For CTS 2010, our second assignment we had to do was to take our technology and apply it to mapping. We had a choice for this assignment to choose whether you would prefer to do it in the “StoryMapJS*” or Google “My Maps” platforms and I chose StoryMapJS*. Click on THIS to see what my final project looked like. (Note: Having it embedded on this website makes it hard to move around on it)
For researching my map, I didn’t begin thinking about what I set out to do with the information until I came across various websites, including its own website, that talked about Netflix. That’s when I realized that I didn’t want to do Google’s “My Maps” for this assignment, and it would be more effective to do “StoryMapsJS*” instead since it would be more like telling and explaining things rather than having individual random locations.
From doing various research, I eventually realized that I needed to express how Netflix is more than just a streaming service, it’s part of the world in both mass and cultural. I found that this was an important topic because Netflix is more involved in the world than we think, and I got 3 very good points to back that up.
The first is that Netflix is physically globally large. From slides 3 to 16 in the map, I talk about the various service locations that Netflix has in each country. From slides 17 to 22 I show various films done by Netflix near us. With both of these sections, I wanted to show that Netflix is spread out around the world, and yet their very focused locally when it comes to movie and TV show production.
On a side note, I couldn’t put in enough information on slides 3 to 22 since they were just netflix services in countries and they basically all have the same job, so I was thinking about removing them. But Netflix is so accessible that even with the amount of locations I had, I still couldn’t capture all of the locations since there were so many. So thats why I thought it was necessary to include all those slides even though they had not much information. Here is an image of all the various locations Netflix has (this is service locations plus more) –
https://jobs.netflix.com/locations
The second point is that Netflix tries different ways to bring a community together in cultures and/or countries. There are 3 examples of this.
The first is the “France Experiment” (slide 25), where Netflix mimicked a traditional channel of Frances, which has a schedule of the best of series and films at that time, and it was called “Direct”. The reason for this is because –
“In France, watching traditional TV remains hugely popular with people who just want a ‘lean back’ experience where they don’t have to choose shows…”
– Netflix
In this scenario, people are happy to be forced to watch shows in this country, but might not be in others.
The second example is the “Netflix Prize”, which is a competition Netflix held to improve its algorithm by giving money to the team with the best ‘improvement percentage’. I didn’t include that in this map because it is a competition of code, so theirs not a location for it. But it’s still very relevant because it’s bringing different cultures and communities together to try and beat each other in code for a friendly competition (besides Cuba and North Korea cause their blocked countries of Netflix’s at the time).
The third example is “Netflix LIVE!”, which was a spot in Los Angeles where people could join live to enjoy a rock and roll group with stars Teri Hatcher, Hayden Panettiere, Kristen Bell and Adrian Pasdar to have some fun. It also had various TV shows and movies being shown there. It was a gathering of people, and Netflix’s intention was to bring together community and culture for people who wanted to see those movie stars and to enjoy themselves.
My third point is that Netflix has power and control over how countries are portrayed, which makes them naturally involved with culture. This is because I found 3 very interesting studies online. The first one is that people who watch Netflix are 1.8 times more likely to watch Canadian content than those who don’t have Netflix. The second study, which is a bit related to the first one, shows that people who watch Canadian content are 2.1 times more likely to say that Canada is their number 1 travel destination (Studies 1 and 2 are on Slide 23).
The third study shows that people who watched the “Somebody Feed Phil” episodes that were focused in Montreal were 79% more interested in Canada’s food and drink, and 76% more interested in Canadian cities than before. (The third study is on Slide 24).
All sources to these studies can be found HERE.
Throughout this exercise, I realized that we are missing out on culture. I came to this conclusion during my research – since I knew their wouldn’t be much differences in Netflix services across the world, I researched different movies and TV shows created in those countries to put as the image for the services in each slide. But it just absolutely blew my mind to see how much content I didn’t know the name of, and the amount of material getting wasted to being limited to only certain parts of the world, especially since I was intrigued by the thumbnail on some of the movies and TV Shows.
One thing I did struggle with was the order of the mapping because if I put the ones with the most information at the beginning, its going to not look like its specific enough on to locations on the globe, so overall I decided that at the beginning it would be better to have little comments but have more specific points, but have it vice versa at the end.
For this assignment, I used more of Netflix’s website than I did for the timeline assignment since I was looking for locations for the company. I did also have a different topic/story with the map than the timeline assignment. The timeline was more about answering “Is their history?”, if so, was it good or bad? This mapping assignment answers more about how Netflix impacts people and where. Because the assignment itself is about mapping too, it helped take out the algorithm/streaming service part of it, because as I’ve mentioned in other blog posts on Netflix, it’s going to be a challenge separating the algorithmic side and the actual company side to Netflix. I think there were pros and cons to both the timeline and mapping assignment. For me, I think all of the information I found was ‘ok’ when I researched the timeline, but for this one, I got ‘amazing’ information but less than the ‘ok’ information from the timeline.
Links (CHICAGO):
Ahearn, Victoria. 2021. “Netflix Chooses Toronto as Location for its Corporate Office in Canada.” The Canadian Press, Apr 27. https://subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/wire-feeds/netflix-chooses-toronto-as-location-corporate/docview/2519562966/se-2.
Armelli, Paolo. “Netflix Sta Sperimentando UN Canale Tradizionale in Francia.” Wired Italia, November 9, 2020. https://www.wired.it/play/televisione/2020/11/09/netflix-canale-generalista-francia/.
Collins, Padraig. “Netflix Scout for Narcos TV Show Found Shot Dead in Mexico.” The Guardian, September 17, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/17/netflix-scout-for-narcos-tv-show-found-shot-dead-in-mexico.
Liedtke, Michael. “Netflix to Stop Sending Dvds by Mail – a Thing It Was Still Doing – National.” Global News, April 19, 2023. https://globalnews.ca/news/9635409/netflix-dvd-by-mail-service-ending/#:~:text=The%20DVD%20service%20has%20been%20operating%20from%20a,from%20Netflix%E2%80%99s%20sleek%20campus%20in%20Los%20Gatos%2C%20California.
Netflix. “Netflix Corporate Information.” Netflix Help Center, January 24, 2024. https://help.netflix.com/legal/corpinfo.
Nield, David. “Netflix Is Testing a More Traditional TV Channel Approach in France.” TechRadar, November 7, 2020. https://www.techradar.com/news/netflix-is-testing-a-more-traditional-tv-channel-approach-in-france.
Scully, Lindsey. “A Great New Way to Discover Canada through Your Favourite Series …” Netflix, September 27, 2021. https://about.netflix.com/en/news/a-new-way-to-discover-canada-through-your-favourite-series-and-films.
When a Location Scout for the Netflix Series “Narcos” Went to Mexico, He was Shot to Death – Raising Questions the show’s Producers Haven’t Answered 2017. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. https://subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/other-sources/when-location-scout-netflix-series-narcos-went/docview/2727703945/se-2.
Wikipedia contributors, “Netflix Prize,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Netflix_Prize&oldid=1208793505 (accessed February 27, 2024).
Wikipedia contributors, “Timeline of Netflix,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Timeline_of_Netflix&oldid=1206251593 (accessed February 26, 2024).
“Band From TV to Headline ‘Netflix LIVE! On Location’ Concert and Screening Series Aug. 9 in L.A.” Entertainment Newsweekly, August 11, 2008, 72. Gale OneFile: Fine Arts (accessed February 25, 2024). https://link-gale-com.subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/apps/doc/A182860059/PPFA?u=guel77241&sid=bookmark-PPFA&xid=19a62be2.
“5 Canadian Locations Where Netflix shows were Filmed.” 2022.Chatelaine (Online), Jan 11. https://subzero.lib.uoguelph.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/magazines/5-canadian-locations-where-netflix-shows-were/docview/2618750085/se-2.
Images (In blog post without shown link):
Netflix “Direct” image –
Armelli, Paolo. “Netflix Sta Sperimentando UN Canale Tradizionale in Francia.” Wired Italia, November 9, 2020. https://www.wired.it/play/televisione/2020/11/09/netflix-canale-generalista-francia/.
Somebody Feed Phil image –
“Somebody Feed Phil.” Wikipedia, February 17, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Feed_Phil.
Tom Talks: Stories and Reflections 
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