This paper presents parts of the findings of a study on how Danish 8-17-year-old children and adolescents perceive quality and relevance when it comes to particularly to audiovisual fiction, i.e., series and films. The paper particularly zooms in on how, for these children that have grown up with the past decade’s video-on-demand abundance, US-American content clearly appears to be the standard and, as such, the norm when it comes to form, narrative style and content. As a consequence, Danish films and series appear as nonstandard and, arguably, an anomalous supplement to their media diets. This finding is particularly interesting considering that we also find that our respondents in fact enjoy watching Danish content on YouTube and, interestingly, as such produced within the stylistic and narrative content logics of one the most popular and globalised Video-on-Demand providers in the world.

The study was a sequential mixed-methods design, of which the first step was a survey (n = 313) of 8-17-year-old Danes, which explored how they relate to various fictional screen content and the platforms that provide it. The second step was a qualitative and so-called mobile ethnographic study, in which we gave 20 children in the age group various tasks relating to their media use – communicated via short online videos and text – that the children in turn completed on their smartphones via a combination of videos, texts and images gathered in an app designed specifically for mobile ethnographic research.

This combination of methods yielded a rich, yet fairly structured, data collection that, on the one hand, was removed from too much adult researcher interference, and, on the other, happened on the children’s own terms. Hence, we purposefully shied away from methods such as (survey) interviews and observation, in which the researcher is relatively conspicuous and may therefore influence the children’s answers.