An Introduction to Informal Media Economies

This special issue of Television and New Media showcases current research on informal media production and distribution networks. Situated partly or wholly outside regulated, consolidated, and policy-governed audiovisual industries, the networks studied here include video circuits in West Africa, new media infrastructures in the Caribbean, user-driven streaming sites, and transnational VHS piracy. Together, these accounts provide glimpses of what may be best described as an interlocking set of informal media economies: zones of unmeasured and unevenly regulated media production and exchange, which articulate with conventional media systems in unpredictable ways.