Professor Rai's article "Bollywoodizing Netflix or globalizing Hotstar? The cultural-industrial logics of global streaming platforms in India" analyzes the localization strategies of Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar, positing India as a distinctive cultural-industrial contact zone. The Indian market’s size, scale, and cultural and linguistic diversity make it a remarkable region for an epistemic inquiry into global industrial contact zones created by transnational streaming platforms. Rai maps the relative power of Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar in relation to India’s strong local film and entertainment industry. In doing so, Rai identifies two types of localization strategies: the cosmopolitan local and the indigenized global. These strategies encompass content, aesthetics, audiences, and local industry dynamics. This essay explains the cultural and global mobility of media forms tied to cricket and Bollywood and argues that these forms accord the Indian mediascape a distinctive agency, presenting an antipodal inversion of imperialistic discourses of Western hegemonic media power.
