Your window-on-the-world: interactive television, the BBC and the second shift aesthetics of public service broadcasting

The impetus for this project was to consider how the digitalisation of television stood as an important moment to re-evaluate key concepts and debates within television studies. To this end, my focus is on public service broadcasting and television studies' textual tradition. I examine how linear models of the television text are challenged, usurped and at times reinforced by interactive television's emergent non-linear, personalisable forms. In so doing, I am concerned to analyse interactive television's textual structures in relation to the BBC's position as a public service broadcaster in the digital television age. Across these two concerns I aim to historicise the moment of digitalisation, drawing on longer positionings of television's technological and cultural form as a 'window-on-the-world'. An introduction is followed by section 1 of the thesis that includes a review of key literature in the field, focusing particularly on work on the 'text' of television studies. The chapters in section 1 mix this review with an historical argument that understand the current digital television era as one of 'excess', placing television at the boundaries of new and old media concerns that can be usefully understood through the presence of a dialectic between television's position as window-on-the-world and its emergent position as 'portal'. Section 1 demonstrates how this dialectic is called up by the prominence of discourses of 'choice' in new media practices and textualities and, more importantly, the debates about public service broadcasting's role in the digital age. As I go on to show in section 2, this dialectic evidences a tension between the 'imaginative journeys' television's window offers and the way in which these are then 'rationalised'. The second half of the thesis maps out emergent textual forms of interactive television by analysing the way choice and mobility are structured, providing a series of case studies in non-fiction television genres. Chapter 4 demonstrates the persistence of key discourses subsumed within the window-on-the-world metaphor in the formation and 'everydaying' of interactive television, elucidating key institutional and gendered tensions in the way these discourses are mobilised in the digital age. In turn, Chapter 5 connects the kinds of mobility promised by interactive television's window to longer historical practices of public institutions regulating spectator movement. Chapter 6 examines how television's window has been explicitly remediated by interactive television, placing it within the 'database' ontologies of computing. Finally Chapter 7 demonstrates the way in which television's window increasingly comes to function as a portal through which to access digital media spaces, such as the Internet. Across the chapters I am concerned to connect the textual and discursive form of each case study to the academic debates and public service concerns of the various applications' generic identity. Although I am interested in the challenges television's digitalisation poses to both public service broadcasting and traditional television studies approaches to the text, a more important motivation has been to re-affirm the role of both in the digital television landscape. Thus through close textual analysis that connects aesthetics with production and regulation, the thesis aims to demonstrate the relevance of television studies and the BBC, as a public service broadcaster, as an 'old media' becomes a 'new' one

La audiencia activa en la ficción transmedia: plataformas, interactividad y medición

Introduction. The changes in the television landscape have given rise to new forms of production and consumption which present challenges to the monitoring of the audience. This article delves into the transformations regarding how to measure the audience through the case study of the series produced by RTVE, Si fueras tú, the first native, interactive and transmedia fiction series. Methodology. An analysis of the official media and platforms which make up the transmedia universe of the fiction series is carried out. Subsequently, the possibilities of interaction and the activities of the audience in each of them are studied. Results. The data show that Facebook and Instagram comprise the greater part of the activity in the transmedia universe. Moreover, the weekly routine in the combination of platforms and the integration of the active audience is identified. Discussion and conclusions. The impossibility of measuring in a standardized way the transmedia audience is proven while further challenges are mentionedIntroducción. Los cambios en el panorama televisivo han dado pie a nuevas formas de producción y de consumo que imponen desafíos en la monitorización de la audiencia. Este artículo profundiza en las transformaciones de la medición de audiencia a través del estudio de caso de la serie de RTVE Si fueras tú, primera serie de ficción nativa, interactiva, transmedia. Metodología. Se realiza un análisis de los soportes y plataformas oficiales que conforman el universo transmedia de la serie de ficción para posteriormente estudiar las posibilidades de interacción y la actividad de la audiencia en cada una de ellas. Resultados. Los datos muestran que Facebook e Instagram concentran la mayor parte de la actividad del universo transmedia, además se identifica una rutina semanal en la combinación de plataformas y la integración de la audiencia activa. Discusión y conclusiones. Se constata la imposibilidad de cuantificar de forma estandarizada la audiencia transmedia y se señalan retos de futuroEste artículo está elaborado en el marco de las actividades promovidas a través de la Red Internacional de Gestión de la Comunicación – XESCOM (Referencia: ED341D R2016/019), apoyada por la Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria de la Xunta de GaliciaS

Broadcasting regulation and the public-private dichotomy

This thesis is a theoretical and methodological engagement with the extent to which the public-private dichotomy is an appropriate and effective framework within which to critically approach the history of broadcasting regulation in the UK. The critical literature on the subject tends to present a narrative of decline, from an ethos of public service and citizenship, which is presumed to have enabled the public sphere, to a neoliberal faith in market logic and consumer choice, which is accused of undermining it. Much of this discussion is theoretically weakened, however, by a lack of engagement with the relevant literatures, and by the reduction to unitary oppositions between commonsensical terms of what are actually protean distinctions between contentious concepts. Taking this claim as its starting point, the thesis will attempt to clarify the ambiguity of the key concepts of debate on broadcasting regulation, recognising the need for the complexification of distinctions rather than their simplification or abandonment

Once and Future Copyright

Copyright is like a well-meaning but ultimately bothersome friend, eager to help but nearly impossible to get rid of. It attaches indiscriminately to the simplest acts of expression, without regard for whether the author needs or wants its protection. This automatic propertization made sense in the print era, when mass distribution of information was an expensive process rarely undertaken by those with no plans to profit from their creativity. It makes little sense today. The following article shows that copyright\u27s overly solicitous nature is the source of several seemingly unrelated and intractable problems - e.g., closed code, copyright as censorship, technological hegemony - that have resulted from trying to fit the digital peg of computer technology into the analog hole of copyright law. The common solution to these problems involves a purposefully retrograde approach that cures their twenty-first-century ills using nineteenth-century tools: copyright\u27s antiquated formalities. Resurrecting publication, notice, registration, and deposit as threshold requirements for copyright protection prevents authors and publishers from achieving technologically what they do not merit legally, while at the same time ensuring that copyright does not apply in contexts where it is neither necessary nor useful

The political economy of Irish television broadcasting policy 1997 - 2007

This dissertation is an analysis of the political economy of the Republic of Ireland's television broadcasting policy in the period between 1997 and 2007. It is primarily concerned with Irish policy approaches to the introduction of digital terrestrial television (DTT) and the restructuring of public service broadcasting (PSB). Whereas policy addressing these two policy areas had been articulated in the late 1980s, it was not until the period under review that significant policy endeavours took place. The research is primarily concerned with identifying the articulation of state/market relations as manifested in policy making and assessing the relative effectiveness/success of such policy changes relative to specific policy aims in communications and media and the larger strategies and activities of the Irish state

What now?: a New Zealand children’s television production case study

This case study provides a snapshot of cultural agency within the production of a publicly funded magazine programme strand for children in New Zealand. What Now? considered by cohorts of children since 1981 to be a New Zealand children’s television institution, was scheduled in a commercial zone after school, and on non-commercial Sunday mornings, during the last years of the twentieth century. The thesis is framed by discussion of the complex global forces that shaped children’s audio-visual flows in the late 1990s. This discussion moves between analysis of parental concerns about diminishing public media spaces for local children and commercial and post structuralist celebration of children’s pleasures in consumption, and how this tension has seen children’s media rights become highly politicised during the 1990s. It takes a critical stance, analysing the unequal command over material resources and power for different agents, and the consequences of such inequality for the nature of the symbolic environment for children. It follows this frame with analysis of stakeholder struggles over shaping the text of What Now? The discussion concentrates on one year of production - from annual public funding round in 1997 to reformating of the strand in 1999. The author is interested in competing cultural, economic and political discourses in production talk. She analyses the interplay and negotiations between programme stakeholders, as revealed within the discursive battles of production talk, and their consequences for content and style of a television text. Micro-production moments illustrate how producers and other adult stakeholders imagine their child audiences, and how reified and reductive constructs of the child audience become instrumental in decisions made over commissioning, scheduling, creating and judging children’s programmes. The thesis sets itself a sequence of tasks: to articulate between global and local conditions of production, to complete a fine-grained study of children’s television producers as they imagine the role of their programme in children’s lives, to explore how those creative visions for children are delimited by other powerful stakeholders’ contrary constructs of children’s audiences, and to speculate about how the eventual text serves as a symbolic resource for New Zealand children. It draws on cross-disciplinary theorizing of culture, power and media agency to enable analysis of who has the power to delimit symbolic resources available to children in their ‘serious play’ of learning and identity formation. Certain conclusions can be drawn from the data, but the data also suggests many more questions for subsequent research