Media Portfolios after Credit Scoring: Attention, Prediction, and Advertising in Indian Media Networks

Studying the reconfiguration of the film economy after the rise of satellite television, this essay draws upon media history in South Asia to tease out the repackaging of stardom in a changing media ecosystem, which commands the celebrity function to be more flexible and more willing to mount increasing debt upon its diversifying palette. The rise of calculable creditworthiness and sophisticated systems of prediction thus securitize media portfolios, while de-risking the business at the production end and distributing risk further downstream. The essay shows how targeted advertising comes to reign over this digital network as its preeminent language and what its consequences might be for consumer attention.