Explore the vast range of titles available.

A leading film critic discusses the evolving world of streaming media and its impact on society.

\"China is the world's largest market for cultural products, including films produced abroad in the USA and elsewhere. So why is it that just a handful of American movies are imported for theatrical releases in China each year, and anointed by the government to earn massive audiences and box office revenues? Why not more, especially when the same government approves a much larger number of movies for online distribution in China? These and a host of other fascinating questions get answered in this deeply researched account of what the author describes as a policy of cultural zoning. This book analyzes the way in which the Chinese government differently regulates video that is distributed online and video distributed via broadcast, created a \"zoned\" media environment in which more independence is allowed online than in broadcast. In doing so, the author provides insight into Chinese popular culture and the distinct features of governance in the Chinese environment. Zoning China examines how online video developed as an alternative to television in China in the last two decades\"-- Provided by publisher.

The different combinations of streaming media modes and product types influence the sales performance of streaming e-commerce. However, which combination is more effective in boosting product sales is unclear. Drawing on the cognitive fit theory, we collected sales data from 564 short videos and live streams on TikTok to investigate how the interaction of streaming media mode and product type impacts streaming e-commerce sales quantity. This study reveals that short video e-commerce works better at selling search products. In contrast, live-streaming e-commerce excels at boosting experience products, particularly expensive ones. Furthermore, the interaction effect between streaming e-commerce mode and product type is more significantly affected by low-priced products. This research contributes to understanding streaming e-commerce and offers valuable insights for e-commerce stakeholders.

\"This book deals with the various ways Netflix reconceptualises television as part of the process of TV IV. As television continues to undergo a myriad of significant changes, Netflix has proven itself to be the dominant force in this development, simultaneously driving a number of these changes and challenging television's existing institutional structures. This comprehensive study explores the pre-history of Netflix, the role of binge-watching in its organisation and marketing, and Netflix's position as a transnational broadcaster. It also examines different concepts of control and the role these play in the history of ancillary technologies, from the remote control to binge-watching as Netflix's iteration of giving control to the viewers. By focusing on Netflix's relationship with the linear television schedule, its negotiations of quality and marketing, as well as the way Netflix integrates into national media systems, Netflix and the Re-invention of Television illuminates the importance of Netflix's role within the processes of TV IV.\"-- Provided by publisher.

Streaming media devices have recently become one of the innovative IT devices used to replace traditional smart TV sets. In order to examine user acceptance of streaming media device, this study proposes an extended research model based upon flow theory and investigates the relationship among flow, perceived usefulness, product-related characteristics (i.e., content quality, functionality, ease of use, portability), and a manufacturer-related characteristic (i.e., trust). Partial least square methodology was employed to test the proposed model and corresponding hypotheses on data collected from 305 survey samples. The results showed that flow and perceived usefulness, two mediating variables, has a significant influence on usage intention. Among the four antecedents reflecting product-related attributes, content quality has the strongest effect on flow. Interestingly, functionality and ease of use affected only perceived usefulness in an indirect way through flow. Thus, flow mediates the effect of functionality and ease of use on perceived usefulness. This study discusses a number of implications and offers insights useful for both researchers and practitioners.

United States copyright law generally assumes that by providing property entitlements in creative works, the free market will balance between two competing priorities: incentivizing creators to produce works and ensuring the public has adequate access to this content. But the Copyright Act also outlines several detailed compulsory licensing schemes requiring the owners of certain copyright interests, musical works in particular, to license to anyone at government-set prices. Consistent with broader property theory concepts, scholars tend to treat compulsory copyright licenses as liability rules used only to address market failures caused by transaction costs. This Article questions that account, arguing that compulsory licensing also plays an important and underexplored role in furthering copyright’s specific policy agenda. A close analysis of the music regulatory regime and its history shows that its primary function has been to recalibrate the balance between creators’ financial incentives and public access to expressive works in situations where free market licensing would yield problematic outcomes. Unlike liability rules designed only to address transaction costs, for which regulators generally try to mimic market rates using market proxies, the compulsory music licensing regime traditionally used rate-setting criteria oriented around copyright policy. Applying these criteria, regulators often chose low royalty rates explicitly designed to allow access-expanding music dissemination technologies—from the player piano to digital radio—to flourish. In recent years, however, policymakers have begun to lose sight of this access-encouraging role. A series of legislative changes, including the recent Music Modernization Act, has made the compulsory music licensing regime increasingly inconsistent and ill equipped to handle new forms of music dissemination. Policymakers now seem to view compulsory licensing as justified only in the face of transaction-cost-based market failures and have begun privileging market mimicking over copyright policy when choosing royalty rates. This shift has yielded increasingly high royalty rates, which have made it more difficult for new disseminators, such as streaming services, to facilitate access to music. This Article argues that the shift away from policy-focused compulsory licensing prevents the regime from maintaining balance in the copyright system, a problem that is especially apparent in the experience of the burgeoning music streaming industry. In particular, a copyright-policy-based approach is necessary to prevent the malleability (and manipulability) of market-mimicking rate-setting standards from yielding royalty rates that are unworkable for streaming services. Although the Music Modernization Act has pushed the existing regime even farther away from its original role by implementing a market-focused rate-setting standard, this Article suggests ways that regulators could still further copyright policy goals in future rate-setting proceedings.

By leveraging the development of mobile communication technologies and due to the increased capabilities of mobile devices, mobile multimedia services have gained prominence for supporting high-quality video streaming services. In vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), high-quality video streaming services are focused on providing safety and infotainment applications to vehicles on the roads. Video streaming data require elastic and continuous video packet distributions to vehicles to present interactive real-time views of meaningful scenarios on the road. However, the high mobility of vehicles is one of the fundamental and important challenging issues for video streaming services in VANETs. Nevertheless, previous studies neither dealt with suitable data caching for supporting the mobility of vehicles nor provided appropriate seamless packet forwarding for ensuring the quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) of real-time video streaming services. To address this problem, this paper proposes a video packet distribution scheme named Clone, which integrates vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications to disseminate video packets for video streaming services in VANETs. First, an indicator called current network quality information (CNQI) is defined to measure the feature of data forwarding of each node to its neighbor nodes in terms of data delivery ratio and delay. Based on the CNQI value of each node and the trajectory of the destination vehicle, access points called clones are selected to cache video data packets from data sources. Subsequently, packet distribution optimization is conducted to determine the number of video packets to cache in each clone. Finally, data delivery synchronization is established to support seamless streaming data delivery from a clone to the destination vehicle. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves high-quality video streaming services in terms of QoS and QoE compared with existing schemes.