American Cultural Insularity and Global Online Video: Are Netflix, Amazon Prime and Other Digital Streaming Platforms Broadening Americans’ Foreign Film Consumption Horizons?

Abstract

The United States has long been characterized by American Cultural Insularity (ACI). According to a theory of ACI that I have developed in previous work ( Author 2019 , 2020 ), compared to most people in most other countries, Americans tend to consume much more of their own cultural media products and much fewer cultural media products produced in other countries than people in other countries consume. This paper compares long-running and deeply-entrenched American resistance to foreign and non-English language film in movie theaters to the (lack of) popularity of foreign, non-American and feature film-length content originally produced in a language other than English on major digital online video streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Google Video. It does so primarily via a discussion of, and analysis of, digital online video streaming platform popularity charts compiled by flixpatrol.com (Flixpatrol), a Netherlands-based online video streaming data collection and analysis web site/company. An analysis of Flixpatrol's Top Streaming in the United States popularity chart for 10 major digital online video streaming platforms from February 2020 to September 2021 shows little evidence of a movement among American-based consumers toward more consumption of foreign, non-English-language feature length films.