Locating Media Industries: Spaces, Places, Platforms

Examining how media industries actively shape, and are shaped by, attachments to place and movements across geographical spaces, Locating Media Industries illuminates the many spatial dimensions of ‘globalised’ media.

In an era where music, video and games can be streamed instantly around the world on numerous digital devices, and films and television series are produced across numerous countries, often featuring globetrotting characters in an array of exotic settings, it is easy to forget that media industries retain any attachments to space or place. While globalised production, distribution and consumption systems structure contemporary media industries, this collection seeks to document and analyse the many ways in which questions of space and place still matter to those industries.

Written by leading scholars in the field, this international collection explores how media industries both occupy and generate spaces and places. Here, spatial dynamics are represented by the formation of global production networks, the impacts of virtual production technologies, media engagements with local communities, questions of accessible participation in film festivals, and the franchising of space at media-themed leisure attractions. Several of the book’s chapters reflect the increasing dominance of streaming media, which also have complex relationships to place and space, even as they actively seek to obscure and even erase these aspects of the media they distribute and, in some cases, produce.

This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of film, media and/or creative industries.

Paul McDonald is Professor of Media Industries at King’s College London, UK. Recent publications include editing The Routledge Companion to Media Industries (2022), and co-editing Media Industries and Cities: Perspectives, Geopolitics and Transformations (2026), Global Film Policies: New Perspectives (2025), and Digital Media Distribution: Portals, Platforms, Pipelines (2021).

Christopher Meir is Assistant Professor of Communication at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, where he is a member of the TECMERIN research group as well as the University Institute of Spanish Cinema (IUCE). He is the author of Scottish Cinema: Texts and Contexts (2014) and Mass Producing European Cinema: Studiocanal and Its Works (2019).

Andrew Spicer is Professor of Cultural Production at the University of the West of England Bristol, UK. His recent publications include Sean Connery: Acting, Stardom and National Identity (2022); and collaborative works, Go West! 2.5: Bristol’s Film and Television Industries (2025; co-authored with Jelena Krivosic); and The Politics of Place: Space and Location in European Screen Industries (2025; co-edited with Ruth Barton and Amy Genders).