Original Article

Critical Studies in Television:

The International Journal of
Class, pay TV access and Television Studies
2019, Vol. 14(2) 233–254
Netflix in Latin America: ª The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
Transformation within sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1749602019837793

a digital divide journals.sagepub.com/home/cst

Joseph D Straubhaar
University of Texas at Austin, USA

Deborah Castro
Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Luiz Guilherme Duarte

University of Central Florida, USA

Jeremiah Spence
University of Texas at Austin, USA

Abstract
In the context of international flows of media products, this article offers an exploration
of pay TV and the prospects for streaming television usage in the Latin American region.
Based on audience preference data gathered by Kantar Media, the article offers an
overview of how the pre-Netflix era looked like in the region. Drawing on the theories
of cultural proximity and cultural discount, our results suggest that the international
nature of Netflix programming is of particular interest and appeal among the upper
middle class and elite, who have the cultural capital to enjoy and appreciate it. The
findings also indicate that access to streaming television is hampered by a new digital
divide, based in both age or generation, class and geography, which will limit the extent
to which services like Netflix will disrupt broadcast and cable/satellite television.

Keywords
Pay TV, Netflix, Latin America, social class

Corresponding author:
Joseph D Straubhaar, Department of Radio-TV-Film, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712–1067,
United States of America.
Email: jdstraubhaar@austin.utexas.edu
234 Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 14(2)

Introduction: From fear of flows to class-based flows

and their social impact
The international flows of media products (such as film, television, news, comics and
music) and their possible impacts on other cultures have been a source of fear for the
receiving countries since at least the 1970s. The flows of television in particular, which
was the most rapidly emerging medium of the time, was one of the most prominent issues
in the New World Information and Communication Order debate in UNESCO in the
1970s. People feared the ideological impact of media from other cultures, such as the
increased acceptance of consumer capitalism and the desire to be part of the middle class
(McPhail, 1989). They feared, in a more abstract way, that the large flow of media
products from the United States would lead to an Americanisation of their cultures and a
homogenisation of other cultures to resemble America or Europe (Ritzer, 2004). This
was part of a wave of concern centred on the idea that US-dominated media flows were
part of a larger cultural imperialism, which also included a turn towards global capit-
alism. These concerns were linked to the spread of more commercial media systems
supported by advertising (Janus, 1983), the support of consumer lifestyles (Dorfman and
Mattelart, 1984), as well as a movement towards absorbing and copying US culture
(Hamelink, 1983) and the loss of cultural and political autonomy (Schiller, 1976).
When it comes to television as a cultural product, much of the fear of uneven global
flows has been linked to new waves of television technology at key junctures over the
years, from 1950 to now. The licensing and sale of US television programmes to other
countries, beginning in the late 1940s to early 1950s (Kackman, 2008), triggered much of
the debate in UNESCO. A UNESCO study conducted in 1973 demonstrated that over
half the TV programmes airing in most countries originated in the United States (Nor-
denstreng and Varis, 1974). Debates about the prospect of direct cross-border satellite
television transmission to homes in the UN started in the 1950s, well before it was a real
technological possibility (de Sola Pool, 1979). Both global and regional flows of tele-
vision expanded tremendously in the 1980s–present, as satellite TV and cable TV both
proliferated in most countries around the world (Barker, 1997). Although much of this
was US in origin, other programming including European, Japanese, Korean, Indian,
Brazilian, Mexican, Egyptian, Lebanese, Turkish and others also expanded into the
world via satellite (Sinclair et al., 1996; Straubhaar, 2007).
Currently, the most recent wave of global TV flows consists of those distributed via
the internet, with the popularisation of platforms such as YouTube, video over social
networks like Facebook and subscription video on demand services, such as Netflix.
With the so-called new golden age of American TV (Damico and Quay, 2016) flowing
out into the world on these platforms, to what extent do they represent a new form of
media imperialism, in the sense of renewed or even increased US dominance of TV
flows? Or should we see it as a new form of globalisation of TV, or a complex new
transnationalism (which will be defined below)? This article aims to examine this overall
question by paying special attention to the Latin American region, using audience
preference data gathered by Kantar Media for multichannel TV. The analysis of this data
allows us to depict how the pre-Netflix era looked like in the region and come to
Straubhaar et al. 235

conclusions as to how the future of Netflix’ potential disruption of existing television

systems may be somewhat limited there by lack of infrastructure and access, by limits of
cultural capital and by the continuing strength of cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991).
Another interesting question is how the eras of television technology have differed in
Latin America and how that affects the current impact of these platforms in the region. In
the context of the United States, Amanda Lotz (2007) identified three periods of sig-
nificance while looking into the production components: first, the network era (1952 to
mid-1980s), where a few broadcast programming options available were consumed
through the TV set. That era has lasted much later in most of Latin America, where the
main broadcast networks still hold much of the audience (Straubhaar et al., 2016).
Second was the multichannel transition in the United States (mid-1980s to mid-2000s),
when both technological developments and the emergence of new TV channels
expanded viewers’ choice and control. That era came much later, with much less impact,
in most of Latin America. In most countries, until the 2010s, it affected only the upper
middle class and elite. The third television era for Lotz was the post-network era (mid-
2000s to today), when the viewer assumes more independence and television con-
sumption expands into new platforms, largely on the internet. Almost a decade later,
Lotz recognises that those three periods are ‘rough periodizations without exact starting
and end points’ (2016: 127). She also argues that the concept of ‘post-channel’ would
have described better the two main characteristics of the third period, that is, ‘textual
innovation introduced by original, scripted cable series and the technological capacity
for nonlinear distribution’ (Lotz, 2016: 125). This third era in Latin America has arrived
relatively more quickly, since Netflix targeted the region as its first major area for
international expansion. However, it still targeted only the upper middle class, those who
have the broadband internet access, the money and the cultural capital, linked to a certain
sense of taste (Bourdieu, 1984), to get access to it and enjoy it. As we will show, this
period can hardly be called ‘an era’ as the changes are still highly restricted in their
effective reach by social class and the geography of infrastructure and access. Indeed, we
will argue that the television eras and services, including the new Netflix era, are much
more divided and restricted by social class and access to infrastructure in Latin America
than in the United States or the global north. These technological and socioeconomic
frames shape the context into which Netflix and previously satellite and cable emerged in
Latin America. This limits the degree to which Netflix can disrupt the overall system of
television in Latin America, but it can and probably will continue to disrupt the way that
upper middle classes and elites consume television, which is a significant disruption in
itself, particularly since these are still the classes most pursued by a variety of advertisers
and media.
A series of social factors related to preferences for national, regional or US television
programmes and channels affect the flow of programming. One key framework is the
historical development of a generalised preference for local or national television, often
referred to in the context of two related theories, cultural discount (Hoskins et al., 1989)
and cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991). A competing framework to explain why
people still like US, European and other television programmes from beyond their
immediate geographical region comes from the ongoing development of a set of human
236 Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 14(2)

capitals that also affect cultural and media preferences: cultural, economic and linguistic
capitals, as theorised by Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 1991). These frameworks help
explain preferences in Latin America for national, regional or US programming, which
will affect Netflix’s strategy and decisions about whether to rely on US programming
and to offer more transnational programming from Europe and Asia, or to emphasise
local/national or regional programmes, that it might either acquire, produce or co-
produce.
This article revolves around the following three research questions: What are the
emerging audience preferences for national, regional and US programming in the met-
ropolitan regions of eight major Latin American countries? To what extent do cultural
proximity and cultural discount allow us to explain and theorise those viewing pre-
ferences? What limits are placed by economics, access to the internet and internet
infrastructure on platforms such as Netflix’s evolving strategies in the region?
Prior to present the empirical results, the next section presents an overview of the key
theories this article draws on.

National TV and cultural proximity

While a study by UNESCO in 1973 found a very unequal television flow dominated by
the United States, national television production by domestic networks was growing
rapidly in a number of the countries with the best developed TV industries: Brazil
(Straubhaar, 1984), Mexico and other Latin American countries (Antola, Rogers et al.
1984), Japan (Ito, 1990), Hong Kong (Curtin, 1999), South Africa, Egypt and other
developing countries. This challenged two key tenets of cultural imperialism: that the
United States and other core countries (Wallerstein, 1979) would dominate flows (Boyd-
Barrett, 1977) and that their firms would tend to dominate less developed countries’
systems (Schiller, 1976).
The empirical support for these theories was complex and mixed. On one hand, more
and more countries began to present commercial media reliant on advertising, which
cultural imperialism predicted. On the other hand, these countries also tended to make
more of their own television programmes (Antola, Rogers et al., 1984; Straubhaar,
1981), which cultural imperialism did not predict.
This upsurge in national production started in the 1970s, gradually spreading to other
medium-size or even smaller countries in the 1980s and 1990s (Sinclair et al., 1996).
This has led a number of the scholars (cited above) to question the extent to which
unequal flows of television from the United States were really challenging national
cultural production. A new wave of research noted that production costs had dropped,
production technology was cheaper and easier to use, local genres like telenovelas were
developing in regions like Latin America, local/national writers, producers and stars
were developing and audiences seemed to respond better to locally produced pro-
grammes (Straubhaar, 2007, 2009).
Efforts to theoretically understand the evolving preference for national versus
imported television remain as relevant today in understanding the slow growth of cable
TV in Latin America and in trying to understand Netflix’s strategy in the region. Two
Straubhaar et al. 237

major lines of thinking evolved in the 1980s–1990s, which reflect and support each
other: the cultural discount and cultural proximity. The cultural discount approach
argues that audiences come to discount or select against programmes in languages and
cultures that are unfamiliar or less interesting to them (Hoskins and Mirus, l988).
Conversely, cultural proximity, similarity and relevance led audiences to tend to prefer
national television programmes (e.g. telenovelas in Mexico and Brazil) over foreign
productions (Straubhaar, 1991). The idea of cultural proximity is based on the higher
relevance of national or regional topics, themes, news mentions, shared history and
various other aspects of topicality and locality. It relies on recognition of jokes, stars,
ethnic types, land and cityscapes, as well as various indications and symbols of day-to-
day life. It led audiences to prefer national TV programmes, especially telenovelas,
sports, music, comedy, variety shows and news.
There is a second aspect or layer of cultural proximity, that is the attraction of regional
or cultural linguistic-based programming to national audiences, so that even though a
Brazilian show might have to be translated from Portuguese to Spanish for Chilean
audiences, because of linguistic, historical, cultural, ethnic and other similarities
between the two Latin American countries, it will likely seem more proximate or rele-
vant to the Chilean viewer than a show from China or even the United States. However,
this regional cultural proximity seems very dynamic and subject to both interaction and
change over time in how countries in a region relate to each other.
Technology can also either enhance or reduce the impact of cultural proximity.
Much of the relevance of cultural proximity theory for East Asia, in particular, had
to do with the expansion of satellite and cable TV in the region, which began to
increase the number of accessible channels from other parts of Asia, which rapidly
became popular (Sinclair et al., 1996). For instance, the remarkable popularity of
Japanese programmes and channels in Taiwan, where satellite antennas could pick
up Japanese signals directly (Iwabuchi, 1997). In Latin America, the impact of
regional cultural seems to have been highest in the broadcast, when countries that
could not afford to produce expensive shows like scripted comedy or telenovelas
tended to import them from other Latin American countries. In contrast, first cable
and satellite television, then streaming television, has predominantly brought in a
much larger volume of US shows, to which Latin America audiences have
responded positively (Straubhaar et al., 2016).
The cultural proximity theory would predict, empirically, that television audiences,
particularly in regions like Latin America, which has had a fairly strong regional market
in television programming since the 1970s–1980s, ought to show a preference, first for
national programming, because those would be the most relevant and attractive shows in
cultural terms (Straubhaar, 1991). At least hypothetically, then, their second preference
might well be for programming from within their region, since it will show similarities of
historical experience, religion, ethnicity and various aspects of culture (Straubhaar,
1991). In contrast, how high are the audience’s preferences for US or European pro-
gramming? We will examine this question empirically, using audience preference data
from Kantar Media.
238 Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 14(2)

Methodology
This article uses data from Kantar Media, particularly data from their Target Group
Index, a syndicated survey conducted in eight Latin American countries. TGI respon-
dents answer questions about lifestyle, product consumption and media habits. TGI has
been in the market since 1999 and all data sets can be trended. The analysis presented in
this article focuses on data from 2004 through 2014, which covered major metropolitan
areas, not true national samples, in eight countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil,
Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. Although the total number of
respondents for all eight countries was 61,300, which represent a universe of more than
185 million people in the region covered, we have to remember that we focusing on the
major metropolitan areas and rural less-populated areas may behave differently. The
sample design guarantees representation of the universe of the study: people 12–64 years
of age in urban centres. (They do collect data on people over 65, but their sample is
optimised for audiences 12–64, and the populations of these countries are younger on
average than in the United States.)
For each country, a multi-stage stratified probability sample was projected to rep-
resent the total household and individual population. With the exception of Mexico,
where the sample represents 28 cities across Mexico, most of the samples are limited to a
few major metropolitan areas – 10 (nine major cities þ Campinas) in Brazil, far fewer in
most other countries. This is important because people in major metro areas are richer,
better educated and more connected to a variety of communication technologies than the
national general population. For example, in 2012, 64% in the Kantar metro sample in
Brazil had access to the internet, while the number in the general population was 44%.
TGI Latina surveys are conducted door-to-door, with a combination of personal
interviews and a paper survey left behind by the interviewer to be retrieved later.
Interviewers followed a skip pattern for sampling based on the physical location of
respondents’ homes. The skip pattern in the upper class neighbourhoods may be higher
than the lower SES levels, where the response rates are generally higher. SES gathers
TGI Latina samples disproportionately within the region. These disproportionate rates
are adjusted properly in reporting the data by weighting mechanisms. In order to properly
analyse the higher SES level are over-sampled and therefore, an under-sample of the
lower class areas. This is created in order to have a robust sample size for analysis per
social class. The weights applied in the TGI Latina survey are proportionate to the last
national census or growth estimates in order to represent the overall population within
each market.

Limitations
These findings are limited to the characteristics of the data collection. First, the sample is
based on cable and satellite subscribers in major metro areas, not general national
populations, as noted above. Second, in order to have access to the data, we had to utilise
the analytical programmes of Kantar Media, which essentially limit us to cross-
tabulations with significance analysed by the w2 statistic; more advanced statistical
Straubhaar et al. 239

procedures and measures were not performed in Kantar’s system. Third, because of the
large sample size and our need to rely on cross-tabulation, we run some risk of Type I
error here, finding false positives in significance due to our large sample (61,300).

Results
Satellite/cable TV and regional/global audience preferences
In Latin America, the pay TV expansion was more limited in Latin America than in other
parts of the world. Some of the resistance to satellite and cable TV came from political
reasons: some national political parties were allied with national broadcasters, such as
the overt alliance of the ruling PRI party in Mexico with Televisa, which included former
presidents among its owners (Sinclair and Straubhaar, 2013). Relatedly, some govern-
ments, like the military regimes in Brazil (1964–1984) preferred to see national pro-
gramming to reinforce national identity (Mattos, 1982). More resistance came from the
industries where the dominance of strong broadcasters with political influence held back
legislation that would foster growth of competing pay TV interests. Even more important
were economic reasons: poor economies with unequal distribution of wealth saw not
many people able to afford pay TV on cable or satellite (Reis, 1999).
Demand for cable or satellite TV in Latin America was also simply not as high as in
other parts of the world. Penetration of pay TV in Brazil was only about 12% in 2004 (see
Figure 1), much lower than most comparable countries. This lack of interest in cable TV
characterised much of the region. Significant exceptions were Argentina and Colombia,
which have historically had much higher audiences for cable and satellite television, due
to government policies that stunted broadcast networks at the moment that cable was
coming in (Sinclair and Straubhaar, 2013). For example, in Argentina, cable TV was
already well established in part by nationalisation of the dominant private television
networks by both the military and Peron governments from 1974 to 1984 aimed at
limiting their political power (Silvestri and Vassolo, 2009). While broadcast networks
were greatly diminished, new networks and independent producers expanded via cable
TV in the country, which remained popular among audiences even after the return of
broadcast networks. In the case of Colombia, broadcast television networks were also
limited by government, which leased out time on networks it owned to television pro-
ducers, who arranged their own advertising (Fox, 1975). Figure 1 shows that cable/
satellite TV penetration in those two countries was much higher than the others in 2004.
To some degree, this limited adoption of pay TV defied the logic of economic growth,
as the slowly building middle class in the region between the 1970s and the 1990s could
probably have afforded cable television (Ferreira et al., 2012). One hypothesis in this era
was that nationally based programming on the broadcast networks in Latin America was
so attractive – partially in terms of cultural proximity – that national audiences felt no
need to pay what were often substantial sums (upwards of US$50 a month for cable
subscriptions), or to acquire a VCR as another means of supplementing national TV.
This was an unjustifiable economic burden for many people because their interests in a
240
Figure 1. Multichannel TV in metropolitan area homes by country, 2004–2014.
Straubhaar et al. 241

Figure 2. Latin American TV viewing interests by country or regional origin of their preferred
television and film programming, 2014.

variety of things including fictions, sports, music and comedy, among others were met by
national broadcast television (Boyd et al., 1989).
In the 2000s, satellite and cable TV had finally begun to grow in the Latin American
region, bringing in many more US television channels and programmes, increasingly
dubbed into Spanish and Portuguese. Figure 2 shows Latin American TV viewing
preferences according to the origin of their favourite TV show and film for 2014.
For the average of all eight countries in the TGI Kantar media survey in 2014 (the left-
hand columns), Figure 2 shows that an average of 59% of domestic audiences across the
region prefer domestic programming. That shows that national level cultural proximity is
still at play even in the era when far more people, particularly in the metropolitan centres
that the survey covers, have access to cable TV, satellite TV and internet-based tele-
vision. Only in Peru did more people prefer US television to national.
More startling, the survey shows that the secondary preference is for US program-
ming (52%, the average of the national preference in the eight countries). The preference
for regional programming is at a much lower level (31%). Furthermore, the average
preference for regional programming at 31% is only slightly higher than the preference
for European programming at 30%. So it seems that, at least in these Latin American
countries, which are the largest and best developed, cultural proximity to the national and
a strong preference for US programming has overcome secondary cultural proximity to
regional programs. That will require serious theoretical re-thinking.
Figure 2 also shows that this pattern is slightly irregular in certain countries such as
Mexico, where the relative preference for national programming is somewhat greater:
68% as opposed to 51% for US programming. In Peru, preference for US programming
at 58% is actually slightly higher than preference for national programming at 55%.
242
Figure 3. Latin American TV viewing interests by SES and by country or regional origin of their preferred television and film programming, 2004–2014.
Straubhaar et al. 243

Figure 4. Interest in or preference for US television by education, or cultural capital.

This may reflect its status as a smaller, less affluent country with less fiction production
than many of its neighbours. The other anomaly to the general pattern is Venezuela,
where both national fiction and regional fiction are preferred at a lower level of 44%, but
still higher than American fiction, at 35% and somewhat higher than European fiction, at
41%. This atypical pattern in Venezuela probably reflects the political conflicts that
happened under the Presidency of Hugo Chávez, who drove out one major fiction
producing television station due to its opposition to him. Moreover, the remaining large
producer, Venevisión, reduced its television fiction production, which used to be roughly
one telenovela per year, because of concerns over government controls and also reduced
market support for TV production (Acosta-Alzuru, 2013).
Another reason for the eventual growth of cable and satellite TV is the way in which
they made new genres of television accessible. In terms of content, relatively few
national television industries in Latin America were producing certain genres, such as
action series or feature films, high quality dramatic and comedy series and other sub-
genres within television fiction that begin to characterise what has come to be called the
new golden age of American television. That new golden age was first perhaps char-
acterised by HBO on cable and satellite TV, however is also coming to be characterised
by series such as Orange is the New Black (2013–), produced and carried by Netflix.
Drawing on this, one interesting new hypothesis is that middle and upper middle class
audiences with an interest in such series-based TV fiction may have been drawn to first
cable channels and more recently internet-based services like Netflix in order to have
244 Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 14(2)

access to new genres of fiction that interested them. One disruption that services like
Netflix, as well as HBO, are creating is a much greater taste for dramatic and comedy
series, which are only now being very widely produced in Latin America. That widening
genre proximity (La Pastina and Straubhaar, 2005) has contributed to a change in cul-
tural proximity by origin.

Explanations for changes in audience preferences

in Latin America
Since the mid-2000s, Latin Americans are turning more to pay television and, since the
mid-2010s, to Netflix, and in both cases, to more US programming. We will argue that
this has to do with the expansion of economic, cultural and linguistic capital across Latin
America (Bourdieu, 1984, Bourdieu, 1991), leading not only to an increased economic
ability to afford the cable, satellite and internet technologies that are bringing in a huge
amount of television programming from beyond Latin America but also a notable
increase in many people’s likelihood of understanding and enjoying it, thus in effect
partially overriding cultural proximity.
In several of the countries under discussion here, a very large degree of economic
mobility and social mobility in the last decade has helped audiences change their access
to television and expand both their educational and professional horizons. As a result, the
cultural nature of these viewers’ preferences for television may have also changed. If we
think about economic mobility and economic class in terms of the theories of Pierre
Bourdieu, it helps us understand how audiences are formed both in terms of economic
capital (what they can afford) as well as cultural capital (what they understand and
enjoy). For example, Bourdieu (1984) sees economic capital in the ways that are largely
used to describe social class and access to work or other economic resources that a
person can use in various fields of competition. Economic capital can buy access to
better education, which is also related to an increase in cultural capital, the knowledge
and skills that one has to deploy in a field in which one wishes to compete (Bourdieu,
1986). Families experiencing social mobility linked to economic capital tend to start
desiring greater levels of education, new forms of travel and learning and new forms of
consuming cultural products (e.g. in their original language). In the following, we will
unpack these forms of capital in relation to the data.

Economic capital
Increasing levels of social mobility since the 1990s have seen radical changes in the
distribution and impact of economic capital for millions of people, depending on the
countries involved. Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have all experienced
substantial economic mobility, lifting people from working-poor/working-class into the
lower middle class and, in some cases, lifting people from the lower middle class into the
middle or even upper middle class. Economic capital gives families much broader
choices about acquiring new forms of media technology, such as cable or satellite TV
and broadband internet, where available in terms of infrastructure.
Straubhaar et al. 245

In 2012, the World Bank estimated that the middle class now outnumbered the poor in
Latin America and the Caribbean for the first time (Ferreira et al., 2012). In other words,
there has been a steady growth of the middle class for 10 or 15 years and towards the
formation of a new lower middle class, from at least the late 1990s or early 2000s in the
case of Brazil, and somewhat longer and steadier in the case of Mexico and Chile. For
example, in Brazil there is an estimate that from the early 2000s until 2012, roughly 40
million people moved out of either working poor/ working class into the new lower
middle class (Zizola, 2014). Needless to say, this is a controversial idea. Even though this
new lower middle class has a revised purchasing power to, for example, afford cable TV
and internet connection, it does not mean that they are necessarily as well educated,
critically among the adult members, as were previous generations of the middle class.
This would explain why people in Brazil and Mexico are fiercely discussing what it
means to be part of the middle class (O’Dougherty, 2002; Scalon and Salata, 2012).
Another aspect noted by the World Bank’s study about the growth of the lower middle
class is its instability (2012). It might continue to grow and solidify but within an eco-
nomic depression such as the one Brazil has suffered from 2015 to the present, members
of this new lower middle class are in fact falling back into the working class, if not into
working poor. Particularly relevant to this study is a large number of Brazilians from the
new lower middle class who have been giving up their cable, internet and cell phone
subscriptions because they simply can’t afford them anymore (Alves et al., 2016;
Mayrink, 2016). So, although the new lower middle class and the expanded middle class
are both real, they are not necessarily stable economically and therefore their media
consumption habits are not either.
If we examine the impact of increasing economic capital (which is measured in the
TGI study by an overall measure of social economic status that is focused on income,
household possessions, as well as education), we will see that it is in fact related to
increased interest in US-based film and television programmes. As Figure 3 (based on
the same TGI surveys) shows, in 2004 the interest in US domestic programming among
the richest 10% of metropolitan area residents of the eight Latin American countries
studied was almost equal to domestic programming, perhaps slightly preferred by 1% or
2%. In fact, perhaps the most significant trend in the graph is that the preference for
national programming stays evenly high across all the time periods and income groups,
at around 60%, despite increasing interest in US programmes. This is visible in Graph
Three, which breaks preferences for television content from different regions down by
socioeconomic status, which is rooted in economic capital.
However, if we look at preferences based on socioeconomic status in 2014, we
notice that US programming is now preferred to a much larger degree – a margin of 7%
or 8% – by the richest (Top 10%). If we examine the next richest (Next 20%), which
would correspond to the upper middle class and middle class, domestic programming is
preferred over American by almost 7% or 8% in 2004. By 2014, however, US pro-
gramming is almost as popular as domestic programming. It is interesting to note in
this graph that while domestic programming remains almost equally popular among all
social classes in both 2004 and 2014, the preference for American programming tends
to increase rapidly not only among the elite and upper middle class but also among
246 Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 14(2)

those in the next 30% (the middle and lower middle classes) as well as somewhat
among the poorest (next 40%).
Increased economic capital in a family also tends to parallel increased choices and
options and schooling for their children, which is then linked to the acquisition and use
of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984). Particularly in Mexico and Brazil, social mobility
in schooling terms has also been increased by government initiatives such as Brazil’s
bolsa escola.1 This measure pays parents to keep their children in school rather than
drawing them out to do work in order to help the family’s economic fortunes. By
paying poor families to keep their children in school, Brazil and Mexico have also
directly addressed the question of the formation of cultural capital, by making it
economically easier for poor parents to keep children in school. At least in Brazil, this
has roughly doubled the number of children in both elementary and secondary schools
(Glewwe and Kassouf, 2012).

Cultural capital
Cultural capital itself has also been growing in tandem with economic capital from the
1990s through the 2010s in much of Latin America. This is due to increases in education,
but also travel, learning other languages and family-level exposure to more cultures and
new ideas in the process of social mobility (Bourdieu, 1986). This has also changed not
only the access to television technologies but also the nature of audience preferences. To
some degree, national television and preferences for it have been reinforced by a strongly
nationally focused cultural capital that many people in Latin America have grown up
with, experienced in school and also through national holidays, maps, sports loyalties
and other sorts of resources. This is described by Benedict Anderson in his landmark
work on the imagined community (1983). He explains how national identity is formed,
billed and reinforced through the creation of education and other resources, often funded
and directed by the state, to develop and reinforce national identity. However, this
national cultural capital is now being supplemented by the other forms of cultural capital
people gather when studying for a university degree, learning a new language, getting to
know people from other countries, travelling, working in international environments and
having access to a wide range of cultural products created in different countries.
In qualitative interviews starting in the late 1980s and continuing in various intervals
since then in Brazil, Joseph Straubhaar has discovered that more and more people are in
fact gaining increased knowledge of the outside world from a wide variety of sources in
such a way that their interest in outside or foreign cultures has in fact increased. These
interviews also seem to reveal the gradually increasing levels of interest in programming
from outside the region (Straubhaar, 2007). Figure 4 shows how the preference for US
television was related to low, average and higher levels of education on average across
the eight countries studied in Latin America in 2004 and 2014.
Preference for US television increased notably among the best educated in metro-
politan areas of these eight Latin American countries (those with at least some higher
education) from 2004 to 2014. It increased somewhat among those with some basic
education (middle school or some high school). Preference for US television remained
Straubhaar et al. 247

consistently lower among those with less education. These results show that cultural
capital, as indicated by a person’s education, is significantly related over time to their
preference for US television. This result is interesting in itself. It reinforces earlier
findings that higher cultural capital tends to offset the effects of national and regional
cultural proximity (Straubhaar, 1991, 2003). It also begins to answer one of our research
questions, whether Latin American audiences are to some degree being separated or
stratified in their tastes as more people acquire the cultural capital that enables them to
better enjoy foreign cultures through television, while less educated people with less
cultural capital in the region are not changing in that direction very much. We begin to
see a social situation in which people are indeed increasingly stratified by taste, related to
both income (economic capital) and education (cultural capital), just as Bourdieu (1984)
might have predicted. This trend also sets a significant context for Netflix and similar
services. When internet video services entered Latin America in the early 2010s, they
found an increasingly fertile climate in which increasing numbers of people had the
cultural capital to understand and enjoy the foreign, largely US content, which they
offered.

Linguistic capital
A somewhat similar phenomenon plays out with what Bourdieu called linguistic
capital (1991). He defined this largely as someone’s ability to know the dominant
language of a country or culture, so that one had both literal and symbolic access to its
culture and resources. We can redefine linguistic capital slightly to see how someone in
Latin America, or other non-English speaking countries, might acquire important
advantages from using linguistic capital in terms of knowing English as a second
language. Bourdieu discussed the more overtly embodied cultural and symbolic power
of a degree from a prestigious university, or the ability to speak a prestigious language
(like English or French in Brazil). So this article modifies Bourdieu’s concept of
linguistic capital just slightly to emphasise the international dimension of linguistic
capital, which we will call international linguistic capital, indicated in practice by
someone’s ability to speak or understand English, building on research about the
international value of speaking English as part of globalisation (Park and Wee, 2013).
Once people have that linguistic capital, it also aids them in accessing and under-
standing programming from the United States. If consuming such US programming is
considered prestigious, then it also grants the person who watches it what Bourdieu
called symbolic capital.
When someone in Brazil brags to his friends about how much he enjoys watching
Orange is the New Black or House of Cards (2013–2018) which Straubhaar has observed
a number of times since 2015 in several seminars he has taught to Brazilian students,2
that person is displaying and using cultural, linguistic and symbolic capital all at once to
impress their friends and maybe even gain some social power, since as Bourdieu (1984)
notes, the exercise of capital is often the exercise of power.
Figure 5 shows how self-defined knowledge of English is associated with a greater
preference for US television and film programmes. It is interesting that while the
248 Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 14(2)

Figure 5. Interest in or preference for US or European television by linguistic capital.

preference for US programmes increases from 2004 to 2014, the audience’s self-defined
knowledge of English does not. The implication is that although knowledge of English is
not really increasing, it seems to still be associated with increasing preference for US
television and film.

Limits on access to new forms of television by the digital divide

One severe restriction to the expansion of television in Latin America beyond
broadcast and cable/satellite TV are the limits placed on access to digital streaming
television by income, geography and broadband infrastructure. Our third research
question is whether these limits will tend to reinforce the class structure of television
consumption in Latin America that we have been profiling above. Access to and use of
television in its various forms, such as pay TV, is already severely stratified by the
various elements of social class, as defined and described by Bourdieu (1984; 1991):
income (economic capital), education (cultural capital) and foreign language knowl-
edge, particularly of English (linguistic capital). Those are strongly related to pre-
ferences for national versus US television, which will already structure demand for
transnational services like Netflix, which feature a great deal of English language
programming.
Access to broadband internet, which is required for the kind of extensive digital
streaming used to watch services like Netflix, has grown in some countries much more
than others, as noted in Figure 6. As noted above, incomes have been consistently
growing in some Latin American countries, like Argentina, Chile, Colombia and
Mexico. These are the places in which internet access has also grown the most. Others
had strong growth for over a decade, but are now suffering recession, like Brazil.
Venezuela has all but economically collapsed in the last few years under government
Straubhaar et al. 249

80
70.97
70 64.7 66.01
60.87 61.11 59.54 60
58.14 57
60 54.55 52.57 54.06
50 45.59 44.39 45.46
40.2
40
28.18
30
19.07
20 16.04 14.1 14.1
9.12 8.4
10 4.83
0
Argenna Brazil Chile Colombia Ecuador Mexico Peru Venezuela

2004 2014 2016

Figure 6. Internet users per 100 people by country. Source: ITU Annual Report 2018.

25 22.99

20 16.49
15.17 12.88 14.42
15 11.74 12.15 12.58
10.42 9.79 10.49 8.27
10 8.3 6.67 7.81
5.71
5 1.4 1.7 1.9 0.99 0.83 0.8
0.3 0.05
0
Argenna Brazil Chile Colombia Ecuador Mexico Peru Venezuela

2004 2014 2016

Figure 7. Fixed broadband connections per 100 households. Source: ITU Annual Report 2018.

mismanagement of its oil industry, agriculture and trade. However, a surprising number
of people still have internet connectivity. Those with consistent growth have also largely
managed to grow their internet infrastructure.
In countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela,
internet penetration rates have grown rapidly overall, from 10% to 20% in 2004 to
around or even over 60%, by 2016. However, some substantial percentage of the
internet penetration rates reflect lower income people using the internet primarily
through mobile smartphones or in public computer centres or cyber cafes. To be sure,
those in small town and rural areas don’t even have the option of fixed broadband, no
matter what their income, because the infrastructure doesn’t extend to them yet. The
overall internet penetration also includes many who have mobile broadband only,
accessed through smartphones, which may let users watch short videos but can be cost-
prohibitive (depending on data service packages) as an effective device for streaming
services like Netflix.
250 Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 14(2)

However, what is most crucial for streaming services like Netflix is how many
households have access to fixed broadband internet infrastructure. As Figure 7 shows,
that has also grown over the same period, so these broadband users can now reasonably
access services like Netflix. The percentages of homes with broadband range from about
7% in Peru to over 22% in Chile. Brazil and Mexico, which have been two of Netflix’s
target markets in their initial internationalisation, only have a little better than 12% home
broadband penetration, which limits the service to the elite and part of the upper middle
class. Even though the potential base of the service in technological terms has now
grown considerably, there are still many small towns, interior provinces and rural areas
where the internet infrastructure is much weaker, so even their elites and upper middle
classes are excluded by geography and infrastructure.

Conclusion
An analysis of audience preference data from Kantar Media shows that there is a
potentially very strong audience for Netflix in Latin America. Latin American cable and
satellite subscribers, in most of the eight countries studied, still prefer their national
programming, which Netflix is starting to commission in the two largest producing
markets of Mexico and Brazil. Therefore, Netflix’s initiative to produce nationally and
regionally should be appealing. Perhaps even more important, after a consistent viewer
preferences for national television, Latin American audiences on average tend to prefer
US programming, which is both a disruption of the Latin American television market and
a gift for Netflix as it seeks to expand in Latin America with a mix of US, European and
Latin American programmes. If national programming receives an average of around
60% of cable and satellite audience preferences, US programming receives around 50%.
Thus, there is clearly an audience for American television of the so-called golden age,
which is one of Netflix’s specialties in global distribution. This is particularly for the
expanding upper middle class in Latin America, who are more likely to have access to
the internet, as we will see below, therefore the most likely audience for Netflix.
Audiences overall in Latin America are notably somewhat less interested in regional
programming from the rest of Latin America and in television from Europe. While that
might seem to limit some of the appeal of Netflix, which also brings in quite a bit of
programming from the region as well as from Europe, it is not necessarily so. A
breakdown of the Latin American audience by class — which is to say by economic
capital, cultural capital and linguistic capital in the terms defined by Bourdieu (1984;
1986) — suggests that the international nature of Netflix programming will find audi-
ences among the upper middle class and elite (the richest 10% and the next richest 20%).
However, these same audience profiles show some of the limits on Netflix’s potential
expansion into Latin America. Many potential viewers in Latin America don’t have the
money to subscribe to Netflix, even at regional fees that average in the $8–12 range.
Furthermore, many audiences in Latin America lack the cultural capital or education to
find US, European and other programming from around the world relevant, interesting,
compelling or funny. In other words, lower middle class, working class and working
poor audiences show a predicted preference for national programming (see Straubhaar,
Straubhaar et al. 251

1991). Conversely, they apply a cultural discount to programming which is not familiar,
relevant, or funny to them (Hoskins and Mirus, 1988).
Another serious barrier to Netflix’s expansion in the region comes in the form of
infrastructure limits. Only an average of 50% to 60% of Latin Americans currently use
the internet (ITU 2017). Many access the internet in public places like cyber cafes or on
mobile data plans on smartphones. Access to broadband internet at home, which is
typically associated with Netflix use, tends to be limited to between 10% and 22% of the
Latin American population, even in the most affluent countries. There are severe limits
to Netflix expansion into regions outside the affluent areas of the major cities in Latin
America simply due to poor infrastructure, by the geography that’s related to the
expansion of infrastructure and by the economic aspects of social class in terms of the
money required to acquire the kind of high-quality access to the internet that Netflix
favours. On the other hand, the middle and upper middle classes are expanding, which
expands opportunity for access to both multichannel and streaming television. That
includes economic capital to acquire new technologies and afford often expensive data
plans, cultural capital to enjoy/understand foreign cultures, foreign travel and linguistic
capital that aids in extending the understanding and enjoyment of foreign culture on
television, reducing the effect of the cultural discount.

Acknowledgement
The authors would like to show our gratitude to our colleagues from Kantar Media for
giving us access to their database.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.

ORCID iD
Deborah Castro https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7980-0964

Notes
1. Initiated in the 1990s by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and greatly amplified by Pres-
ident Lula da Silva, the bolsa escola pays poor families a ‘school scholarship’ to keep their chil-
dren in school, replacing what the child might have earned if working to help support the family
(Glewwe and Kassouf (2012) The impact of the Bolsa Escola/Familia conditional cash transfer
program on enrollment, dropout rates and grade promotion in Brazil. Journal of Development
Economics 97(2): 505–517.
2. One 2-week graduate seminar at the University of São Paulo and several 1-week graduate semi-
nars at the State University of São Paulo in Bauru.
252 Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies 14(2)

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Author biographies
Joseph D Straubhaar is the Amon G Carter Sr., Centennial Professor of Communication in the
Radio-Television-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His current research con-
cerns the globalisation of television and new media, the BRICs, television in Brazil and Latin
America, the digital divide in Brazil and Texas. He is co-author of Television in Latin America
(2013), the author of World Television: From Global to Local (2007) and editor of Inequity in the
Technopolis: Race, Class, Gender and the Digital Divide in Austin (2011), and numerous journal
articles on these topics.

Deborah Castro is a lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus Univer-
sity Rotterdam in The Netherlands. Castro’s main research interests lie in the fields of audience
and television studies. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as El Pro-
fesional de la Informacio´n (2016), Revista Latina de Comunicación Social (2018) and Interna-
tional Journal of Communication (2018).
Luiz Guilherme Duarte, PhD, is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Radio & TV at the
University of Central Florida. He worked as head of audience research for DIRECTV Latin Amer-
ica, with passages through many brand-name entertainment companies in the United States, as a
Telecommunication consultant. He was a co-author of The Evolution of Television: An Analysis of
Ten Years of TGI Latin America (2004–2014).

Jeremiah Spence is a research associate at the Moody College of the University of Texas and an
Assistant Professor at the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rot-
terdam in The Netherlands. He was a co-author of The Evolution of Television: An Analysis of Ten
Years of TGI Latin America (2004–2014) and a co-editor of Inequity in the Technopolis: Race,
Class, Gender and the Digital Divide in Austin (2011).