmopolitans think globally. We tend to apply the
term to those who develop a taste for international food, dance, music, art,
or literature—in short, those who have achieved distinction through their
discriminating tastes for classical or high culture. (Jenkins, 2006, p. 869)
Similarly, Elkins (2019) argues that with increasing global connections

and rising expressions of nationalism, “cosmopolitanism becomes short-
hand for a progressive, worldly appreciation of multiculturalism” (Elkins,
2019, p. 379). Considering Hannerz (1990) arguments about cosmopoli-
tanism not making discriminatory distinctions between certain elements
of foreign cultures to accept only some and refuse others, but accepting
other cultures as a “package deal,” Elkins indicates cosmopolitanism offers
an escape from parochialism and isolationism considering a global per-
spective and a recognition of different points of view. In that sense, global
digital platforms such as Netflix and Spotify claim they can “foster a cos-
mopolitan orientation toward the world by exposing audiences to works
of art by people from different places and by revealing how common taste
binds people regardless of background” (Elkins, 2019, p. 379). Jenkins
(2006) discusses “pop cosmopolitanism” as a way that popular culture
from elsewhere might bring audiences a recognition of the world beyond
their own national cultures and ideas. This promotion strategy of a sort of
pop cosmopolitanism deployed by Netflix can work to validate their posi-
tion as corporations of global reach that follow a liberal and progressive
project, in other words, Netflix might use a combination of globalization
and cosmopolitanism as a market strategy to identify itself as a political and
ethical corporation (Elkins, 2019).
Cosmopolitanism
and Audience Preferences for U.S. and European
Television and Film
Even though media engagement may help in developing a sense of cosmo-
politanism, it is important to note that this alone does not provide the
cultural competence for surviving and interacting with external or foreign
cultures (Hannerz, 2006). Because of this limitation and our focus on
media preferences, we treat cosmopolitanism as primarily a cultural dispo-
sition, and link it to the preference for consumption of foreign film and
television.
In our study with TGI survey data, four TGI items particularly tapped
into cosmopolitanism as cultural openness—its dominant form (Etinson,
2010; Riefler & Diamantopoulos, 2009; Türken & Rudmin, 2013).
Those who agreed with the following questionnaire items: (1) I am inter-
ested in other cultures and countries; (2) I like to travel and learn about
exotic places; (3) I enjoy eating foreign foods; and (4) I am interested in
international events. Latin Americans who strongly agreed or agreed to all
four opinions and attitudes were considered cosmopolitans, while non-
cosmopolitans were those who either strongly disagreed or disagreed with
the same items.
Cosmopolitans, given their proximity to a larger globalized culture, are
expected to consume foreign products (Riefler & Diamantopoulous,
2009). If this is the case, these patterns are expected to be replicated
among Latin American cosmopolitans, with those culturally open demon-
strating media preferences for non-domestic television programming and
films at higher rates than those not identifying as cosmopolitanism. The
driving question then is summarized as follows: do cosmopolitanism dis-

positions drive media preferences from various countries among Latin
Americans?
Among those who can be characterized as cosmopolitan (on the items
above), there was an interesting general decline in preferences for televi-
sion programs over a ten-year span regardless of the origin of the pro-
grams (national, regional, U.S., and European). Such a pattern may
indicate that cosmopolitan Latin Americans have increased leisure and cul-
tural options beyond television, higher in 2014 than in 2004. This is a
historical pattern that Straubhaar found in his early studies of television
audiences in Brazil (1981). However, the high percentage of interest
across media preferences (above 90% in 2004 and still above 80% in 2014)
suggests an ongoing linkage between the internalization of cosmopolitan-
ism among Latin Americans and media consumption.
In theory, Latin American cosmopolitans should be more interested in
U.S. or European television than in national or regional programming,
since they might demonstrate a connection to a larger global culture,
rather than a more culturally or geographically circumscribed culture, his-
torically linked to Latin America commonalities. In fact, the omnivorous
television interests of Latin America cosmopolitans showed they were
interested fairly equally in television and film from all sources, which may
itself be an indication of a certain kind of cosmopolitanism: interest in all
cultures.
When we created an index of the four questionnaire items related to
cosmopolitanism and related it to preferences for national, regional, US or
European television and film, what we found was a striking pattern of
cultural omnivorousness. In 2004, those who showed cosmopolitan atti-
tudes liked television and film from all of those sources almost equally
well; they were omnivores, as reflected in Fig. 7.1. If anything, both in
2004 and in 2014, they liked everything, but liked non-national material
slightly better, as indicated in the left-hand set of bars that shows the aver-
age of the eight countries that were in the survey. However, the difference
is slight and not significant statistically. What is strikingly significant is how
much they liked everything almost equally, with minor variations between
2004 and 2014, and between countries.
On the other hand, the media preferences of Latin American non-
cosmopolitans were generally more varied between national, regional,
U.S., and European programs. As expected, from discussions in Chap. 3
of this volume, as part of the larger culture that tends to prefer national
Fig. 7.1 Interest in TV programs from different origins among cosmopolitans in

various Latin American countries
culture, probably from a sense of cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991),

Latin American non-cosmopolitans generally preferred domestic media
more than those from other countries. This affinity for television pro-
gramming and films from one’s own country was again more evident in
2004 than 2014.
So the increased choice brought in by multichannel television for
increasing numbers of people by 2007–2011 may have had some impact
(see Chap. 5 for more detail). Unlike the similarity between cosmopolitans
across countries in their media preferences for programs from varied ori-
gins, there were substantial differences between countries, and notable
change within countries over the ten years. For example, non-cosmopolitan
Brazilians and Mexicans were more interested in programming from most
regions than other non-cosmopolitan audiences in 2004, but audiences in
Argentina, Chile, and Peru became more like them in 2014, as reflected in
the second part of Fig. 7.2. In contrast, interest in programming of all
origins dropped even further in Venezuela from 2004 to 2014, a trend
analyzed further in Chap. 3.
Fig. 7.2 Interest in TV programs from different origins among non-

cosmopolitans in various Latin American countries
The media preferences of Latin American non-cosmopolitans across

the sampled decade partially reflect Straubhaar’s (1991, 2007) cultural
proximity hypothesis, which Chap. 3 explains more in detail. To recap,
while cosmopolitans are more likely to consume foreign products (Riefler
& Diamantopoulous, 2009)—in this case television and film, Latin
Americans who are less culturally open to foreign cultures tend to prefer
television programming and films belonging to their own countries. On
the other hand, Latin American cosmopolitans had an avid interest in
media originating from Europe or the United States, rather than (non)
domestic Latin American media. While the basic premise of cultural prox-
imity is that people tend to gravitate toward media that resembles their
own, that proposition holds for Latin American non-cosmopolitans who
remain grounded to the familiarity of their own countries’ cultures and
less interested in the foreign cultures.
In contrast, television interest for Latin American cosmopolitans lies in
cultural heterogeneity, in the diverse geo-cultural source of the programs
(Etinson, 2010; Riefler & Diamantopoulos, 2009; Sinclair & Straubhaar,
2013; Türken & Rudmin, 2013). They opt for television programming
and films that reflect the cultural Other away from, but also including their
Latin American roots. Latin American cosmopolitans are thus interested
in a pluralistic, domestic, and foreign media consumption that supple-
ments their disposition toward a global culture away from the homogene-
ity of domestic media.
Theoretically, Latin American cosmopolitans would show a preference
for American and European films and television. Figure 7.3 compares the
origin of program preferences with some of the most classic cosmopolitan
attitudes, such as people who agreed with the following statements: “I
enjoy eating foreign foods,” “I am interested in other cultures and coun-
tries,” “I like to travel and learn about exotic places,” “I am interested in
international events,” “I love the idea of traveling abroad,” and “A real
vacation always includes travel.” Surprisingly, none of the cosmopolitan
values resulted in higher preference for foreign television and film, not
even programming from the United States, which is always higher than
Fig. 7.3 Origin of program and film preference and cosmopolitan attitudes
domestic with other key demographic variables such as young age, and
high economic status. The pattern we see seems to reflect omnivorous-
ness, rather than an elitist cosmopolitanism that would favor the foreign,
particularly from the U.S. and Europe, as reflected in the work of
Hedegard (2015).
However, when grouping cosmopolitan attitudes into cosmopolitan
and non-cosmopolitan respondents, the programming preferences are
more starkly different. Figures 7.4 and 7.5 were elaborated with a com-
posite index of cosmopolitan attitudes including (1) I am interested in
other cultures and countries; (2) I like to travel and learn about exotic
places; (3) I enjoy eating foreign foods; and (4) I am interested in interna-
tional events. Respondents who strongly agreed or agreed to all the above
statements were considered cosmopolitans. Respondents who indicated to
disagree or strongly disagree to the statements were considered non-
cosmopolitans. Figure 7.4 shows that audiences considered cosmopolitans
prefer European, American, and regional content slightly more than
Fig. 7.4 Cosmopolitans vs. Non-Cosmopolitans and origin of program and film
preferences
Fig. 7.5 Origin of program and film of preference and access to different stream-
ing platforms
domestic content, which is indicative of the idea of the cultural omnivore

(Maguire, 2015) whose consumption varies from highbrow to middle-
brow to lowbrow culture. Conversely, Fig. 7.4 shows non-cosmopolitans
have a higher preference for domestic television and film than for any
other region, which is more in line with the theory of cultural proximity
(Straubhaar, 1991).
To understand the role that streaming platforms have on programming
preferences, Fig. 7.5 compares the percentages of kinds of programs
watched on different streaming platforms available in Latin America. Of
interest, is that some platforms seem to be either offering more domestic
programming or used by audiences interested in watching more domestic
television and film. Audiences with access to Crackle, HBO Go, Netflix,
and YouTube consume slightly more American content than domestic.
While Cinemax Go, Foxplay, and Sunday TV are streaming platforms in
which audiences tend to watch more film and television produced locally.
Following the assumption that streaming platforms have higher volumes

of foreign television programs and films in their catalogues than multi-
channel or network television (Lobato, 2017; Aguiar & Waldfogel, 2018;
Steemers, 2014), we expected to see more consumption of foreign pro-
grams and films on streaming platforms, but the actual pattern was more
varied than that, with national consumption close to US consumption,
even among those who had access to the new platforms.
Another important factor to consider is that streaming platforms
require several expensive material conditions, related to social class, in
order to access them. For example, one has to have access to broadband
and credit or debit cards to pay for the subscription. Research noted in
Chap. 6 found that that was a problem for many Latin American consum-
ers of television. Those two are mostly limited in Latin America to upper
and middle classes. In that sense, Fig. 7.6 shows that people in the top
10% on the socioeconomic scale report the highest percentages of access
to streaming platforms, specially Netflix and YouTube, with almost 10
Fig. 7.6 Access to streaming platforms and level of economic status

percentage points of difference to the next 20%, which represent the

upper-middle class. Then the next 20% are also over 10 percentage points
away from the next 30%, which represent the middle class, which means
that as socioeconomic status decreases, access to streaming platforms
decreases dramatically. Notably, in 2014, streaming platforms were still
trying to penetrate the market, so even within the top 10% the giant
Netflix was only half as popular as YouTube.
Conclusion
So far in this book, we have examined the quite remarkable growth of the
broadcast television industries and television production capability in
Latin America, particularly in several of the largest and best developed
countries, such Brazil and Mexico, first and foremost, then Argentina and
Colombia, as well, examined in Chap. 2. We also examined the reciprocal
growth of a strong national audience for that national production, exam-
ined in Chap. 3, based in some large part on cultural proximity (Straubhaar,
1991) and the strength of national identity or imagined community, itself
reinforced by national television (Anderson, 2006). To a lesser degree, we
found that in some of the smaller Latin American countries, there is a fairly
strong attraction to the telenovelas, variety shows, and, increasingly, the
action super series, of the regional main producers, which in the super
series genre, now includes a new major producer, Telemundo, based in the
U.S. Hispanic population. This reflects a secondary level of cultural prox-
imity, supporting a regional television market, notable but less strong than
was originally theorized (Sinclair et al., 1996; Straubhaar, 1991;
Wilkinson, 1995).
However, throughout this book, we have also clear evidence that Latin
American upper-middle class and elite audiences have long been less
engaged with national television and more interested in programming and
film from the U.S., and to a lesser degree, Europe. That is examined in
terms of their historical structural class position, and in terms of their pref-
erences expressed in the TGI surveys, that we have analyzed in Chap. 4.
This seems to have been reinforced by the expansion of the middle classes,
upper-middle and even elite classes during the economic growth spurt
that took place in many Latin American countries from the late 1990s
through the mid-2010s, as examined in Chap. 5. That seems to have
increased the audience in Latin America for pay-TV, which is heavily pop-
ulated by channels from the U.S., although some of the larger Latin
American producers, such as TV Globo and Televisa, have created a num-

ber of their own pay-TV channels of national news, telenovelas, music,
and so on, plus documentary and film channels that mix in international
content. Interest in pay-TV has also spread into the middle and low mid-
dle classes during the economic boom, as noted in Chap. 5, which indi-
cates that parts of those classes may be moving toward more interest in
international, particularly U.S. content.
Chapter 6 examines the growth of streaming television in Latin America,
which also tends to amplify the availability of U.S. and European television
and film content in Latin America. We argue that it does this, particularly
examining Netflix’s approach, by directly targeting individual audience
members through algorithmic profiles and recommendations based on the
accumulation of big data about the individual and by placing individuals
into taste clusters, based on genre interests, which adds more data to lever-
age to make recommendations. We argue that this approach cuts across
previous national and regional patterns of television flow, which had
implicit boundaries of language and culture. It also cuts across the pattern
of simple U.S. outflow of content, since Netflix at least, unlike Disney+,
offers an increasing amount of content from Asia and Europe as well as
from the U.S. So we call this pattern transverse transnationalism, as it cuts
across past patterns of flow to target individuals by genre taste wherever
they are.
All this increased attention to foreign television in Latin America, par-
ticularly programming, streams, and channels from the U.S., but also
other Anglophone countries, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, also indicates
the need for increased theoretical understanding, particularly of audiences
and their motivations. The larger structural explanations of cultural impe-
rialism (Schiller, 1991) and platform imperialism (Jin, 2017) apply well
enough to the economics and structures of the flows, but audiences don’t
necessarily use those structures just because they are there, there must be
cultural or other attractions at play as well.
Building on the patterns we had observed in Chapts. 2–6, we thought
that some of the theoretical debates in cultural sociology were relevant.
We had already made extensive use of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural, eco-
nomic, and linguistic capitals (Bourdieu, 1984) to explain why upper-
middle and elite classes seem to prefer imported culture, as opposed to the
more nationally oriented preferences of middle, lower-middle, working,
and working-poor classes, as applied in Chaps. 3–5. Bourdieu’s original
argument (1984) was that upper-middle and elite classes built on their
access to greater cultural capital to show their distinction from the rest of
society by preferring classical or erudite music to more popular music.
According to our evidence about the preferences of Latin American audi-
ences for imported versus national television and film, this explanation still
seems quite plausible. It probably accounts for a good deal of what cul-
tural elites in the upper-middle and elite classes are doing. Furthermore, it
connects these elite cultural preferences to their structural places in soci-
ety, where dependency theorists like dos Santos had predicted that Latin
American elites would be connected by ties of education, language abili-
ties, work, and travel to neo-colonial powers like the U.S. (Dos
Santos, 1978).
However, our analysis in Chap. 7 not only supports those theories but
also supports two competing or, in our thinking, complementary
approaches, the concepts of cosmopolitanism and elites as cultural omni-
vores. Cosmopolitanism is approached in a large number of ways in the
literature, but we worked with two basic definitions, of cosmopolitanism
as a high-minded interest in other countries and cultures (Beck, 2006;
Hannerz, 1990; Skrbis et al., 2004) and as more mundane, as an interest
in consuming other cultures through food, purchases, and travel (Germann
Molz, 2011; Skrbis & Woodward, 2007; Szerszynski & Urry, 2002).
Although these two versions of cosmopolitanism are prominent in the
literature, we also picked them somewhat pragmatically, as they corre-
spond well to four questions (on interest in foreign countries, foreign
news, foreign food, and travel) that had been asked in the TGI surveys
that we have been using to examine audience preferences in Latin America.
Interestingly, when we looked at them statistically, the four questions
scaled together strongly into a single index of cosmopolitanism, suggest-
ing that while two questions each represented the two trends in the litera-
ture, they are all closely related.
This index of cosmopolitan attitudes was significantly related to televi-
sion preferences, but what it revealed also seemed to be cosmopolitanism
as cultural omnivorousness. Those in the sample who held all four of these
cosmopolitan attitudes not only like U.S. and European culture on televi-
sion, but liked national culture and regional culture on TV just as well. As
applied to television consumption, that seems to be a pretty fair opera-
tional or working definition of cultural omnivorousness. The literature on
cultural omnivores counterposed omnivorousness to the kind of classic
distinction based on preference for a high culture that Bourdieu found in
1984 (Peterson, 1992, 2005).
Our argument based on the data we analyzed is that all three of these
concepts are related, and all help us understand the evolving national ver-
sus imported television preferences of Latin American audiences. People
in audiences, particularly those in upper-middle or elite classes, still want
to show their cultural distinction. We can see it in the data analyzed in
Chaps. 4, 5, and 7. Among the co-authors, Straubhaar has observed it in
practice as he observed Brazilian graduate students in seminars he taught
in the mid- to late-2010s talk about how much they enjoyed Orange is the
New Black or House of Cards on Netflix as a fairly obvious way of trying to
show how culturally sophisticated they were.
However, as the evolving literature argues, both cosmopolitanism and
omnivorousness can also function to demonstrate social distinction
(Lindell, 2014). In fact, recent research shows that cosmopolitanism may
be evolving as a new form of cultural capital, and vice versa, to be used
precisely to display social distinction (Lindell & Danielsson, 2017).
And if we wanted to be a little provocative in our conclusions, we could
argue that this combination of social status (upper-middle and elite
classes), cosmopolitan attitudes, omnivorous preference for television
from a wide variety of geographic and cultural sources, and an ongoing
desire by social elites to display their distinction may be what has driven
pay-TV subscriptions in Latin America and what is currently driving sub-
scriptions to streaming media, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.
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CHAPTER 8
Conclusion
National Preferences
Television in Latin America has been noteworthy worldwide for being
among the first in the world, outside North America and Western Europe,
to move toward creating strong national industries to produce local con-
tent in several major countries by the 1970s (Tunstall, 2008). The most
developed television networks in the region, Televisa in Mexico and TV
Globo in Brazil, also moved relatively quickly to export programs to the
rest of Latin America, and in the case of TV Globo Portugal and Lusophone
Africa (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013).
Television grew quickly in much of the rest of Latin America, too, cre-
ating a situation with a top tier of exporters, Brazil and Mexico, then a
second tier of countries developed that produced much of their own pro-
gramming and also exported some (Roncagliolo, 1995), like Argentina,
Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela. Other countries rose into this group,
like Colombia (Benavides, 2008; Espinosa-Medina & Uribe-Jongbloed,
2017), or fell out of it, like Venezuela (Acosta-Alzuru, 2013), over time.
Most of the others slowly developed their own programs in some of the
lower cost genres, importing the rest from Latin America in certain genres
like telenovelas, or from the U.S. in other genres like cartoons, action-
adventure, or drama, or from Japan in cartoons.

Switzerland AG 2021
In this book, we have examined the quite remarkable growth of the

broadcast television industries and television production capability in
Latin America, particularly in several of the largest and best developed
countries, such Brazil and Mexico, first and foremost, then Argentina and
Colombia, as well, examined in Chap. 2. We also examined the reciprocal
growth of a strong national audience for that national production, exam-
ined in Chap. 3, based in some large part on cultural proximity (Straubhaar,
1991) and the strength of national identity or imagined community itself
reinforced by national television (Anderson, 1983). To a lesser degree, we
found that in some of the smaller Latin American countries, there is a fairly
strong attraction to the telenovelas, variety shows, and comedies of the
regional main producers. There is also the new super series genre, which
now includes a new major producer, Telemundo, based in the U.S. Hispanic
population (Pinon, 2019). This reflects a secondary level of cultural prox-
imity, supporting a regional television market, notable but less strong than
was originally theorized (Sinclair et al., 1996; Straubhaar, 1991;
Wilkinson, 1995).
Examining this national or domestic television advantage (in Chap. 3),
it was clear that national television production expanded in Latin America
due to not only the growing productive ability captured in Chap. 2, but
also audience interest in national production. The enormous success of
TV Globo, Televisa, Clarín, Venevisión, and others was due to strong
audience response to their productive capacity and genre development.
That strong audience response made the extra cost of national production
worth it to both networks and advertising sponsors (Mattos, 1984). Even
though many countries were taking advantage of a flood of cheap foreign
programs to fill their program schedules (Nordenstreng & Varis, 1974),
those were not as popular with audiences, which TV Globo discovered
when it had to switch strategies away from imports to national production
in 1965 to gain an audience (Straubhaar, 1984). In fact, national produc-
tion increased across several Latin American countries, particularly for
prime time when audiences were concentrated, but also across the broad-
cast day. That growth was reflected in the table about national production
(see Fig. 3.2).
One theoretical explanation for that increasing preference for national
production was cultural proximity, the theory that audiences tend to pre-
fer the programming that is most similar to their own cultures and identi-
ties (Straubhaar, 1991). The idea was that people would tend to prefer
national television (or local/regional if it was economically feasible) first,
8 CONCLUSION 239
then television from other, culturally similar Latin American countries sec-
ond, particularly in genres like telenovela that some countries were too
small or poor to produce for themselves. Conversely, the theory of cultural
discount argued that audiences would reject cultural imports that were
too alien, unfamiliar, or non-relevant, particularly in genres, like news,
where local relevance was most important (Hoskins & Mirus, 1988). A
famous example of this latter phenomenon in Latin America was the fail-
ure of Dallas in Latin America, where interviewees told Straubhaar in
1989–1990 that it seemed like a less interesting version of something they
did better, the telenovela.
These predictions, at least for national preference, seemed to hold up in
Latin America, 2004–2014, in the TGI data we examined in Chap. 3.
Figure 3.2 showed that well over half of most audiences in the eight coun-
tries examined preferred national programming. Only in Peru in 2004 did
national preference fall below 50%. In fact, the aggregate regional average
preference for national programs was consistently above 60% in 2004 and
2014 (in Fig. 3.1).
However, the same Fig. 3.2 shows that in most of the eight Latin
American countries analyzed, the second preference after national pro-
gramming was for U.S. programs, not regional ones from other Latin
American countries. That challenges the second half of the cultural prox-
imity theory prediction; that in countries which could not produce a cer-
tain genre, the audience preference would turn to productions from
culturally similar or proximate countries within the region of Latin
America. However, the preference for regional programs was fairly strong
in smaller Latin American countries with fewer production resources and
less ability to produce expensive genres like telenovelas, dramas, or series.
So the theory of cultural proximity applies but in much more limited cir-
cumstances than originally imagined.
National preference did vary by genre. Almost all audiences consis-
tently preferred national news, something predicted by cultural discount
theory, since news has more need to be local. However, those who tended
to like national programming more, in general, were much more likely to
prefer national drama or telenovela, as well as national series, as indicated
in Fig. 3.4. As we will see below, audiences tended to be most interested
in foreign production in genres, like drama series, that were not produced
extensively in either the main nations or the region.
National preference also varied by country. Partial nationalization of
private stations in Ecuador and Venezuela led to declines in the
production of telenovelas and other entertainment (Acosta-Alzuru, 2013),

since the new government stations did not produce them. That in turn led
to a decline in audience interest in those genres, which were then primarily
imported from elsewhere in Latin America. There were slight ups and
downs in preference for national programs in Colombia and Mexico,
slight increases in Argentina and Brazil, and a level but high preference in
Chile. Regional programs were preferred most in countries that were
either traditional or new importers of programs, such as Chile, Colombia,
Ecuador, and Venezuela. Interest in regional programs declined most in
Peru, where interest in U.S. programs increased the most. Regional inter-
est increased the most in Ecuador, almost equal to national programs.
Continuing Attraction and Power of Imported

Programs and U.S. Culture
If cultural proximity leads audiences toward familiar content, national or
regional, what leads them toward foreign television, beyond the cultural
contours of Latin America? We discovered a considerable continuing
strength of attraction to foreign culture on television, particularly from
the U.S., on both broadcast and multichannel television. For we did
observe, from 2004 to 2014, a gradual increase in interest or preference
for programs and films from the U.S., reaching 48% across Latin America
in 2014, compared to 60% for national programming. Interest in U.S. pro-
gramming did decline notably in Venezuela and somewhat in Ecuador,
probably related to internal political campaigns against U.S. media and
interests. Interest in European programming (26%) was much lower than
for U.S. programs (see Fig. 3.2).
Later studies show that audiences begin to be interested in more differ-
ent national productions of prestigious programming like dramatic series
began to be available, particularly on the newer medium of streaming tele-
vision, which we examined in Chap. 6. An in-depth examination of global
audiences for Danish dramatic series exports finds audiences in Brazil and
elsewhere in the region (Jensen & Jacobsen, 2020), concentrated in the
larger upper-middle-class interest in foreign drama series, which we dis-
cussed in Chaps. 6 and 7.
To understand the continuing attraction of U.S. programming in Latin
America, it helps to examine the history of U.S. cultural power in Latin
America. In the largest sense, after independence from the former cultural
8 CONCLUSION 241
powers of Spain and Portugal, many Latin Americans, particularly those in

what we would now consider the elite and upper-middle class, transferred
their loyalties as elites from the former colonial powers to the new post-
colonial economic and cultural powers of the U.S., Great Britain, and
France (Sanders, 2014). They particularly identified with the U.S., which
worked hardest to assert its power, not only through obvious steps like the
Monroe Doctrine that asserted its primacy in the Americas, but more spe-
cifically through the influence of U.S. film industries (Schnitman, 1984),
radio through RCA (Schwoch, 1990), television through RCA in equip-
ment and Time-Life, ABC, and others in management (Sinclair &
Straubhaar, 2013; Straubhaar, 1981), and through the prodigious export
to Latin America of U.S. film (Miller et al., 2005), music (Laing, 1986),
and television (Varis, 1974). Such one-way flows from the U.S. to regions
such as Latin America were considered media imperialism (Boyd-Barrett,
1977) or part of larger cultural imperialism that intended precisely to get
Latin Americans to subscribe to U.S. visions of a consumer-capitalist world
order (Beltran, 1978; Schiller, 1969). There is considerable tension
between theories like cultural imperialism that predicted a continued
dominance of television flows by the U.S. and theories like cultural prox-
imity that predicted a turn away from U.S. cultural goods to national and
regional ones. However, one theoretical resolution might be to consider
that U.S. and national cultural productions appeal to different aspects or
layers of complex cultural identities in which national identities co-exist
with Americanized or partially globalized ones. Both exist within a com-
plex political and cultural economy in which strong national cultural
industries co-exist with strong U.S. (and European and other) cultural
industries that continue to put attractive cultural goods into a globalized
cultural market in which different productions and flows co-exist. Different
layers of identities, both nationalized and “Americanized,” can develop,
grow, shrink, or transform in interaction with these cultural industries
(Straubhaar, 2007).
The Impact of New Television Technologies

The overall strength of both productive ability and audience loyalty in
national and regional television in Latin America seemed to keep at bay
some of the technologies that permitted massively renewed importation of
television from abroad in other world regions. Neither VCRs in the 1980s
(Boyd et al., 1989) nor satellite and cable television in the 1990s
(Straubhaar, 2007) had the same massive impact on Latin America that
they had in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Central and
Eastern Europe. In fact, the initial impact of satellite television in large
nations like Brazil and Mexico was to increase the reach of national televi-
sion by letting local repeater stations carry satellite television signals down
to regular television viewers in remote areas (Straubhaar, 1981, 2007).
However, a couple of larger nations, Argentina and Colombia, had much
larger bases of cable and satellite television since government policies had
limited national commercial television networks, so commercial multi-
channel or pay-TV had much greater penetration there, including quite a
bit of national production for cable channels (Fox & Waisbord, 2002).
Direct to home multichannel or pay-TV, by both satellite and cable, slowly
increased in the rest of Latin America in the 1990s, as did new streaming
television networks after 2010, throughout the region, as audiences began
to seek some diversity (Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013), beyond the major
national and regional producers that they had long enjoyed.
Multichannel or cable, satellite, and pay-TV, in general, finally took off
in the 2000s. Figure 2.1 shows that multichannel television grew steadily
in all of the eight countries studied in Latin America from 2004 on. There
was some leveling off or downturn in pay-TV subscriptions in some coun-
tries after 2012, when some countries began to tip into economic recession.
Increase in Lower-Middle Class Increases

Pay-TV Use
Television use in Latin America has always been connected to social class.
Only elites and upper-middle classes had television up through the
mid-1960s, but it began to expand rapidly in the 1970s with a cycle of
economic growth that increased the middle classes in many countries
(Ferreira et al., 2013). From 2001 until 2011, the middle classes tripled in
Ecuador, doubled in Argentina and Colombia, and increased significantly
in the five other countries studied (Ferreira et al., 2013). The upper-
middle class also went by at least 40% in all of them, much more in some
(see Fig. 5.1 in Chap. 5). Other sources verify considerable growth in the
middle classes in 2000–2010 (Ferreira et al., 2013). That has changed
Latin American television notably. Multichannel penetration seems to
have increased considerably among the upper-middle class and even more
8 CONCLUSION 243
among the lower-middle class in 2004–2014. It grew much more among

the working class and poor in some countries than in others.
To go further requires breaking social class down into several compo-
nents. Class represents several kinds of capital: income, education/cul-
ture, language (Bourdieu, 1984). Income is connected to affording
pay-TV, or more currently streaming television and broadband access
(Straubhaar et al., 2019a), but cultural capital or education seems to be
linked to preferring some of the imported contents prominent on pay-TV
and streaming television. Growth in multichannel or pay-TV seems very
low among the least educated, except in Argentina, where it has unique
status, given the historical disruption of broadcast television there (Fig.
5.12). Growth was much stronger among secondary and particularly
university-educated viewers (Fig. 5.11).
Overall, we found from the TGI surveys that most people get multi-
channel or pay-TV to “have more television channels” and to “get better
reception.” Better educated people are somewhat more likely to get it to
“receive more entertainment and education from other places,” which
clearly connects with the cultural capital to want more imported televi-
sion, and because they want “to be up-to-date with the latest technology,”
which also goes along with higher status and knowing more about what is
available.
Economic and Cultural Capital and the Appeal

of Foreign TV
Increased access to the foreign, through multichannel television, enabled

by increased economic capital, is part of the reason for an overall moderate
increase in interest in U.S. or European television. Economic capital grew
in most of Latin America in 2004–2014, giving more people the money to
afford multichannel access to more imported television. Interest in
U.S. programming grew slowly but steadily among the richest (top 10%),
the upper-middle class (next 20%), and the lower-middle class (next 30%),
but not much among the working class or poor (lowest 40%).
However, it seems clear that simply having access to more foreign mate-
rial does not guarantee that it will be watched, since the overall pattern of
national preference did not shift greatly. In several countries, notably two
with strong national production, Brazil and Mexico, interest in U.S. pro-
duction rose after 2004 and then fell again by 2014 (noted in Fig. 3.1).
That might indicate an interest in novelty, as more people had more access
to U.S. programs on multichannel television, were curious about them,
but then returned to more familiar national fare.
We examined the impact of increased cultural and linguistic capital,
which likely enables greater comprehension and appreciation of foreign
culture, like having the knowledge of the world sufficient to understand
and enjoy CNN. Better-educated Latin Americans, those with more cul-
tural capital, were consistently more interested in U.S. programming than
were less well-educated people. That also increased steadily in 2004–2014,
particularly among those with higher education. Among those with sec-
ondary education, it increased slightly until 2007–2009, then leveled off,
and declined slightly. That might be consistent with a general pattern of
initial curiosity about U.S. television that leveled off or even declined,
especially in some countries, like Brazil or Mexico with particularly strong
national television. Interest among the better educated in European tele-
vision programs was pretty consistent, but among those with secondary
education, it increased in the early- to mid-2000s, then leveled off. Those
with more economic capital were also consistently more interested in
European programming. Preference for European programming grew
slightly among all income groups in 2004–2007 but then leveled off.
Linguistic capital, defined here as English language ability, has not
really grown in the Latin American audience, 2004–2014, despite all the
millions of people taking English language courses. However, English lin-
guistic capital is strongly and increasingly, from 2004 to 2014, associated
with preference for U.S. and European programming. By 2014, the num-
ber of people who prefer U.S. programs is much higher among all coun-
tries except Chile, where interest is uniformly high, and Venezuela, where
interest had uniformly declined. Overall, like cultural capital in terms of
education, learning English is strongly associated with more globalized or
internationalized taste in television.
Although language capital is associated with liking foreign programs,
Latin American audiences are overwhelmingly (around 75%) accepting of
dubbing imported programs into national languages. That has increased
in most countries in 2004–2014, probably in part as the availability of
dubbed programs and channels has increased. Preference for subtitling is
much lower, around 25%, although it is higher among those with higher
education.
Young people (under 24) are more likely to prefer foreign programs.
Middle-aged (25–50) audiences also prefer foreign much more than those
8 CONCLUSION 245
who are older. However, while preference for U.S. programs increased in
2004–2014 among those with greater cultural, economic, and linguistic
capital, the preference among the young did not increase. So age was a
stronger predictor of foreign interest in 2004 than it was in 2014. In con-
trast, youth interest in European programs grew better as a predictor in
2004–2014. And youth seem to be early adopters again with imported
streaming programs, largely U.S. (see Chap. 6), so with new waves of
technology, like television/film streaming, and with services like Netflix, it
seems likely that youth will be early adopters of that as well. U.S. data have
shown that and qualitative interviews in Brazil by Straubhaar see heavy use
of Netflix among better educated young people in their 20s and 30s.
Another interesting set of predictors of foreign preference are cosmo-
politan attitudes, for example an increased interest in foreign issues/
events, countries, travel, and food. Logically, people with these attitudes
should like foreign television. They do but they also like domestic and
regional. It seems cosmopolitans are cultural omnivores who are inter-
ested in everything.
Television Over the Internet, Streaming Television

For audiences with access to broadband Internet, television in Latin
America and elsewhere is being redefined. In terms of what television con-
sists of, audiences watch increasing amounts of non-traditional forms of
video, particularly on YouTube. In terms of when television is watched,
streaming has revolutionized viewing on demand, especially on the binges
of several programs from the same series. Streaming services are increasing
and now use most of the Internet bandwidth in Latin America, as it has for
years in the U.S.
Global or transnational programming has been further strengthened as
an unequal flow, largely in from outside the region (Penner & Straubhaar,
2020), by incoming streaming platforms that offer another substantial
layer of international content, building on earlier layers of flow such as
pay-TV and the sale of many imported programs to broadcast stations and
networks (see Chaps. 4 and 5).
We argue in Chap. 6 that the concept of transversality can help us
understand the novel nature of the new streaming flows that add to but
also cut across existing television flows that went primarily from the
U.S. and Europe out across the world from the 1960s, then within regions
from the 1970s on. This is why we have taken the concept of transversality
and redefined it to apply to this substantially new form of flow. It is trans-

verse because it cuts across traditional flows: from the U.S. to Latin
America, within the regional market of Latin America, and within the
national markets of the countries themselves.
The new transnational streaming flows by Amazon, Disney+, and
Netflix do that by directly targeting individual audience members as part
of groups by taste and genre preferences, or what Netflix calls taste clus-
ters. The streaming companies directly target individuals across cultures,
guided by algorithms using big data that they gather about their individ-
ual viewers’ program and genre preferences.
These algorithmically driven flows are a strikingly different kind of flow.
It is no longer bounded, limited, or controlled by language, culture, or
national policies promoting national or regional programming or identity.
When Straubhaar presented a version of Chap. 6 to an international con-
ference on cultural policy, academics and policy officials were struck by
what a real challenge this presented to decades of cultural policy aimed at
reinforcing either national or regional cultures. There is a need to both
theoretically redefine these kinds of flows and also begin to think about
policy responses to them.
This is made possible by the technological breakthrough of algorithms
and big data, restructuring what was possible with previous forms and lay-
ers of flow. However, not all successful streaming operations will be trans-
national or transverse. Existing television networks like TV Globo are
creating nationally focused streaming services like Globoplay, with new
programming for them, recycled programming from their broadcast net-
work, such as hit telenovelas from the past, and new licensed program-
ming, including some from the U.S. and elsewhere. Furthermore, some
global streaming services, like Disney+, are essentially doubling down on
the long-existing one-way flow out of Hollywood to the rest of the world
by offering its popular U.S.-produced films, series, and cartoons all over,
and doing little co-production outside the U.S. In theoretical terms,
Disney+ is primarily a new wave of U.S. cultural imperialism.
We considered the history of well-established national media markets,
particularly Mexico and Brazil, which have filled their own national spaces
with national production. We have examined regional flows, including
exports by Mexico and Brazil, plus others such as Argentina, Chile, and
Colombia, exporting telenovelas, and other genres. And we examine how
those ongoing dynamics are now interacting with streaming platforms.
Transversality means that some global streaming media companies make it
8 CONCLUSION 247
possible for audiences and content to travel between national and regional
television flows motivated by taste preferences regardless of geographic,
linguistic, and cultural boundaries.
One of the reasons why streaming has become more truly global than
most other forms of television includes the multiplicity of models available
on different platforms. Chapter 6 outlined and classified how national
media companies, international and regional pay-TV companies, interna-
tional and regional telecommunication companies, and a variety of stand-
alone services have joined the streaming industry.
Theoretically, these models led us into a discussion about platform
imperialism (Jin, 2017), in which companies like Netflix might offer global
content and cater to national, regional, and global audiences, but opera-
tions, control, and financial gain continue to be controlled by the
U.S. firms. While one of the upsides of some of the new global streamers,
particularly Netflix, but increasingly Amazon Prime and HBO, too, is that
they are paying for dozens of co-productions, particularly in Brazil,
Colombia, and Mexico, the ultimate financial, production, and distribu-
tion decisions are made in the U.S., rather like the current pattern of
global production with a new global distribution of labor by Hollywood
(Miller et al., 2005), but with a great deal more power to target individual
consumers and promote their productions via algorithmic recommenda-
tions (Elkins, 2019; Lobato, 2019).
In Chap. 6, we have also laid out the strategies deployed by Netflix to
penetrate the Latin American market. In their first major co-productions,
Netflix seemed to be taking a page from the Televisa and Globo play-
books. Their first Netflix originals in the region were Club de Cuervos in
Mexico and 3% in Brazil, which used familiar telenovela tropes and famil-
iar actors. These two countries have been the major exporters to the region
(Sinclair & Straubhaar, 2013), which makes them ideal in geo-cultural
terms (Sinclair et al., 1996) as initial partners for Netflix to create content
for the region. It appears Netflix has found a formula for success in its
Latin American market, sharing actors, directors, and producers with
national networks and with HBO Latinoamérica and relying on popular
genres such as telenovelas, narco dramas (Benavides, 2008), the new action
super series (Pinon, 2019), and bio-series, like Luis Miguel.
The concept of quality TV, focused on high quality, often controversial
dramatic series, originally developed by HBO (McCabe & Akass, 2008),
offers a sense of cultural distinction to elites and upper-middle classes
(Bourdieu, 1984). Netflix has taken that idea to create originals, dramatic
series, comedies, and films that appeal to an upper-middle class and elite
transnational audience. Building on our earlier analysis of why Latin
Americans choose to watch U.S. and European television and film in
Chap. 4, cultural capital from education, family connections, travel, lan-
guage learning, and so on enables those who possess it to enjoy and prefer
more foreign programming. These better-off Latin American audiences
are also the ones most likely to have home broadband or other forms of
access that let them afford to stream hours of high quality image television
(Straubhaar et al., 2019b).
Although speaking English is positively related to preference for pro-
gramming from other countries (see Chap. 4), Netflix has taken consider-
able efforts to translate, dub, and make its content available in different
languages. Multilingualism positions Netflix as a transnational and global
competitor and reinforces its position as a quality TV producer.
Latin American Cosmopolitan Audiences

Throughout this book, we have clear evidence that Latin American upper-
middle class and elite audiences have long been less engaged with national
television and more interested in programming and film from the U.S.,
and to a lesser degree, Europe. That is examined in terms of their histori-
cal structural class position, and in terms of their preferences expressed in
the TGI surveys in Chap. 4. The expansion of the middle classes, upper-
middle and elite classes during the Latin American economic growth spurt
from the late 1990s through the mid-2010s seems to reinforce these pat-
terns, as examined in Chap. 5.
All this increased attention to foreign television in Latin America, par-
ticularly programming, streams, and channels from the U.S., but also
other Anglophone countries, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, also indicates
the need for increased theoretical understanding, particularly of audiences
and their motivations. The larger structural explanations of cultural impe-
rialism (Schiller, 1991) and platform imperialism (Jin, 2017) apply well
enough to the economics and structures of the flows, but audiences don’t
necessarily use those structures just because they are there; there must be
cultural or other attractions at play as well.
Some of the theoretical debates in cultural sociology since the 1980s
are relevant. Bourdieu’s theory of cultural, economic, and linguistic capi-
tals (1984) helps explain why upper-middle and elite classes seem to prefer
imported culture, as opposed to the more nationally oriented preferences
8 CONCLUSION 249
of middle, lower-middle, working, and working-poor classes (see Chaps. 3

and 4). Bourdieu argued (1984) that upper-middle and elite classes used
their greater cultural capital to show their distinction from the rest of soci-
ety. His example was how they preferred classical or erudite music to more
popular music. Our evidence about the preferences of Latin American
audiences for imported versus national television and film fit a similar pat-
tern. The argument that elites seek distinction through cultural prefer-
ences probably accounts for a good deal of what the upper-middle and
elite classes are doing in their television viewing. Furthermore, the con-
cept of cultural capital connects these elite cultural preferences to their
structural places in society, where dependency theorists like dos Santos
had predicted that Latin American elites would be connected by ties of
education, language abilities, work, and travel to neo-colonial powers like
the U.S. (Dos Santos, 1978).
However, our analysis in Chap. 7 not only supports the applicability of
those theories but also supports two other approaches from cultural soci-
ology: the concepts of cosmopolitanism and elites as cultural omnivores.
Cosmopolitanism is approached in a large number of ways in the litera-
ture, but we worked with two basic definitions. First is cosmopolitanism as
a high-minded interest in other countries and cultures (Beck, 2006;
Hannerz, 1990; Skrbis et al., 2004). Second is a more mundane consump-
tion of other cultures through food, purchases, and travel, what some call
banal cosmopolitanism (Germann Molz, 2011; Skrbis & Woodward,
2007; Szerszynski & Urry, 2002). These two versions of cosmopolitanism
are prominent in the literature, but we also picked them somewhat prag-
matically, as they correspond well to four questions (on interest in foreign
countries, foreign news, foreign food, and travel) that had been asked in
the TGI surveys that we have been using. Interestingly, when we looked
at them statistically, the four questions scaled together strongly into a sin-
gle index of cosmopolitanism, suggesting that while two questions each
represented the two trends in the literature, they are all closely related.
These cosmopolitan attitudes were significantly related to television
preferences, but what that revealed conceptually seemed to be cosmopoli-
tanism as cultural omnivorousness. Those who held all four of these cos-
mopolitan attitudes not only like U.S. and European culture on television,
but like national culture and regional culture just as well. At least as applied
to television consumption, that seems to be a pretty fair operational defini-
tion of cultural omnivorousness.
The literature on cultural omnivores counterposes omnivorousness to

the kind of classic distinction based on preference for high culture that
Bourdieu found in 1984 (Peterson, 1992, 2005). However, based on the
data we analyzed, all three of these concepts, cosmopolitanism, cultural
omnivorousness, and distinction, are related. All three help us understand
the evolving national versus imported television preferences of Latin
American audiences. Those in upper-middle or elite classes still want to
show their cultural distinction, which is reflected in the data analyzed in
Chaps. 4, 5, and 7. Straubhaar has observed it in practice among Brazilian
graduate students in several seminars he taught in the mid- to late-2010s
in a medium-sized city in the state of São Paulo. They would talk about
how much they enjoyed Orange is the New Black or House of Cards on
Netflix as a fairly obvious way of trying to show how culturally sophisti-
cated they were, a classic display of both cultural and symbolic capitals.
However, both cosmopolitanism and omnivorousness can also be used to
demonstrate social distinction (Lindell, 2014). Cosmopolitanism may be
evolving as a new form of cultural capital, and vice versa, to be used pre-
cisely to display social distinction (Lindell & Danielsson, 2017).
And if we wanted to be a little provocative in our conclusions, we could
argue that this combination of social status (upper-middle and elite
classes), cosmopolitan attitudes, omnivorous preference for television
from a wide variety of geographic and cultural sources, and an ongoing
desire by social elites to display their distinction may be what has driven
pay-TV subscriptions in Latin America and what is currently driving sub-
scriptions to streaming media, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.
At the same time, we should not forget that most of the Latin American
television audience, in the middle class and below, still tend to watch the
genres of television that have developed in the region (telenovelas, variety
shows, news, talk, comedy) or been adapted to it, such as imported for-
mats like Big Brother (originally from the Netherlands). The twenty-first
round of Big Brother 21, in Brazil, showing on TV Globo as we finish this
writing, is dominating both ratings and media discussion along with the
latest telenovelas and news shows. While Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+
may dominate the viewing of the upper-middle class, it has not yet become
the mainstream of Latin American television.
8 CONCLUSION 251
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Index1
A Antola, L., 74, 78

Acosta-Alzuru, C., 23, 29, 58, 70, Appeal of the foreign, 88
237, 240 Argentina, 4, 6, 17, 18, 23, 26–28,
Action adventure, 77, 90, 237 33, 35–39, 49, 55, 57, 64, 65,
Ad-supported, 38, 176 70, 74, 79, 94, 103, 113, 114,
Advertising agencies, 54, 89 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 138,
Aesthetic cosmopolitanism, 140, 141, 152, 153, 166, 168,
204, 213–215 173, 183–185, 191, 194, 223,
Africa, 17, 62, 218, 237 229, 237, 238, 240, 242,
Age of Internet television, 160 243, 246
Algorithmic streaming, 161 Asymmetrical interdependence,
Amazon Prime Video, 171, 172 179, 180
América Móvil, 24, 26, 31, 38, Audiences, 1, 3–4, 7–8, 14, 33–38,
128, 172 49–79, 88, 94–103, 125,
Ampere, 171 128–130, 159, 163, 203–232,
Anderson, Benedict, 3, 61 238, 248–250
Anderson, B., 61, 88, 212, 229, 238 genre preferences, 16, 193, 246
Anglophone countries, 129, 167, habits, 18
230, 248 preferences, 4, 7, 16, 52, 71,
Animation, 90 74, 79, 88, 92, 221–229,
Antola, A., 2, 21, 50, 92 231, 239
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Switzerland AG 2021
American Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77470-7
256 INDEX
Authentic culture, 52, 214 C

Authoritarian populism, 88 Cable and multichannel TV age, 160
Autoridad Nacional de Televisión Cable TV, 17, 50, 125, 127–129, 152,
(ANTV), 27 173, 175, 176
Cadenatres, 125, 125n2
Canal 13 Chile, 27, 30
B Canclini, N. G., 2, 14, 54, 206
Banal cosmopolitanism, 219, Caracol, 23, 28, 190
220, 249 Cardoso, F. H., 2, 13, 89
Barrier to entry, 124, 175 Carlos Slim, 26
Beck, Ulrich, 8, 9, 203, 204, 208, Casa de las Flores, 188, 191, 193
231, 249 Castro-Mariño, D., 123, 124, 152, 153
Belize, 17 C-band satellite, 97, 129, 136, 149
Beltran, L., 2, 5, 13, 14, 91, 241 Center-periphery domination, 52
Bielby, D. D., 63 Chavez Hugo, 29, 57
Big data, 168, 169, 179, 181, 193, Chile, 17, 30–31, 33, 35–37, 55, 65,
194, 230, 246 70, 74, 79, 94, 107, 113, 114, 124,
Bolaño, C., 14 127, 130–132, 138, 140, 152–154,
Bolsonaro, Jair, 133 194, 223, 237, 240, 244, 246
Bondebjorg, 63, 92 Chilevisión or CHV, 30
Bourdieu, P., 5, 7–9, 64, 65, 87, 91, China, 61, 150, 179
95, 96, 98, 99, 102–104, 107, Chiquititas, 57
108, 112, 132, 134–136, 147, Cidade de Deus, 191
183, 188, 195, 203–207, Cisneros, 28, 29
209–211, 217, 219, 230, 231, Clarin, 23, 27, 238
243, 247–250 Claro TV, 31
Boyd-Barrett, O., 7, 14, 50, Claro Video, 31, 172, 177
89, 241 Classes A–E, 96
Brazil, 2, 13, 49, 89, 124, 162, 163, Class mobility, 135
215, 237 Clientelism, 14, 15, 88
Brazilian Bolsa Escolar, 132 Club de Cuervos, 26, 185, 188,
Broadband, 22, 24, 34, 39, 55, 65, 191–194, 247
78, 162, 163, 168, 181, 183, CNN, 6, 87, 104, 244
184, 195, 209, 228, 243, Colgate-Palmolive, 2, 16, 53
245, 248 Colombia, 6, 7, 16–18, 21, 23,
Broadcast television, 17, 23, 26, 27, 27–28, 33, 35–38, 49, 55, 57–59,
33, 36, 37, 49–79, 89, 93, 94, 64, 65, 67, 70, 78, 79, 101, 114,
124, 125, 127, 137, 141, 162, 124, 125, 127, 138, 140, 141,
164, 167, 168, 170, 178, 229, 152–154, 166, 168, 169,
238, 243 183–186, 192, 194, 229, 237,
Buonanno, M., 61, 63, 79, 92 238, 240, 242, 246, 247
INDEX 257
Colonialism, 15, 62 160, 162, 181, 182, 195,

Colonization, 61 203–207, 210, 212, 213,
Commercial media models, 15, 52 216–219, 231, 232,
Commercial system of US 243–245, 248–250
television, 88–90 Cultural dependency, 7, 13, 51, 91, 94
Commercial television, 4, 6, 19, 89, Cultural discount, 60, 61, 102, 239
124, 125, 242 Cultural distinction, 8, 16, 91, 187,
Communications policies, 128 188, 195, 203, 206, 219, 232,
CONDECINE, 129 247, 250
Consumer capitalism, 2, 52 Cultural hybridity, 54
Consumer societies, 53, 89, 91 Cultural imperialism, 2, 5, 14, 52–53,
Consumption, 33, 34, 50, 52, 54, 65, 76, 90–93, 178, 179, 230, 241,
96, 111, 123, 133, 134, 152, 246, 248
160, 166, 186–188, 205–208, Cultural industry, 14, 53, 60, 61, 206,
211–213, 215–217, 219–222, 212, 241
225, 227, 228, 231, 249 Cultural-linguistic region, 59,
Content metadata, 168 62–63, 76
Content producer, 169, 186 Cultural omnivores, 8, 204, 206,
Co-production, 13, 16, 59, 74, 163, 212–214, 216, 217, 227, 231,
169, 170, 194, 246, 247 245, 249, 250
Corporatism, 15, 88 Cultural proximity, 7, 8, 17, 49–51,
Correa, Rafael, 32 59–66, 68, 74–79, 87, 102, 116,
Cosmopolitan attitudes, 33, 207, 208, 124, 129, 136, 147, 148, 160,
210, 222, 225, 226, 231, 232, 163, 178, 182, 223, 224, 227,
245, 249, 250 229, 238–241
Cosmopolitan audience, 19, 248–250 Cultural studies, 3, 15
Cosmopolitan citizenship, 211
Cosmopolitan condition, 211
Cosmopolitan disposition, 204, 209, D
210, 213, 215 Dallas, 50, 97, 98, 184, 239
Cosmopolitanism, 8, 9, 16, 22, 99, Dependence, 13, 91
116, 160, 181, 183, 186, Dependency, 2, 5, 7, 15, 28, 51–53,
203–232, 249, 250 76, 91, 94–97, 179, 215,
Counter-flow, 160, 168 231, 249
Crises as a routine, 123 Dependent development, 13,
Cuba, 16, 19, 52–54 15, 89, 91
Cultural and public diplomacy, 95 Deregulation, 17
Cultural capital, 6–9, 18, 22, 59, 64, Developing countries, 52, 135, 180,
66, 75, 78, 91, 95, 104–110, 182, 215
108n3, 112, 114, 116, 124, 132, Direct-broadcast satellite (DBS), 129
134–136, 144, 146–148, 154, Direct investment, 51
258 INDEX
Direct-to-home (DTH), 29, 36, 38, Ecuador, 32–33, 35–37, 55, 65, 70,
127, 129, 130, 130n3, 242 74, 79, 124, 140, 152, 239,
DirecTV, 24, 29–31, 37, 97, 130, 240, 242
175, 176 Ecuador TV, 32, 33
Discovery Channel, 37, 127 Editora Abril, 24, 37, 97, 127, 129
Dish, 26, 128, 130n3, 155, 175 Educated audience, 76
Disjunctive, 52 El Chavo, 74, 171
Disney, 1, 7, 91, 170, 171, 176, El chavo del ocho, 55
203, 217 El Derecho de Nacer, 54
Disney+, 6, 159, 165, 171, 177, 178, Elite Brazilian media, 94
213, 230, 246, 250 Elite culture, 96, 104, 206,
Dispositions, 77, 95, 96, 99, 103, 213, 215–218
111, 112, 134, 204, 205, 209, Elites, 5, 7–9, 14, 16, 20, 22, 58, 65,
210, 213, 215, 217, 221, 75, 76, 91, 94–96, 104, 116,
222, 225 127–132, 152, 153, 163, 182,
Disposition to be interested in foreign 195, 203–232, 241,
culture, 96 242, 247–250
Dominican Republic, 17, 60, 124, 135 El Señor de los Cielos, 59
Dorfman, A., 2, 14, 91 Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, 125n1
Dos Santos, Theotonio, 5, 14, Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, 191
91, 94, 96, 204, 216, Entrepreneurs, 15, 16, 54, 89
231, 249 ESPN, 31, 129
Drama series, 90, 97, 239, 240 European television programs, 66, 68,
Dramatic series, 49, 58–59, 102, 106, 107, 110, 112, 116,
240, 247–248 222, 244
Duarte, F., 87, 166 Export programs, 57, 237
Duarte, L. G., 15, 28, 29, 37, 64, 97,
123, 124, 128, 129, 173
Dubbing, 61, 128, 189, 244 F
Dumping, 52 Family commercial empires, 88
Family media empires, 15
Fejes, F., 14, 89
E Fernández, C., 14
Eastern Europe, 17, 96, 242 Ferreira, F. H. G., 6, 8, 21, 34, 78,
Economic capital, 7–9, 22, 64–66, 75, 107, 130, 242
78, 87, 96, 98, 103, 107–112, Flows of television scripts/formats, 19
116, 134–136, 144, 147, 148, Flows of television shows, 2, 159,
183, 188, 243, 244 161, 177
Economic crisis, 123, 124 Foreign capital, 16, 89
Economic downturn of the last five Fox, 176, 177
years, 152 Fox, E., 2, 4, 13, 20, 31, 51, 88,
Economic mobility, 78, 130, 184 141, 242
INDEX 259
Fox Latinoamerica, 31 Hedonic good, 153

Fox Play, 31 Highbrow, 127, 205, 212, 213, 216,
Frankfurt School, 14 217, 227
Free trade, 51, 79 Higher education, 95n1, 96, 104,
Free Video on Demand, 173 106, 107, 132, 136, 142, 147,
Friedman, Sam, 182, 206, 217 213, 244
Hollywood, 3–5, 50, 63, 90, 161,
170, 178, 186, 194, 218,
G 246, 247
Garcia Canclini, N., 2 Homogenization of culture, 52
Garmendia, 166 Hybrid development, 14, 54
GDP, 130, 134 Hybridity, 54, 206, 208
Genre analysis, 15
Geo-cultural regions, 62–63,
78, 247 I
Gitlin, T., 63, 91, 92 Illegal, 163, 173, 177
Globally based streaming Imagen TV, 25, 26
television, 16 Imaginative travel, 211
GloboPlay, 7, 173, 177, 246 Imagined communities, 3, 15, 61,
Globosat, 129 210, 218, 229, 238
Glocalize, 169 Imagined national communities, 61
González-Hernández, David, 56 Imperialism, 2, 3, 7, 14, 15, 52–53,
Gossip programs, 127 88, 90–93, 97, 159, 160, 168,
Grammar of transnationalism, 187, 177–179, 194, 230,
188, 190 241, 246–248
Gratify needs, 97 Imperialism theories, 2, 5, 52, 76, 90
Green Frontier, 192 Income distribution, 65, 126
Grupo Clarín, 27, 128 Independents, 9, 25, 27, 38,
Guback, T., 4, 50 129, 170, 171, 175,
176, 180
Independent subscriptions, 177
H Inflow of US programming, 88
Habitus, 111, 112, 114, 134, 209 Institutional subscriptions, 176
Hallin, B., 181 Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião Pública
Hallin, D. C., 14 e Estatística (IBOPE),
Hannerz, Ulf, 8, 203, 207, 210, 33, 65, 154
219–221, 231, 249 Internet penetration, 22, 38, 39, 77
Harrington, C. L., 63 Investment opportunities in
HBO, 6, 13, 16, 22, 29, 37, 38, 87, television, 90
91, 164, 165, 170–173, 175, Ito, Y., 61
188, 193, 195, 247 iTunes, 9, 38, 173, 176, 177
HBO Go, 31, 171–173, 176, 227 Iwabuchi, K., 52, 62, 75–77, 79
260 INDEX
J Lusophone Africa, 62, 237

Japan, 2, 61, 62, 146, 167, 170, 177, Lusophone linguistic space, 62
181, 237
Jenkins, Henry, 3, 220, 221
Jin, D. Y., 7, 178, 179, 194, 230, M
247, 248 Macedo, Edir, 24
Malú Mulher, 58
Martin-Barbero, J., 3, 14, 54, 56, 206
K Marx, 51
Kantar Media, 4, 33, 65, 67, Mass culture, 60
136, 136n5 Mattelart, A., 6, 14, 54, 55, 97
Katz, E., 61, 97, 98, 182 Mattelart, M., 54, 55
Korean melodrama, 62 Mattos, S., 2, 53, 89, 238
Kottak, Conrad, 60 Mazziotti, N., 3, 56, 57
Media imperialism, 2, 7, 14, 88, 159,
160, 168, 177–178, 241
L Media industry studies, 15
La Pastina, 53, 62, 91, 93–94 Megacable, 25, 26, 129
La Reina del Sur, 59 Metropolitan area, 8, 34, 37n2,
Latin America, 1, 4–6, 13, 17–22, 49, 66, 76, 99, 99n2, 124, 132,
50, 58–59, 87, 98–99, 123–127, 136, 138
130–133, 159, 171–173, 184–187, Mexican Progresa/Oportunidades, 132
190–193, 203, 215–219, 237 Mexico, 2, 4, 7, 9, 13, 14, 16, 19, 23,
Latin American political economy of 25–27, 33–38, 37n2, 49–51, 53,
media, 14 55, 56, 58–60, 62, 64–66, 70,
Latin American television, 1, 2, 7, 13, 74, 78, 79, 90, 97, 101, 107,
51, 53, 69, 74, 77, 87, 88, 92, 113, 114, 124, 125, 127–129,
116, 184, 242, 250 130n3, 133, 140, 152–154, 165,
Liberalization of competition by 166, 168, 171, 173, 175,
private networks, 17 183–186, 190, 192, 194, 209,
Liberty Media, 97, 129 229, 237, 238, 240, 242–244,
Linguistic capital, 7, 8, 64, 67, 75, 78, 246, 247
87, 96, 99, 103, 107, 110–116, Miceli, S., 3, 15
204, 230, 244, 245, 248 Middle classes, 1, 5, 6, 21, 22, 24, 34,
Local adaptations, 52 49, 51, 55, 58, 64, 79, 95, 98,
Lopes, M. V. I., 17, 54, 55, 62, 90, 107, 108, 123, 125, 125n1,
93, 125, 134, 173 130–134, 137, 147, 162, 178,
Los ricos también lloran, 56 203–232, 242, 248, 250
Lotz, A. D., 22, 64, 103 Middle-class growth, 130
Lower-middle class, 6, 8, 24, 36, 51, Middle East, 17, 18, 62, 242
64, 65, 78, 93, 98, 107, 110, MMDS, 129, 137
125, 131–134, 137, 139, 140, Monroe Doctrine, 88, 241
147, 154, 184, 242–243 Movistar, 30, 31, 176
INDEX 261
MTV, 6, 18, 19, 37, 87, 115, 153, 159–195, 203–232,

116, 129 245–248, 250
MTV Brazil, 18 Netflix Original, 169, 185, 186, 190,
Mulan, 170 191, 194, 247
Multichannel penetration, 26, 30, 35, Network television age, 160
65, 98, 101, 103, 135–144, New middle class, 34, 108, 123–155
154, 242 News Corporation, 36
Multichannel television, 19n1, 27, 30, Niche audience, 18
33, 35, 38, 64, 67, 73, 75, 99, Nordenstreng, K., 2, 5, 17, 21,
107, 128, 134, 135, 137, 140, 50, 92, 238
146–150, 223, 240, 242–244
Multilingualism, 189–190, 195, 248
Multimedios, 25 O
Multiple mobilities, 204, 211–212 Obitel, 23, 25, 26, 28–31, 167
Multiplicity, 162, 165, 177, 179, 194, Oliveira, O. S. D., 13, 17, 52, 53
208, 247 O Mecanismo, 191
Murdoch, Rupert, 36, 129, 130 Omnivorous, 206, 207, 212, 222,
232, 250
Open TV networks, 175
N Orozco Gomez, G., 36, 55, 56, 125,
Narconovelas, 57–59 128, 130
Narcos, 164, 169, 189, 191, 192 OTT, 64, 134, 162, 172, 174
National broadcast networks, 21, 78 Over-the-air television, 23, 25,
National elites, 91 28, 31, 127
National Geographic Play, 177
Nationalism, 4, 179, 220
Nationalized cultural capital, 59 P
Nationally developed genres, 21 Paldan, L., 76
National production, 18, 21, 29, 31, Panhumanity, 211
32, 49, 53–55, 59, 74, 76–78, Patrimonialism, 15
161, 170, 186, 194, 229, 238, Paxman, A., 14
242, 243, 246 Pay-TV, 1, 6, 8, 16, 18, 19,
National programming, 4, 5, 17, 20, 19n1, 21, 22, 24–30, 33,
21, 33, 49, 53, 59–61, 63, 68, 35–38, 37n2, 49, 55, 60,
71–74, 76, 79, 87, 92, 104, 128, 64, 65, 77, 78, 87, 91, 93,
136, 147, 204, 239, 240 96–99, 103, 109, 116, 123–155,
National television industry, 15 161–165, 168, 171–173, 176,
Nation-state, 15, 16, 19, 88, 212 177, 183, 184, 193, 194, 229,
Neocolonial influence of the US, 88 230, 232, 242–243, 245,
Neo-liberalism, 14 247, 250
NET Brasil, 24, 129 distributors, 175, 176
Netflix, 1, 6, 7, 9, 13, 15, 16, 19, 22, programmers, 175, 176
26, 31, 38, 39, 49, 77, 87, 93, Per-capita daily income, 130
262 INDEX
Peripheral cosmopolitanism, Q
204, 214–215 Quality TV, 170, 187, 188, 190, 195,
Peron, 26, 141 247, 248
Peronist, 26, 127
Peru, 21, 31–33, 35–37, 39, 55, 65,
68, 70, 74, 76, 78, 79, 101, 103, R
113, 124, 130, 131, 138, 140, RCN, 23, 28
141, 152, 154, 223, 239, 240 RCTV, 29, 57, 70, 190
Peterson, Richard A., 212 Reality shows, 26, 127, 191
Pew, 125, 126 Rede Bandeirantes, 167
Phelps/Granier Group, 28, 29 RedeTV, 167
Piñon, J., 23, 27, 28, 58, 59, 238, 247 Red Televisiva Megavisión or
Platform imperialism, 7, 178–179, MEGA, 30
194, 230, 247, 248 Regional cultural proximity,
Political economy, 2, 14, 15, 52, 179 62, 87, 102
Political parallelism, 14 Regional flow of scripts, 55
Political patrimonialism, 14 Regionally developed genres, 21
Pool, 90 Regional markets in television, 13
Pop cosmopolitanism, 220, 221 Regional television flow, 16, 21, 180,
Populist entertainment, 125 194, 247
Portugal, 17, 62, 94, 96, 237, 241 Reis, R., 6, 18, 64, 78, 98, 124
Post-colonial era, 94 Rivero, Y. M., 2, 16, 20, 57
Post-colonial Latin America, 88, Rogers, E. M., 2, 21, 50, 74,
179, 215 78, 92
Post-colonial legacy, 88 Roma, 184
Post-colonial power, 5, 95 Roncagliolo, R., 4, 17, 21, 23,
Postmodernism, 190 57, 74, 237
Prime time, 18, 21, 50, 53–56, 60,
73, 92, 93, 238
Prime time melodramas, 50 S
Privatization, 17, 25, 27, 30 Sábado Gigante, 74
Producers, 2–4, 13, 15–17, 19, Salinas, R., 76
23, 26–28, 49, 50, 53–55, Santos, Silvio, 24
57, 59, 62, 63, 70, 74, 77, 90, Satellite-based pay-TV, 15, 87
129, 165, 166, 169, 175, 179, Satellite distribution, 18
186, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, Satellite television penetration, 18
229, 230, 238, 240, 242, Satellite TV channels, 17, 18, 51, 64,
247, 248 68, 78, 88, 93, 96, 97, 124, 137,
Production values, 50, 52 138, 153, 161, 162, 175,
Programmers, 15, 16, 129, 173, 241, 242
175, 176 Schiller, D., 178
Public broadcasting, 127 Schiller, H. I., 2, 5, 14, 50, 52, 53,
Purchasing power parity, 126, 130 90, 91, 230, 241, 248
INDEX 263
SeAC Law, 129 Streaming television, 6–7, 9, 15, 16,

Segmenting audiences, 21 38–40, 91, 159–195, 213, 230,
Serial narrative, 54 240, 242, 243, 245–248
Siempre en Domingo, 74 Subscription-based television, 19n1,
Silicon Valley, 178 21, 35, 36, 127, 163
Silvio Santos, 24 Subscription expansions, 176
Simplemente María, 56 Subscription video on demand (SVOD),
Sinclair, J., 1, 2, 4, 5, 13, 15–18, 9, 162, 163, 167, 172, 183
20, 21, 24, 27, 50, 53, 56, 57, Subtitling, 61, 128, 163, 190, 244
60–63, 73, 74, 78, 88–90, 92, Super series, 26, 58, 59, 195, 229,
103, 124, 136, 165, 182, 186, 238, 247
194, 224, 229, 237, 238, 241, Symbolic capital, 98, 112, 134, 250
242, 247 Syndicated survey, 124
Sistema Brasileira de Televisão (SBT), Szerszynski, B., 203, 207–209, 211,
5, 23, 24, 38, 93, 125, 173, 175 212, 231, 249
SKY Brasil, 129
Sky Latin America, 97, 129
SKY México, 36, 129 T
Social capital, 21, 102, 108, 132 Talk show, 15, 90
Social class, 5, 9, 55, 63, 64, 75, 78, Taste cluster, 160, 182–183, 193,
91, 95n1, 96, 98, 107, 123–127, 230, 246
131, 153, 154, 182, 228, Taste communities, 161
242, 243 Technology companies, 175, 176
Social mobility, 54, 55, 96, 134, 217 Telecommunications companies, 26,
Social stratification, 34, 111, 124, 173, 175, 194, 247
213, 214 Telefe, 27, 191
Socioeconomic status, 8, 66, 78, 108, Telefónica, 9, 24, 27, 29, 31, 38, 128,
127, 137, 153, 212, 215, 229 163, 165, 175, 176
Sodre, M., 3, 15 Telemundo, 23, 28, 58, 59, 193,
Spending power, 134 229, 238
Spotify, 180, 220 Telenovelas, 2–4, 6, 13, 15, 16, 20,
Star system, 56 21, 24, 26–31, 33, 49, 50,
State-media interaction, 88 53–59, 62, 70, 72, 74, 77, 90,
State-run media, 127 92–94, 98, 99, 104, 125, 127,
Straubhaar, J. D., 1–5, 7, 13–21, 23, 161, 164, 170, 175, 185, 187,
24, 50–60, 62, 64, 65, 73–78, 188, 194, 195, 229, 230,
87–90, 92–97, 103, 116, 123, 237–240, 246, 247, 250
124, 127, 129, 135, 136, 136n5, Televisa, 5, 9, 13, 14, 17, 23, 25–28,
140, 147, 152–155, 165, 167, 31, 36–38, 51, 53, 55, 56, 60,
177–179, 182, 183, 186, 194, 74, 87, 97, 125, 125n1, 128,
207, 222–224, 227, 229, 232, 129, 165, 173, 175, 176, 187,
237–239, 241–243, 188, 190, 194, 230, 237,
245–248, 250 238, 247
264 INDEX
Televisión Azteca, 25, 26, 125, Upper-middle classes, 5–7, 21, 22, 58,
188, 190 65, 75, 79, 91, 94–96, 98, 125,
Televisión Nacional de Chile 127, 131, 132, 164, 184, 195,
(TVN), 30 203, 217, 229, 240–243, 247,
TGI Latina, 8, 33–35, 49, 65–69, 77, 248, 250
108, 131, 136–138, 136n5, Upscale, 127
150, 204 Uruguay, 130
TGR, 154 US advertising, 13, 15, 53, 54, 89
Third age of television, 160, 167 User-centric, 168
Third World countries, 51 User-generated, 166
3%, 35, 55, 134, 170, 177, 185, 191, US ideologies, 15
194, 247 US media models, 15, 52
Time-Life, 50, 89, 90, 241 US television exports, 5, 17, 23, 63
Topography, 27, 128 US television programs, 4, 14, 16, 21,
Transaction, 176 50, 55, 63–64, 66, 78, 79,
Transaction Video on Demand, 173 91, 99, 222
Transnational cultural flow, 52
Transversality, 9, 160–162,
180, 181, 193, 194, V
245, 246 Variety show, 3, 15, 24, 49, 53, 74,
Transverse flows, 159, 180–181 90, 93, 229, 238, 250
Trepte, S., 63 Varis, T., 2, 4, 5, 17, 21, 50, 92,
Tunstall, J., 52, 53, 177, 237 238, 241
Turkish melodrama, 30, 31 VCRs, 18, 241
Turkish TV imports, 26 Venevisión, 23, 29, 37, 58, 70, 238
TVA, 127 Venezuela, 4, 17, 21, 23, 28–29, 33,
TV Globo, 3, 5, 13, 14, 17, 23, 37, 35–37, 49, 55, 57, 65, 70, 71,
38, 50, 51, 53, 55, 58, 60, 87, 74, 76, 78, 79, 99, 101, 113,
89, 90, 93, 94, 97, 125, 129, 114, 124, 131, 138, 152, 184,
146, 162, 165, 166, 173, 176, 191, 223, 237, 239, 240, 244
185, 187, 190, 230, 237, 238, Virtual travel, 211
246, 250 Viscasillas, G., 124
TV imports, 27 VoD, 9, 26, 31, 162, 173
TV Record, 23, 24, 93, 125
W
U Waisbord, S., 14–16, 51, 59, 89,
Unbalanced flow, 2, 7, 159, 160, 114, 242
168, 177 Wall to Wall Dallas, 50
Univision, 28, 193 Wallach, J., 3, 4, 50, 90
Univores, 212 Wallerstein, I., 53, 215, 219
INDEX 265
Western Europe, 61, 63, 168, 171, Y

216, 237 Yo soy Betty la fea, 57
Wilkinson, K., 63, 229, 238 YouTube, 7, 9, 15, 21, 22,
Working class audiences, 51, 58, 93, 147 31, 38, 87, 160, 164–168,
Working classes, 3, 93, 135 173, 177, 181,
World Bank, 125, 130, 133, 154 227–229, 245
World capitalist system, 53 YouTubers, 165, 166
Writers, 15, 16, 19, 97 Yuya, 166

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NEW DIRECTIONS IN LATINO AMERICAN CULTURES

More information about this series at

New Directions in Latino American Cultures

doctorate at University of Texas, is now teaching at Schreiner College near

2 The Growth of Latin American Television 13

3 Why Latin American Audiences Stay Loyal to National

4 The Persistence of the Popularity of US Television 87

5 Changing Class Formations and Changing Television

The Bust Years: 2014–2019 150

6 Streaming Television, Netflix, and Transverse

7 Netflix, Distinction, and Cosmopolitanism Among Latin

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Fig. 6.1 OTT players with the most users 172

Table 2.1 An overview of trends across times and spaces in Latin

Industries and Genres

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

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imperialism, and national governments’ push to produce more, in a form

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excluded by emphasizing music that came from Afro-Brazilian traditions

Ongoing Appeal of U.S. Programming

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Beltran, L. R. (1978). TV etchings in the minds of Latin Americans: Conservatism,

Roncagliolo, R. (1995). Trade integration and communication networks in Latin

The Growth of Latin American Television

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

1977); a related idea of political patrimonialism that looks at the extension

Semiotics has often been applied to television and cultural studies

A related focus is the relationship between national governments and

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right moment to change their programming and massify their audience,

Television Eras in Latin America

By the 1970s, television was more widely available in most Latin

Putting Latin America in the Context of the Other

A Region of Broadcast Exporters and Importers

operated for 20 years before going national, reached 46 million viewers

of broadcast TV in Argentina, along with the obstacles posed by the coun-

to the increasing international viewership of Colombian television (Piñon,

For most of the history of Venezuelan broadcasting, two family-­

exhibit time. Telenovelas remain dominant in Chile where they represent

2019, representing a 35% penetration rate including a less than 1% growth

Audience Television Preferences Sample

the seven largest countries in South America, as well as Mexico—home to

statistic. While there is the possibility of an overestimation of statistical

Fig. 2.1 Multichannel penetration by country in Argentina, Brazil, Chile,

Fig. 2.2 Cable, satellite, and non-multichannel households in Argentina, Brazil,

in Mexico,2 and scattered urban areas in Brazil—followed by a maturation

Colombia, nations with a fragmented television industry, with high

The Impact of Streaming Television

By 2020, Internet penetration had reached 72% of the population in

Boyd-Barrett, O. (1977). Media imperialism: Towards an international framework

Fuchs, C. (2010). New imperialism Information and media imperialism? Global

Igarashi, H., & Saito, H. (2014). Cosmopolitanism as cultural capital: Exploring

OBSERVACOM. (2020, February 18). Reforma Ley de Comunicación de Ecuador:

Primicias. (2020). El Estado quebró a los medios incautados y no puede venderlos.

Straubhaar, J. (2007). World television: From global to local. Sage Publications.

Why Latin American Audiences Stay Loyal

2 The Growth of Latin American Television 13

3 Why Latin American Audiences Stay Loyal to National

4 The Persistence of the Popularity of US Television 87

5 Changing Class Formations and Changing Television

The Bust Years: 2014–2019 150

6 Streaming Television, Netflix, and Transverse

7 Netflix, Distinction, and Cosmopolitanism Among Latin

Fig. 6.1 OTT players with the most users 172

For most of the history of Venezuelan broadcasting, two family-

example, writing about European audiences, Bondebjorg et al. say, “US-