[csaa-forum] Adrian Athique and Vyshakh Mundayat on platformisation in Asia | Fri 15 Aug @ Swinburne

[Ramon Lobato]

Please join us for invited talks by A/Prof Adrian Athique and Vyshakh
Mundayat (UQ) at Swinburne next Friday

2.30pm Friday August 15
AGSE104, Swinburne Hawthorn campus
Contact: rlobato at swin.edu.au

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Digital Transactions in Asia: Platforms, Tokens, Chains, and Cultures
Adrian Athique, University of Queensland
Respondent: Xin Gu, Monash

At the handset level, an expanding suite of everyday fintech provides
almost universal and real time access to goods and services, social
capital, welfare and peer redistribution as well as gambling on an array of
tokens and global markets. As a consequence, vast sums of money are
borrowed, transferred and repaid and fortunes are won and lost everyday via
a hand-held touchscreen. Each of the transaction platforms that we
encounter in the everyday offers a different set of transactional
affordances, according to its design purpose and its configuration within
the larger platform ecosystem. In aggregate, they constitute a
sophisticated and accessible financial system allowing multi-stage
transactions across domains from purchases and personal banking to
investment and speculation. In this paper, I approach transaction platforms
as organs in the bodily constitution of digital economies. This approach
allows me to explicate transaction platforms as functional interchanges for
the complex transaction chains engendered by network economies. As clearing
houses for the cascading range of transactions across social and economic,
symbolic and material domains, transaction platforms ensure the
interoperability of digital tokens. According, I also class the
heterogenous field of digital currencies in terms of these affordances.
Touching ground, I emphasise transaction orders as the meeting points for
systemic design, social imagination and everyday action. I argue that
digital transactions are not only the nerves and veins of algorithmic
capitalism, but also symptomatic of emergent transactional cultures with
their own pathways and aspirations.

Adrian Athique is Associate Professor and programme leader in Cultural
Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at UQ. His
books include The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure
(2010, Routledge, with Douglas Hill), Indian Media: Global Approaches
(2012, Polity), Digital Media and Society (2013, Polity), Transnational
Audiences: Media Reception on a Global Scale (2016, Polity), The Indian
Media Economy (2018, 2 Vols, OUP, with Vibodh Parthasarathi and SV
Srinivas) and Digital Transactions in Asia: Social, Economic and
Informational Exchanges (2019, Routledge, with Emma Baulch).

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The Indian OTT Video Sector: Fragmented, Parallel and Stratified Streaming
Markets
Vyshakh Mundalayat and Adrian Athique, University of Queensland
Respondent: Ramon Lobato, Swinburne

Despite infrastructure and access constraints, the Indian OTT video
streaming sector experienced a more than four-fold increase in revenue over
the period 2019-2024. This rapidly developing mobile-first market
exemplifies some key vectors in the development for streaming video
platforms in Asia, where: 1) SVOD revenues are dominated by market-leading
multinational media platforms targeting relatively elite audiences, 2) A
much larger audience for free video content comprises a parallel market for
local content, largely funded by a duopoly of Alphabet and Meta in online
advertising, and 3) The rise of local ‘super platforms’ bundling video
access with telecoms, social media, and retail subscriptions is effectively
subsuming media sectors.  Taking account of these three vectors, this paper
considers the interplay of business models and interests in India's highly
stratified and regionalised streaming video markets, where the logics of
media platforms are increasingly nestled within the larger interests of
highly concentrated multi-sector platform media. As the subscription market
for international content has matured, it is this cross-subsidized range of
AVOD and hybrid services that is driving the expansion of online video
across social segments, regional and linguistic markets. This is the larger
economy in which Indian OTT platforms, legacy broadcast channels and
content producers are seeking to carve out their market share. In examining
the competing business models of this mixed economy, this paper raises some
critical questions on the co-evolution of parallel video markets in India
and the underlying dynamics of Internet concentration.

Vyshakh Mundayat is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint doctoral programme
between the University of Queensland & Indian Institute of Technology,
Delhi. Currently, he is working on the platformization of television and
how it is reshaping meta, meso and micro levels of the market.  His other
topics of interest include the evolution of the Indian middle class and
media consumption cultures.
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