Inside the stream: transforming production cultures in the European Film Industry

This article examines how professionals across the European Film Industry (EFI) perceive and experience the transformations brought by US-based global Video-on-Demand (VOD) platforms. Drawing on 37 semi-structured interviews with a diverse range of European film professionals, the study adopts a production culture approach, complemented by platformization theory, to investigate the streaming imaginaries in the EFI across different segments of the audiovisual value chain. The findings reveal a shifting imaginary in which global VOD platforms remain associated with technical expertise, substantial production resources and access to international audiences, while increasingly being perceived as constraining creative autonomy rather than promoting it. They also reveal a black box imaginary surrounding all production stages, through which platforms are experienced as powerful, unreachable and opaque players. This shift also reshapes perceptions of legacy European audiovisual players, which are reassessed for their collaborative relationships and contribution to the development of EFI. By analyzing these transformations, the article connects professionals’ situated experiences with broader changes in the organization of cultural production, sheding light on the ways US-based global VOD platforms are reconfiguring production cultures in the EFI.