Acknowledgements

Til Tormod, Agnar, Håkon og Rannveig. Takk.

To my parents, Ellen & Robert for their everlasting moral, and sometimes financial, support.

To friends and family for keeping me sane with their company, bike rides and game nights.

To my supervisor, Audun Engelstad. Everybody should have a supervisor who cares about narratives. If I have managed to keep this thesis coherent, despite my resistance to narrowing the focus, it is largely thanks to your insistence. Jeg har forsøkt å sette teksten under press.

To my initial supervisor, Eva Bakøy, for setting me down the right path - and to my co-supervisor, Terje Gaustad, for guiding this path when it brought me to into (for me) foreign terrain.

To Sven Høier and Terje Colbjørnsen for invaluable feedback at the 50% and 80% seminars respectively.

To everyone at The Media Industries Symposium in Bristol 2018, BAM!2019 and -2021, the Norwegian Media Researcher Conferences in 2018 and 2020, and NordMedia 2019, for feedback on papers that were a part of this work in progress.

To Eva Bakøy, Terje Colbjørnsen and Kim Tallerås, Ove Solum, and Indrek Irbus for inviting me to co-author or submit articles on the history of Norwegian distributors, the contingent availability concept, Norwegian video stores and Norwegian distributors’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. All of these were in different ways a part of writing this thesis as well.

To my fellow PhD candidates at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences in Lillehammer, Andreas Skeide, Ingeborg Holmene, and not least, my fellow traveler on the last flight of the Audiovisual media PhD program, Tone Føreland.

To Johanne Kielland Servoll for taking the fight for welfare benefits on behalf of all PhD candidates with children at HINN. This thesis would never have been finished on time without you.

To everyone in the BAM! (Bransjestudier innen audiovisuelle medier) research group, I’m incredibly proud of all that we have achieved so far. To everyone at the Faculty of Audiovisual Media and Creative Technology, I have enjoyed working with you and I hope this is not goodbye.

Speaking of endings. This thesis would have been very different, if at all possible, without everyone that were a part of Film and Television Studies at Lillehammer and the research you have produced over several decades. Eva Bakøy, Søren Birkvad, Jan Anders Disen, Audun Engelstad, Tore Helseth, Jo Sondre Moseng, Roel Puijk, and Anne Lise With, thank you. I was lucky to catch the last ride.

This thesis feels like a major milestone on a path I have been traveling for about 25-years across several institutions. There are many more that deserve a thank you than I could possibly mention - but I still need to name a few. At NTNU, the Department of Art and Media Studies was my first academic home as a student. Anne Gjelsvik was my first lecturer in Film Studies, and you have remained an inspiration to this day. Gunnar Iversen, who supervised my master-thesis, and Jon Raundalen, thank you for your help and feedback when I first began seriously considering a PhD. At the University of Oslo, the Department of Media and Communication was the first place I was employed as an academic - and I could not have started my academic career at a better place. While many deserve mention I have to thank Anders Fagerjord for helping me hone the project description that finally became this thesis. And to everyone at the Department for Communication and Culture at BI, thank you for offering me a space, and lunches, as a guest researcher during the final months of writing.

Finally, to my informants, distributors, NFI, Film & Kino, Filmweb, Platekompaniet, Medietilsynet, and everyone else in the Norwegian film industry who offered me their time, insight, and data. I hope you find this useful.