Critical analyses of Australian adaptations, which celebrate adaptation as a specific creative (and critical) practice, are relatively rare, but ‘literature to screen’ discussions of various sorts have been a common feature of Australian scholarship since the 1980s. Increasingly diverse adaptation choices made by Australian film and television industries since then reflect shifting assumptions about the status of literary texts in relation to screen culture, changing practices and platforms for funding, consumption and marketing, as well as an increased demand for adaptation as a category in its own right. This chapter starts from the premise that studying Australian adaptations teaches us something about narrative journeys, national culture and Australian studies in an era of wider on-demand access to productions old and new through commercial streaming services. The chapter provides a snapshot of select Australian adaptations over the last thirty years, identifying tendencies which raise important questions about the impact of adaptation in relation to the ways contemporary Australian culture is valued and assessed. It concludes that studying Australian adaptations in the streaming era affords a nuanced and challenging perspective of changing Australian self-definition, and the multiple cultural and educational uses to which Australian adaptations are put.

This chapter analyses the position of crime fiction in the global publishing industry. Drawing on bestseller data from nine countries across all continents, it confirms that crime fiction is prominent in the commercial top segment everywhere, but to varying degrees. The genre is most dominant in countries with strong domestic crime fiction traditions, such as the UK and the USA, and least visible in non-Western markets (e.g. Brazil and India). Data from the UK and the USA show very few bestselling crime novels in translation, unlike other book markets where bestselling translations are more common – primarily translations from English, but to a notable extent also from the Scandinavian languages. Discussion focusses on the power dynamics of global publishing, the increasingly important sector of rights sales and adaptations, author branding and serialization, and the rapid structural changes that are currently taking place in the book trade, including the increased interest in digital formats like streamed audiobooks.

We study the delivery of 360°-navigable videos to 5G virtual reality (VR) wireless clients in future cooperative multi-cellular systems. A collection of small cell base stations interconnected via backhaul links are sharing their caching and computing resources to maximize the aggregate reward they earn by serving 360° videos requested by the wireless clients. We design an efficient representation method to construct the 360° videos such that they deliver only the remote scene viewpoint content genuinely needed by the VR users, thereby overcoming the present highly inefficient approach of sending a bulky 360° video, whose major part is made up of scene information never navigated by a user. Moreover, we design an optimization framework that allows the base stations to select cooperative caching/rendering/streaming strategies that maximize the aggregate reward they earn when serving the users for the given caching/computational resources at each base station.

This chapter discusses some principal themes of the Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture, emphasising the social and cultural dimensions of digital music. A historical introduction ranges from the embedding of digital technology in everyday life to the emergence of virtual realities, from digital-only genres like vaporwave to Second Life and Hatsune Miku, the virtual diva whose holographic performances are seen as emblematic of posthumanism: I sketch out an aesthetics of digital culture that emphasises continuities across its expressions, from digital multimedia and internet memes to playfulness on Reddit. Attention is also given to the real-world dimensions of digital culture, including the transition from downloads to streaming, internet-based participation, and so called Web 2.0 businesses. The digital revolution has brought about a radical restructuring of the music industry, culminating in a bizarre situation whereby music is economically underpinned by the collection of commercially valuable personal data on listeners.

Human curation has earned itself a permanent place in the streaming media world, though it wasn’t always clear whether or how that would happen. For a time, it seemed like tech didn’t want to justify the use of human labour if the future could be won without it. That time seems to have passed, and with handmade playlists and other editorial products, human curators have a unique ability to help the widest-ever audiences find great music. People from different backgrounds are more able now to hear each other’s sounds than ever before. Whether the streamlining of these services matters to a given user is wholly subjective, since the joy of discovering new music is often so inefficient and chaotic. It was never clear that this same sense of joy would make it into streaming products – for many of us, it cannot. And that’s okay. Services offer only what they can.

This chapter considers current and future economies of music production, distribution and consumption, intersecting the question concerning technology – big data storage, distributed network technology, programmable artificial intelligence – with the question concerning contemporary markets – the merchandising of desire, taste and sensibility within a surveillant attention economy, and its concomitant labour ethics. The first section tracks changes in the music industry within the digitally networked environment in the first decade of the twenty-first century. A practice of P2P sharing and free downloading shifted toward a full-scale surveillance economy hitched to licensed music, raising questions concerning data privacy, data security, management of user data, and procedures for third-party requests for data and metadata. By investigating the economic, social, technical and legal dimensions of this shifting terrain, the chapter suggests that the impact on cultural labour practices in the digital age bear uncanny resemblance to a pre-technological one.