Cross-Cultural Television Audiences in the Age of Streaming

Cross-Cultural Television Audiences in the Age of Streaming explores how streaming platforms have transformed cross-cultural television audiences, reshaping the production, distribution, and interpretation of global TV dramas in a transcultural and transnational context.

The book looks at production and distribution as well as the negotiation of meaning in a transcultural and transnational context. Revisiting and updating the influential research of Liebes and Katz, “The Export of Meaning”, on international and intercultural audience decoding of the American TV series Dallas, the book offers fresh insights into the global flows and contra-flows of TV dramas in the streaming era. By replicating, updating, and complementing one of the most influential research paradigms in audience studies, all authors in this book take the study of Liebes and Katz as a reference point and thus make it highly relevant for today’s television and streaming reality.

Written in an engaging and accessible style, this timely cross-disciplinary book is an essential reading for students and scholars in Communication, Media and Cultural Studies and for anyone interested in contemporary television and streaming culture.

Lothar Mikos is Professor Emeritus of Television Studies at Filmuniversität Babelsberg in Potsdam and Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His main research area is television and streaming as popular culture.

Gisela Dachs is a full professor at the European Forum and the Center of German Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She has also been working as an international journalist and book-author, covering Israel and the Middle East. Since 2001 she is the editor of the Jewish Yearbook “Jüdischer Almanach” of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem.

Anne Beier completed her PhD on the relation of religion and politics in German media. Additionally, her research focuses on intercultural integration and television analysis, and quantitative and qualitative social research methods.

Benjamin Nickl is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature, Culture, and Translation Studies at The University of Sydney, Australia. He works on entertainment technologies such as streaming and its techno-cultural politics, tastes, and audience developments. He is the author of Turkish German Muslims and Comedy Entertainment (2020) and co-editor of Moral Dimensions of Humour: Essays on Humans, Heroes and Monsters (2024).