by Alexandra Kapka, Queen's University Belfast "Distribution lends itself to critical/cultural critique as well as industrial analysis because it ultimately functions to regulate access to texts" (Lobato 168). World Cinema On-Demand: Film Distribution and Education in the Streaming Media Era (WCOD) is a research network funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project is directed by principal investigator Dr Stefano Baschiera (Queen's University Belfast) and coinvestigator

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... Alexander Fisher (Queen's University Belfast). The primary objective of the network is to bring together educators, industry professionals and leading academics with diverse research interests to investigate the impact of streaming media services upon the distribution, consumption and teaching of world cinema. The project took the form of a series of workshops held at Queen's University Belfast in 2012 and 2013. The emergent popularity of streaming media services has opened up the global cinematic landscape, altering the way we access, and engage with, world cinema. Services such as LoveFilm, Netflix and their various counterparts have increased the digital availability of an unprecedented range of international films, many of which were previously either difficult to obtain or completely inaccessible beyond their country of origin. World cinema is an ideal area in which to research streaming media. In the introduction to Mapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim note that world cinema is defined by its "situatedness: it is ... the world as viewed from the West" (1). With that in mind, world cinema is conceptualised here as any film that is produced outside of Hollywood. As theatrical exhibition becomes an increasingly narrow market, which is dominated by resource-rich film studios, streaming services are being forced to expand their offer in order to compete with one another. Niche cinemas and independent films allow them to do this with minimal expenditure. Despite the fact that revenue streams from such long-tail distribution can be small or nonexistent, these distribution circuits are often seen as "providing an outlet for many films that would not previously have been distributed in any meaningful sense" (Lobato and Ryan 194), therefore contributing to a growth in the number of films made commercially available each year. As Ramon Lobato observes, "digital distribution as an object of analysis sits at the intersection of culture, technology, law and commerce" (168); it is therefore imperative that this is used to inform the development of film studies in the face of constantly advancing technologies. Studies concerned with streaming media have typically addressed the social and cultural ramifications of its development, but have yet to consider the effect of increased online availability on the study of world cinema in higher education. The WCOD network was