Global Portals in National Markets: Branding Netflix in Israel

Branding has been described as the defining industrial practice of television's recent past.¹ As the frames that manage the interactions among viewers, content, and producers, television brands operate at multiple levels. For example, channels with well-defined brand identities are better able to establish strong relationships with loyal viewers; executives, industry observers, and academics see these relationships as central to commercial success in the increasingly competitive television market.² Beginning in the mid-1980s, demographic network branding—reflected in Lifetime's slogan "Television for Women," for example—became a common industry response to increasingly fragmented audiences.³ In this context, heavily marketed flagship programming reflects the brand identity that network executives are attempting to cultivate. The best-known example of a signature series embodying a channel's brand identity is the case of HBO's The Sopranos (1999–2007) and the network's slogan "It's Not TV. It's HBO."⁴

Despite the television industry's conventional wisdom regarding the necessity for strong channel brand identities and flagship series, the most popular subscription video on-demand (SVOD) services have not used original content targeting specific audience demographics to construct distinctive brand identities. Instead, services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu present themselves as "portals" that act as generalized viewing platforms for subscribers.⁵ Although the appeal of a given streaming service certainly depends on the quality and variety of available content, the brand identities of these services are largely defined by the experiences that the portal offers viewers: a personalized television viewing experience made possible through internet distribution.

Netflix, which competes directly with cable television networks and aggressively positions itself as a replacement for linear television, employs a "portal-as-brand" strategy in the US domestic market that seeks to make the service itself the audience's primary point of identification.⁶ The company frequently and strategically emphasizes streaming television's distance from and superiority to linear television. During his keynote address at the 2016 Consumer Electronic Show, for example, CEO Reed Hastings described ondemand video as "a revolutionary shift from corporate to consumer control."⁷ Netflix's marketing materials consistently present binge viewing as a mode of audience behavior that improves on traditional television's liveness and linear scheduling.⁸

Not surprisingly, executives at Netflix use the same strategic discourses to define the company's brand identity. When asked about the service's programming choices, chief content officer Ted Sarandos explains, "There's no such thing as a 'Netflix show.' That as a mind-set gets people narrowed. Our brand is personalization."⁹ Cindy Holland, vice president for original content, similarly asserts, "Our brand is as broad as the tastes of our members."¹⁰ By defining the brand in terms of personalization or the preferences of the service's 130 million subscribers, Netflix simultaneously separates its brand from those of the most successful cable networks and denigrates those same networks as "narrow" for providing loyal audiences with on-brand content. Yet the claim that there is a clear distinction between Netflix's portal brand structured around a particular television viewing experience and a linear channel's content-based brand becomes less tenable in transnational contexts.¹¹

To illustrate some of the ways in which portal brands like Netflix can become content-based television brands in international markets, this article draws on examples from the pay-television industry in Israel. In contrast to its US strategy, Netflix has not marketed itself to Israeli consumers as a replacement for linear television. Instead, nearly all the company's advertising efforts result from partnerships with two local television providers: Partner TV, the country's second-largest "over-the-top" (OTT) television service, and Hot, the country's largest cable television provider. Given the symbiotic brand relationships between Netflix and Israeli multichannel providers, I argue that streaming television services in some national contexts appear as both personalized portal brands and traditional content-based brands. After describing these relationships and Netflix's very limited local independent marketing efforts, this article concludes by suggesting a new term, "portal-as-content," that reflects how...