Apart from its obvious challenge to television and cinema exhibition, the most revolutionary thing about Netflix is its complex, two-way globalising effect. It’s true the network offers an efficient way of distributing American and English language content to the rest of the world, but the conduit also works both ways, with the corporation buying up and sometimes producing from scratch teleseries and films from around the world and making them available globally – material that otherwise might never have a chance of being seen outside of its traditional markets.

The main obstacle for those wanting to access it lies in knowing what’s there and worth watching. If you’re in Australia, you’ll be told about the network’s latest English language productions such as 2020’s deserved hit The Queen’s Gambit, but good series and films from, say, Japan or India will often be hidden away. I emphasise “hidden”, rather than impossible to find. They’ll come up on a search, if you know the title in advance, but that requires that viewers know what they’re looking for. Netflix algorithms will push that material to households’ content screens if they’ve already watched things from the same nation or region, but if they haven’t, hard...