The research team

Principal investigator

Doc. Mgr. Petr Szczepanik, Ph.D.

Department of Film Studies, Faculty of Arts, Charles University

E-mail: petr.szczepanik@ff.cuni.cz

Petr Szczepanik is an Associate Professor at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic), specializing in East-Central European screen industries, production cultures, and critical geography of streaming economies. He co-edited Behind the Screen (Palgrave, 2013) and Digital Peripheries (Springer, 2020), and authored Screen Industries in East-Central Europe (Bloomsbury, 2021). His current research examines how platformization reproduces and reshapes geographic inequalities in global media industries. He has published articles in journals such as New Media & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and International Communication Gazette. He leads the research team on this project.

Researcher

Mgr. Miloš Hroch, Ph.D.

Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University

E-mail: milos.hroch@fsv.cuni.cz

Miloš Hroch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at Charles University in Prague. His research focuses on participatory media and platform studies, with a particular emphasis on the music industries and the platform geography of Spotify. He has published articles in journals such as New Media & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Communication, Culture and Critique.

Researcher

Jannick Kirk Sørensen

Aalborg University, Denmark, and Charles University, Prague

E-mail: jannicks@audiotales.net

Jannick Kirk Sørensen is Associate Professor in Digital Media at Aalborg University, Denmark, and Research Worker at Charles University, Prague. Since 2007 he has studied the problems and potentials in personalisation of media — algorithmic recommender systems, and more recently AI. His primary focus has been public service media, but that perspective was extended to commercial media in the EU Horizon Europe project “Fair MusE” (2023–26), which, like this project, worked with data donated by citizens. His recent work studies the prominence of European works in video-on-demand services, relevant to the revision of the EU AVMS directive.