Amanda D. Lotz
Professor, Re-imaginer of Media Industries and Society
Digital Media Research Centre
Queensland University of Technology
Dr Amanda Lotz is a media scholar, professor, and industry consultant. Her expertise includes media industries, internet distribution, the future of television, and the business of media.
Amanda leads the Transforming Media Industries research program in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of fourteen books that explore television and media industries including Netflix and Streaming Video: The Business of Subscriber-funded Video on Demand, Media Disrupted: Surviving Cannibals, Pirates and Streaming Wars, We Now Disrupt This Broadcast: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All, The Television Will Be Revolutionized and Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television.
Her most recent books explore the connections between internet-distributed services such as Netflix and the legacy television industry, as well as the business strategies and revenue models that differ. Her award-winning book, The Television Will Be Revolutionized, now in its second edition, has been translated into Mandarin, Korean, Italian, and Polish. She is frequently interviewed by NPR’s Marketplace, has appeared on BBC, CNN's The Nineties, HuffPost Live, and ZDF (German television network) and been interviewed for articles in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Wired, and Men’s Health among many others. She publishes articles about the business of television at Quartz, Salon, The New Republic, hosted the Media Business Matters podcast, and posts about television and media @DrTVLotz (Twitter; Blue Sky) and on LinkedIn.
She has been named a Fellow of the International Communication Association and Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Recent Books
from Polity Books
The digital communication technologies that emerged at the turn of the century have profoundly disrupted long-practiced norms of nearly every media industry. In particular, internet distribution has fundamentally changed the foundation of the media industry to enable the emergence of new sectors while posing a challenge for others.
Media Industries in the Digital Age reframes our understanding of media businesses in the light of these substantial changes. To develop an integrated understanding of media industries today, the book foregrounds the different funding sources that are now common. It begins by mapping the foundations and developments of media industry operation, and exploring all forms of advertiser-funded and consumer-funded media to identify connections across sectors, including digital and legacy media. The final section grounds the book’s conceptual work in examples of media making to explore how some “old” media have successfully adapted to internet disruption, and the differences and similarities of media making outside of corporations. Looking to the future, the book anticipates implications for the emerging “metaverse” media experiences and the key issues generative AI poses to the sector. Ultimately, the book argues that the contemporary differences in media industry operation vary by sector, but meaningful patterns can be identified by considering how advertiser, consumer, or government funding sets different priorities.
Offering a new and original way of understanding the media industries today, this book is enlightening reading for students and scholars of media studies and media industries, as well as global industry professionals
– Coming April 2025 from New York University Press –
After Mass Media: Storytelling for Microaudiences in the Twenty-first Century
After Mass Media explores how developments of the last 20 years challenge the role of audiovisual dramas - fictional series and movies - in constituting societies. Television and movies have long played a role in society-making whether supporting the idea of national societies constructed through a blend of formal government powers and "imagination" or the quotidian societies we are born into, choose to belong to, or observe in our surroundings.
But the screen stories available through the twentieth century - especially for in-home viewing - were narrowly circumscribed by technologies that afforded limited choice and industrial practices that required attracting a mass audience. A mix of technological and industrial adjustments coalesce at the turn of the century to significantly redefine the business of producing and circulating screen stories and expand the range of commercially viable stories that can be made and watched globally. This book connects those industrial changes to particular titles and trends in storytelling to illustrate an expansion in the storytelling universe and begins to build frameworks for theorizing the cultural implications.
While global streaming services have often been hailed as game- changers in the industry, After Mass Media goes deeper to unveil the significant forces of change that predate their arrival. By examining the internationalization of screen businesses and the rise of streaming services with multi-territory reach, this book sheds light on the profound transformations in television and film production and circulation on a global scale.
With a keen focus on major changes in the types of screen stories being told, After Mass Media unravels the industrial roots that made these transformations possible. Through its comprehensive analysis, the book exposes how contemporary industrial dynamics, particularly the erosion of traditional distribution models based on geography and time, have far-reaching implications for our understanding of national video cultures and resurrected concerns about national content.
Upcoming Talks and
Presentations
Keynote: Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, Flinders University, Adelaide, AU December 3rd-6th 2024.
Society of Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, US April 1-4, 2025
Current Projects
21st Century Media Use
This project explores how people make use of the many media technologies, services, and content in daily life. It is aimed at understanding the patterns in media diets and seeks to identify conceptual categories that suit today’s world in which many different media technologies allow us to access media content and experiences that will fulfil our needs. The project also seeks to develop user-centered understanding of fields of media use that transcend common industrial categories.
Making Australian Television in the 21st Century (ARC Discovery Grant collaboration with Anna Potter and Kevin Sanson)
This project explores how the internationalization of the television business and digital distribution has affected the production of Australian television drama. It examines the implications of multi-channeling in early 2000s and various Australian policy responses, before exploring the further complication created by on-demand, catalog-based services such as public service iView and SBS Online, domestic Stan and Foxtel Now, and foreign services such as Netflix and Disney+.
PhD Supervision
I am accepting applications for PhD study as part of the yearly QUT scholarship and admissions cycle. My work is focusing more on viewers and how they experience ‘video’ now so I am looking for projects that take qualitative and innovative approaches to investigating audiences.
