Combining institutional textual and audience analysis, this book introduces students to the factors which have shaped television′s development in contemporary Europe, and invites them to assess the issues that are at stake in its future. Divided into three parts, the book moves from the European broadcasting environment, through current patterns and trends in programming and programme making, to TV genres and issue-specific broadcasting. Incorporating a range of pedagogical devices: boxes of key facts, activities and notes for further reading, Television across Europe offers an essential introductory guide to television in Western Europe.
This collection will be the first volume to gather the best writing on socialist and postsocialist entertainment television as a medium, technology, and institution in Eastern Europe.
Like its companion volume, Telecommunications in Europe, this book deals with the evolution of powerful monopoly institutions in the communications field--the public broadcasters--and the dramatic changes that took place in the late 1980s throughout Europe, and transformed the media landscape. It provides a comprehensive view of European broadcasting systems, using the perspective of economics and policy analysis. The introductory part offers a framework for understanding media and the forces of change affecting them. The main section is a unique series of chapters covering the broadcast and cable television systems of almost thirty European countries.
Today transnational TV networks count among television's most prestigious brands and rank among Europe's leading TV channels. This is the first, dynamically told story of the extraordinary journey of transnational television in Europe from struggling origins to its present day boom. It is based in extensive research into the international television industry and makes full use of its author's remarkable access to leading industry figures, from Sky and Turner to Discovery and BBC World.The tale begins with a few cross-border TV channels, who fought hostile governments, faced antagonism from the broadcasting establishment and provoked the contempt of advertisers. But, Jean Chalaby argues, the planets came into alignment for pan-European television in the late 1990s, when a transnational shift in European broadcasting was produced. He shows how transnational television and globalization have transformed one another, and how transfrontier TV networks reflect - and help sustain - a global economic order in which the connection between national territory and patterns of production and distribution have broken down.
European Television History brings together television historians and media scholars to chart the development of television in Europe since its inception. The volume interrogates the history of the medium in divergent political, economic, cultural and ideological national contexts Taking a comparative approach to the topic, the volume is organized around a set of common questions, themes, and methodological reflections Deals with European television in the context of television historiography and transnational traditions Case study chapters written by scholars from different European countries to reflect their specific areas of expertise
This is the first study devoted to the highly significant roles played by France and Britain in the formulation of European audiovisual policy, providing a truly comparative analysis of the contemporary audiovisual scene in the two countries.
From the mid-1950s onwards, the rise of television as a mass medium took place in many East and West European countries. As the most influential mass medium of the Cold War, television triggered new practices of consumption and media production, and of communication and exchange on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This volume leans on the long-neglected fact that, even during the Cold War era, television could easily become a cross-border matter. As such, it brings together transnational perspectives on convergence zones, observations, collaborations, circulations and interdependencies between Eastern and Western television. In particular, the authors provide empirical ground to include socialist television within a European and global media history. Historians and media, cultural and literary scholars take interdisciplinary perspectives to focus on structures, actors, flow, contents or the reception of cross-border television. Their contributions cover Albania, the CSSR, the GDR, Russia and the Soviet Union, Serbia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia, thus complementing Western-dominated perspectives on Cold War mass media with a specific focus on the spaces and actors of East European communication. Last but not least, the volume takes a long-term perspective crossing the fall of the Iron Curtain, as many trends of the post-socialist period are linked to, or pick up, socialist traditions.
This book maps the landscape of contemporary European premium television fiction, offering a detailed overview of both the changes in the digital production and distribution and the emergence of specific national and transnational case histories. Combining a media-production approach with a textual and audience analysis, the volume offers a complex, stratified, systemic view of ongoing aesthetic, sociocultural and industrial developments in contemporary European TV. With contributions from leading experts in the field, the book first offers an overview of the industrial, policy and cultural context for the renaissance of European television drama over the past decade, based on original comparative research. This research is then supported by case study chapters from the key contexts within which quality European television is being produced, offering a complex and complete picture of the industry’s strengths and limitations, its traditions and trends, its constraints and future perspectives. A European Television Fiction Renaissance is a must-read book for TV scholars working across Europe and beyond in the areas of media studies, international communications and television studies, media industries studies, production studies, European studies, and media policy studies as well as for those with an interest in television drama, Netflix, globalisation, pay TV and on demand.
