Era of the Individual Viewer? Taste, Value, and Creative Media Work in India’s Streaming Industries

Abstract

How do key players in Bombay’s screen industries—producers, directors, writers, and business developers—understand, imagine, and navigate the dizzying new world of streaming platforms in India? Tracking the emergence of symbiotic relationships between new streaming platforms and established media professionals, I discuss how a restructuring of industry dynamics is elemental to the processes of cultural legitimation of new streaming tastes and the reconfigurations of the relationships between texts, industries, and audiences. Through case studies of a few prominent creative professionals associated in various capacities with global and local streaming platforms, I sketch the multiple linkages between contemporary streaming cultures and the structural histories of both film and television in the subcontinent. Ultimately, this article argues that media workers’ self-reflexivity and theorizations about the industry-in-digital transit help us not only grasp the heterogeneity of this moment, but also trace notions of value and taste in Bombay’s emerging digital media ecologies.