List of Acronyms
Chapter 3 METHODOLOGY
3.3. Data Collection: Limitations
There were several limitations that I encountered as I embarked on data collection. As a researcher, I acknowledge these limitations and I understand that my study does not aim to be exhaustive, but rather seeks to take initial steps to explore a wide perspective concerning Southeast Asian media flows research. These are the limitations I have found throughout the conduct of my data collection:
Netflix geo-blocking: Being geographically situated in the Philippines, I am only able to access the catalog of Netflix Philippines. It is important to understand that Netflix catalogs vary per country. Thus, it is almost impossible for me to access the catalogs of other Southeast Asian countries. To circumvent this limitation, SVOD researchers are pressed to choose three options: The first is to fly to the nine
remaining Southeast Asian countries and check their Netflix catalogs upon landing within their territories. Being physically abroad will automatically change my IP address to the specific location that I am in. While this option is possible, it is
impractical to do so at this time when the threat of the COVID-19 virus is still looming within the region.
The second option is to scrape the internet to gather data about each ASEAN country’s catalogs. This option entails the researcher to rely on third-party indexing sites such as Unogs.com, FlixPatrol, FlixWatch, and JustWatch for possible lists of titles available in each territory. However, as I have observed, no website offers an option to automatically filter the Southeast Asian titles from Netflix catalogs. While some websites provide data on all available titles per country, it will still take researchers time to sort all titles and encode them manually. It might also be questionable if the research data is just collected from third-party indexing sites
because most are not comprehensive enough and sometimes, it takes weeks before the actual Netflix updates are reflected on these third-party indexing websites.
The last option is to use a VPN to bypass the geo-blocking of Netflix within various territories. This is what I have employed in my research to access the catalogs of other Southeast Asian countries. While this is very effective as the VPN allowed me to change my location virtually without physically going abroad, I find it difficult to look for the right VPN servers which would help me evade the strict geo-blocking policy of Netflix. After downloading several VPN apps and trying their services to particularly change my location to a specific Southeast Asian country, only the OpenVPN application worked.
OpenVPN with its Southeast Asian servers allowed me to be virtually
transported to 3 Southeast Asian countries — Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, and thus, enabling me to access their catalogs. Unfortunately, aside from these three countries, there aren’t other Southeast Asian servers available, thus limiting my data collection to be exhaustive of ASEAN territories. To gather titles from Netflix
Malaysia and Singapore, I followed the second option and went to FlixWatch to encode Southeast Asian titles listed on their Netflix country catalog.
Lack of Netflix data on four Southeast Asian countries: As established in this study, Netflix does not release any statistical data about the details of its library content. Based on Netflix Help Center, the streaming platform is available in 190 countries except for China, Crimea, North Korea, Russia, and Syria (Netflix, 2016).
This means that Netflix is available in all Southeast Asian countries, however, no data can be found about Netflix in Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Laos, and
Myanmar. Even the Top 10 list from Netflix does not include any data about them. I have tried typing keywords related to the four countries on Netflix’s search engine
but no films or TV shows associated or linked to them were shown. With almost no data gathered from these four countries, this research cannot fully claim an
exhaustive study of the state of Southeast Asian media on Netflix. Nonetheless, having six countries is already impressive data in terms of checking the state of how the ASEAN media fares in the contemporary digital streaming SVOD market, and whether intraregional flows of ASEAN media are present. The six countries with Netflix data gathered are all member states with advanced media production infrastructures.
Limited Keywords: Relying solely on the metadata from Netflix and its
categorization system, I may have missed some Southeast Asian titles not properly tagged by Netflix based on their country of origin. This is possible as while I was sifting through each Netflix catalog, some titles did not show up when I use the keywords I have previously listed. To gather as many Southeast Asian titles as possible, I have extended additional effort in checking related videos to see whether there are remaining titles that should be included in my research. Cross-checking untagged Netflix titles on google search to see their country of origin has been an additional task to proceed with a credible study.
Chapter 4
FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS
This chapter will focus on the findings and analysis based on the data
gathered by the researcher. There are three main points that this research would like to zoom at: first is the historical analysis of ASEAN audiovisual industries to get a panoramic view of the region’s development of media content; second, the total number of ASEAN content available in the Netflix catalogs of each ASEAN Member States; and third, the number of ASEAN titles which entered the Top 10 lists from weeks of June 28, 2021, until May 1, 2022.