Big Data or Guessing Game? The Re-imagined Audience in Film Production in Asia for Streaming Platforms.

This paper explores how an industry conception of the audience in the age of digital filmmaking has been defined and produced by and for streaming platforms in Asia. If digital technology has transformed the traditional practices of film production, streaming platforms such as Netflix have re-imagined how the audience is conceived by the film industry, especially on the map across Asia. In the age of algorithmic culture, the national and geographical borderlines have been blurred in the production and circulation of film arts around the globe. This has led to the emergence of a post-national Asian cinema that encourages trans-national co-productions, and global circulation via streaming services. In the 1960s, Hollywood producers dealt with unknown audiences in the name of an abstract imagining of a 'mass audience' (Cantor 1971). The current proliferation of data-mining techniques, however, has enabled film studio executives to collect and analyze Big data to understand their audience in more detailed and elaborate ways. This has led to film producers having more possibilities for delicate constructions of target audiences (Turow and Draper 2014). This paper argues, however, that film streaming platforms put filmmakers in their production practices wedged in-between mass global and local market audiences – a guessing game with big data.