Lobato earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Film/Cinema/Video Studies from the University of Melbourne. After graduating from the Honors program in 2006, Lobato received his Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Media Studies from the University of Melbourne in 2010. His PhD thesis "Subcinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution" researched the distribution of movies on an international scale. In 2013, he obtained his Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching from Swinburne University.
Career
Before his career in research Lobato worked for Beat Magazine as a music reporter and Sensis as an associate editor. After receiving his PhD in 2010 Lobato began working at the Swinburne University of Technology as a senior research fellow in the Institute for Social Research, where he was involved in several projects pertaining to media policies and technologies. During this time he also taught in the university's cinema and screen studies program, where he developed classes for both the program and the School of Arts, Social Science and Humanities. In 2017, Lobato became a Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University. Alongside Amanda Lotz Lobato co-founded the Global Internet TV Consortium, which focuses on gathering and analyzing studies from various media scholars based on the effects of television and movie streaming services, such as Netflix, on a global scale. In addition, Lobato works as an editor for the Media Industries Journal and serves on the editorial board for the International Journal of Cultural Studies. In 2019 Lobato received an ARC Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council for his research project " the cultural impacts of smart TVs in Australia." Previously Lobato had received their ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award in 2015.
Books
Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution
The Informal Media Economy
Netflix Nations
Edited collections
Amateur Media: Social, Cultural, and Legal Perspectives
Geoblocking and Global Video Culture
Select journal articles
"Creative Industries and Informal Economies: Lessons from Nollywood"
"Histories of User-Generated Content: Between Formal and Informal Media Economies"
"The Cultural Logic of Digital Intermediaries: YouTube Multichannel Networks "