Abstract
The book explores east-central European media industries (namely those of the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary) through the lived realities of producers as key initiators, facilitators, and cultural intermediaries. Based on a broad set of in-depth interviews, it looks closely at how their agency is circumscribed by the limited scale and peripheral positioning of the markets in which they operate, and how they struggle to come to terms with these constraints through their business strategies, creative thinking and professional self-perceptions.
Each of the seven chapters discusses a specific producer type and area of producer practice: independent producers circumscribed by the smallness and/or peripherality of their home markets; a prominent arthouse producer who managed to overcome the limits of the peripheral market; the 'service producers' working on large Western projects in Prague and Budapest, vitally dependent on financial incentives introduced by their national governments; the 'minority co-production' that serves national policymakers as a measure of internationalizing local producers and gaining more festival recognition; in-house producers of public service television, whose agency is limited by the broadcast organization; the regional operation of HBO Europe, which uses original local content production as a vehicle of its transnational corporate strategy; and finally, short-form online video production, which is an extremely diverse and volatile field, but promises dynamic growth in the era of mobile, 'procrastination' viewing. However diverse, all these cases illustrate how producers in east-central Europe are affected by and act upon the transformative forces of digitalization, globalization and Europeanization.