Standing up to Hollywood: the Netflix glocal strategy for popularising non-English-language series worldwide

Abstract

Netflix non-English-language TV shows finding audiences beyond their country of origin is a significant change driven by the company, affecting both the production and distribution sectors as well as the audiovisual culture of Western viewers, who increasingly appreciate diverse audiovisual traditions. This investigation confirms a notable share of foreign product viewership by service users. Between June 2021 and December 2022, non-English TV shows accounted for 38% of the most popular Netflix TV rank in terms of accumulated viewing hours, reaching an average of more than 53 countries worldwide. This outcome results from two primary factors. The first is the company’s business logic based on big data, content indexing, and user monitoring. The second is the global popularity of local non-English speaking content, which is also the consequence of diverse actions taken by the company in project development, audience prototyping, distribution, language, marketing, recommendation algorithms, and social conversation, both locally and globally. This research focuses on Netflix’s glocal strategy as a case study and draws on direct interviews with company employees, audience data from its Netflix Top 10 website, specialized publications, and academic literature.