Amanda D. Lotz

Professor
Digital Media Research Centre
Queensland University of Technology

Dr Amanda Lotz is a media scholar, professor, and industry consultant. Her expertise includes media industries, digital distribution, the future of television, the business of media, and net neutrality.

Amanda leads the Transforming Media Industries research program in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of twelve books that explore television and media industries including Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-funded Video on Demand, Media Disrupted: Surviving Cannibals, Pirates and Streaming Wars, We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All, The Television Will Be Revolutionized and Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television.

Her most recent books explore the connections between internet-distributed services such as Netflix and the legacy television industry, as well as the business strategies and revenue models that differ. Her award-winning book, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, now in its second edition, has been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Italian, and Polish. She is frequently interviewed by NPR’s Marketplace, has appeared on BBC, CNN's The Nineties, HuffPost Live, and ZDF (German television network) and been interviewed for articles in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Wired, and Men’s Health among many others. She publishes articles about the business of television at Quartz, Salon, The New Republic, hosted the Media Business Matters podcast, and tweets about television and media @DrTVLotz.

She has been named a Fellow of the International Communication Association and Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Recent Books

– Now available from New York University Press –

Streaming Video: Storytelling Across Borders
edited by Amanda D. Lotz and Ramon Lobato

An international team of experts explores how streaming services are disrupting traditional storytelling. The rise of streaming has dramatically transformed how audiences consume media. Over the last decade, subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services, including Netflix, Prime Video, and Disney+, have begun commissioning and financing their own original movies and TV shows, changing the way and the rate at which content is produced across the globe, from Mexico City to Mumbai. Streaming Video maps this international production boom and what it means for producers, audiences, and storytellers. Through eighteen richly textured case studies, ranging from original Korean dramas on Netflix to BluTV's experimental Turkish series, the book investigates how streaming services both disrupt and maintain storytelling traditions in specific national contexts. To what extent, and how, are streamers expanding norms of television and film storytelling in different parts of the world? Are streamers enabling the creation of content that would not otherwise exist? What are the implications for different viewers, in different countries, with different tastes? Together, the chapters critically assess the impacts of streaming on twenty-first century audiovisual storytelling and rethink established understandings of transnational screen flows.

– Now available from Polity Books –

Netflix and Streaming Video:
The Business of Subscriber-funded Video on Demand

Netflix and Streaming Video is the first book to provide a comprehensive foundation for understanding the business of subscriber-funded streaming video and its implications for the role of these services in culture. Drawing on Lotz's two decades of research, the book highlights the similarities and differences among streaming video services (Netflix; Amazon) and video distribution technologies (broadcast; satellite; internet). Making a number of provocative and thought-provoking arguments, the book first reveals how the reliance on subscriber payment and video on demand produce different norms and strategies compared to previous video businesses. It then investigates Netflix and how its blend of characteristics distinguishes it from other subscriber-funded video on demand services. This book expertly shows that by understanding the underlying economic and technological dynamics of these services (and their differences), it is possible to better assess the actions taken by these companies and what the future of video may encompass.

This book is a must-read for students and scholars of Media and Communications Studies as well as those wishing to learn more about Netflix and streaming video services.

Reviews

‘In the chaotic world of television, Amanda Lotz has a keen ability to separate noise from signal. Here she drills into the factors and functions that make subscription streaming services distinctive from one another and put Netflix in a class of its own. This is a must-read for students of and professionals in the TV industry.’ Evan Shapiro, Producer, Media Cartographer, and Professor at Fordham University and NYU

‘Amanda Lotz is unparalleled at addressing our most vital questions regarding the global streaming video landscape. With Netflix and Streaming Video, Lotz has also introduced a blog-incubated mode of academic query as essential, iterative, asynchronous, and disruptive as the industries she studies.’ David Craig, USC Annenberg

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– Now available from MIT Press –

Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals and Streaming Wars

How the internet disrupted the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries and what this tells us about surviving technological disruption.

Much of what we think we know about how the internet "disrupted" media industries is wrong. Piracy did not wreck the recording industry, Netflix isn't killing Hollywood movies, and information does not want to be free. In Media Disrupted, Amanda Lotz looks at what really happened when the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries were the ground zero of digital disruption. It's not that digital technologies introduced "new media," Lotz explains; rather, they offered existing media new tools for reaching people.

For example, the MP3 unbundled recorded music; as the internet enabled new ways for people to experience and pay for music, the primary source of revenue for the recorded music industry shifted from selling music to licensing it. Cable television providers, written off as predigital dinosaurs, became the dominant internet service providers. News organizations struggled to remake businesses in the face of steep declines in advertiser spending, while the film industry split its business among movies that compelled people to go to theaters and others that are better suited for streaming. Lotz looks in detail at how and why internet distribution disrupted each industry. The stories of business transformation she tells offer lessons for surviving and even thriving in the face of epoch-making technological change.

Reviews

"Provocative. Revolutionizes notions of the root causes of our sector’s disruption. Lotz exposes myths while connecting to consumers’ everyday experiences. Controversial enough to spark debate; commonsense enough to acknowledge the truth in her analysis and storytelling.”
—Chris Gannett, President of EarBuds (social music platform); former CMO of CORE Media Group (owner and producer of American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance)

“Amanda Lotz is one of the keenest minds in, and writers about, media. This book is an essential diagnosis of how and why tech disruption changed the media ecosystem, and as a consequence, a must-read road map for the disruption ahead.”
—Evan Shapiro, Producer; Professor of Media at NYU and Fordham University

“Lotz’s brilliant dissection of issues like the similarities between music and software, and why ‘news,’ isn’t ‘journalism,’ reveals why the conventional lens of ‘disruption’ stymies efforts to shape the digital landscape.”
—Amit S. Mukherjee, Professor of Leadership and Strategy, Hult International Business School; author of Leading in the Digital World

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Upcoming Talks and
Presentations

Current Projects

Making Australian Television in the 21st Century (ARC Discovery Grant collaboration with Anna Potter and Kevin Sanson)

This project explores how the internationalization of the television business and digital distribution has affected the production of Australian television drama. It examines the implications of multi-channeling in early 2000s and various Australian policy responses, before exploring the further complication created by on-demand, catalog-based services such as public service iView and SBS Online, domestic Stan and Foxtel Now, and foreign services such as Netflix and Disney+.

PhD Supervision

I am accepting applications for PhD study as part of the yearly QUT scholarship and admissions cycle. My work is focusing more on viewers and how they experience ‘video’ now so I am looking for projects that take qualitative and innovative approaches to investigating audiences.