Regulating Discoverability in Subscription Video-on-Demand Services

AbstractIn recent years, the growing popularity of services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ has raised complex challenges for media policy. Established policy approaches in a range of areas including audio-visual licensing, classification, censorship, and local production support are now being disrupted as governments grapple with the “Netflix effect” and its implications for national markets and institutions. Meanwhile, consumption practices are also changing as the algorithmically curated interfaces of SVOD services invite audiences to discover content in new ways. In particular, the use of personalised recommendation and other algorithmic filtering techniques has prompted discussion of how SVODs manage the visibility of different kinds of content—and whether these discovery environments require a policy response. This chapter explores how discoverability has emerged as a topic of debate, specifically in relation to SVOD services, and how this is connected to other precedents in audio-visual law and policy such as prominence regulation. We reflect on the many tensions inherent in this area of policy—which exists at the interface of media and platform regulation—and consider some of the normative questions raised when governments intervene in audiences’ content choices.