Not That Personal: A Qualitative Study of Personalization Practices on Six European Public Streaming Services

Abstract

This article presents key findings from a comparative empirical study of content recommendation on the audiovisual streaming services of six European public service media (PSM) organizations. Due to growing competition with international subscription streaming services, the editorial practices of PSM are developing, combining editorial curation with algorithmic recommendations. Contributing to the fields of PSM, platformization and scheduling studies, the article presents findings from a qualitative reverse engineering approach to interface analysis. We document how the majority of the services exercise what we characterize as light personalization, and we highlight explanations for why the degree of personalization on the PSM streaming services, in most cases, is still limited. The comparative approach enables us to identify the factors most commonly at play across diverse national contexts. The article adds to theoretical debates about how personalization is constructed in a PSM context and discusses whether algorithmic personalization conflicts with PSM values.