ABSTRACT
Small-country media markets and industries are affected by globalization and digitalization in different ways than their larger counterparts. They are more vulnerable and reactive toward these external forces, finding it more difficult to compete with imported content and transnational media services while struggling to preserve national audiovisual culture, independent public service media, and media diversity. Lacking resources, unable to achieve economies of scale, mostly limited by cultural specificity and linguistic barriers or dependent on a larger neighbor sharing the same language, their audiovisual export performance remains low even in the era of online distribution. This chapter starts with an overview of key theoretical frameworks for studying smallness and peripherality in media markets and industries. It then moves to discuss questions specific for critical media industry studies, asking how market smallness and peripherality play out on the middle level of hands-on agents, their everyday practices, self-conceptions, and contradictory power relations. The chapter uses East-Central European media markets, with specific attention to Czech independent producers, as a case study to illustrate how practitioners reflect on their experiences of producing for very small audiences through what might be termed small or peripheral market “industry lore.”
