Summary: This special issue of Television and New Media showcases current research on informal media production and distribution networks. Situated partly or wholly outside regulated, consolidated, and policy-governed audiovisual industries, the networks studied here include video circuits in West Africa, new media infrastructures in the Caribbean, user-driven streaming sites, and transnational VHS piracy. Together, these accounts provide glimpses of what may be best described as an interlocking set of informal media economies: zones of unmeasured and unevenly regulated media production and exchange, which articulate with conventional media systems in unpredictable ways.
