Subscription Video-on-Demand in Everyday Life: A Qualitative Exploration of Saudi Audiences’ Interpretive Repertoires.

Abstract

This study explores how younger Saudi audiences use global Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD) in everyday life, focusing on how platforms and their content are negotiated within a complex, conservative cultural context. While there are growing international calls for audience-centred research into SVOD viewing practices, this gap is particularly evident in Saudi Arabia, where rapid sociocultural change and legal reforms have facilitated the rise of global streaming platforms offering content often censored in local media. This study aims to understand how younger Saudi audiences engage with SVOD platforms and how they construct and negotiate meanings from such practices. The research focused on Saudi audiences aged between 25 and 35 years old from diverse demographic backgrounds in the city of Riyadh. Grounded in an interpretive qualitative paradigm informed by scholarship on everyday life and reception studies, this thesis emphasises audiences’ viewing practices and meaning-making as culturally rooted and contextually situated. Data were collected through participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups. Interpretive repertoires were used as the primary analytical tool to identify patterns in how participants talked about their engagement with, made sense of, and navigated their relationship with platforms. Findings revealed that audiences selectively appropriated platforms and their content, navigating these through both pleasures and tensions. Topics such as women’s independence, empowerment, sexual content, and LGBT representation – often underrepresented in Saudi and Arab media – emerged as complex sites of discourse. Participants selectively embraced elements they perceived as beneficial to their personal lives or to broader social progress, while affirming core cultural values in opposition to those they viewed as detrimental. The study contributes to multiple fields of scholarship by offering a contextually grounded, audience-centred perspective on SVOD engagement in the Global South, providing insights for researchers and policymakers concerned with cultural negotiation, audience agency, and everyday SVOD use.