Guest-edited by Martin Bonnard

The dissemination of films online already has a brief history. Since its advent fifteen years ago, streaming has met with both resounding successes and numerous failures. In each case, digital technology and telecommunications infrastructures have played a central role. The present work looks at the video catalogues of cinephile films available by subscription. These are singular economic actors, by virtue both of their marginal position and their importance in cinema’s shift to the Internet. We will see how these catalogues have been able to claim a niche that had been more or less abandoned by the major studios and how the dissemination of films by means of digital networks poses as much a challenge for these modest players as it is a way to get around the dominant online distribution circuits.