'I Like the Metamorphosis of the Characters': Dynamics of Transnational Television Comedy Engagement

This article contributes to debates on transnational television comedy audiences through analysis of Eastern European audiences’ engagement with British television comedy. Using questionnaire and focus group data it examines the extent and nature of British television comedy engagement by Romanian audiences and the limits of broadcasting British television comedy to Romanian audiences. The research reveals Romanian audiences’ high involvement with television comedy. Over half of questionnaire respondents watch British television comedy. Three themes regarding Romanian audiences’ engagement with British television comedy are identified in the focus group data: 1) transnational television comedy aesthetics; 2) transnational television comedy as intellectual comedy; and 3) ethical limits of transnational television comedy. These themes highlight the complex contours of transnational television comedy engagement.https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2941/152

Global Television and Local Content Viewing in Nigeria: A Study of Calabar Residents in Cross River State

The viewing patterns of Global Television in Nigeria seem to have undermined the objectives of local media content in the Nigerian media industry. This paper was designed to examine the factors that indicate that global television affect the development of Nigeria’s local content and why most Nigerians prefer to watch global television programmes at the expense of local television programmes even in the wake of assumed improved local contents in the Nigerian media. The study adopted observational and quantitative methods of acquiring data on reasons why most residents in Nigeria prefer to view foreign programmes and how television viewing of global contents from the foreign stations has affected the development of local media content. The questionnaire was the instrument adopted for eliciting data from primary sources who are television viewers in Nigeria. This study proposed and distributed 300 but recovered 267 copies of the ‘Global Television versus Local Television Viewing’ questionnaire to randomly selected members of the population in Calabar, Cross River State. A review of secondary sources including books and articles on television viewing in Nigeria was carried out. The quantitative data was analysed using simple tables and percentages. Findings revealed that a significant number of Nigerians prefer to watch global television programmes because of their intrinsic interest and creative nature including the educational, informational and entertainment value advantage of the programmes over their local counterparts. The study recommends that the states and federal governments in Nigeria should inject more funds into revitalization of local television stations and should employ more experienced and retrain old television staff in their respective television stations in order to improve on the quality and patronage of local content in the Nigerian media

Customized television: Standards compliant advanced digital television

This correspondence describes a European Union supported collaborative project called CustomTV based on the premise that future TV sets will provide all sorts of multimedia information and interactivity, as well as manage all such services according to each user’s or group of user’s preferences/profiles. We have demonstrated the potential of recent standards (MPEG-4 and MPEG-7) to implement such a scenario by building the following services: an advanced EPG, Weather Forecasting, and Stock Exchange/Flight Information

Television and the popular: viewing from the British perspective

The academic discipline of television studies has been constituted by the claim that television is worth studying because it is popular. Yet this claim has also entailed a need to defend the subject against the triviality that is associated with the television medium because of its very popularity. This article analyses the many attempts in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to constitute critical discourses about television as a popular medium. It focuses on how the theoretical currents of Television Studies emerged and changed in the UK, where a disciplinary identity for the subject was founded by borrowing from related disciplines, yet argued for the specificity of the medium as an object of criticism. Eschewing technological determinism, moral pathologization and sterile debates about television's supposed effects, UK writers such as Raymond Williams addressed television as an aspect of culture. Television theory in Britain has been part of, and also separate from, the disciplinary fields of media theory, literary theory and film theory. It has focused its attention on institutions, audio-visual texts, genres, authors and viewers according to the ways that research problems and theoretical inadequacies have emerged over time. But a consistent feature has been the problem of moving from a descriptive discourse to an analytical and evaluative one, and from studies of specific texts, moments and locations of television to larger theories. By discussing some historically significant critical work about television, the article considers how academic work has constructed relationships between the different kinds of objects of study. The article argues that a fundamental tension between descriptive and politically activist discourses has confused academic writing about ›the popular‹. Television study in Britain arose not to supply graduate professionals to the television industry, nor to perfect the instrumental techniques of allied sectors such as advertising and marketing, but to analyse and critique the medium's aesthetic forms and to evaluate its role in culture. Since television cannot be made by ›the people‹, the empowerment that discourses of television theory and analysis aimed for was focused on disseminating the tools for critique. Recent developments in factual entertainment television (in Britain and elsewhere) have greatly increased the visibility of ›the people‹ in programmes, notably in docusoaps, game shows and other participative formats. This has led to renewed debates about whether such ›popular‹ programmes appropriately represent ›the people‹ and how factual entertainment that is often despised relates to genres hitherto considered to be of high quality, such as scripted drama and socially-engaged documentary television. A further aspect of this problem of evaluation is how television globalisation has been addressed, and the example that the issue has crystallised around most is the reality TV contest Big Brother. Television theory has been largely based on studying the texts, institutions and audiences of television in the Anglophone world, and thus in specific geographical contexts. The transnational contexts of popular television have been addressed as spaces of contestation, for example between Americanisation and national or regional identities. Commentators have been ambivalent about whether the discipline's role is to celebrate or critique television, and whether to do so within a national, regional or global context. In the discourses of the television industry, ›popular television‹ is a quantitative and comparative measure, and because of the overlap between the programming with the largest audiences and the scheduling of established programme types at the times of day when the largest audiences are available, it has a strong relationship with genre. The measurement of audiences and the design of schedules are carried out in predominantly national contexts, but the article refers to programmes like Big Brother that have been broadcast transnationally, and programmes that have been extensively exported, to consider in what ways they too might be called popular. Strands of work in television studies have at different times attempted to diagnose what is at stake in the most popular programme types, such as reality TV, situation comedy and drama series. This has centred on questions of how aesthetic quality might be discriminated in television programmes, and how quality relates to popularity. The interaction of the designations ›popular‹ and ›quality‹ is exemplified in the ways that critical discourse has addressed US drama series that have been widely exported around the world, and the article shows how the two critical terms are both distinct and interrelated. In this context and in the article as a whole, the aim is not to arrive at a definitive meaning for ›the popular‹ inasmuch as it designates programmes or indeed the medium of television itself. Instead the aim is to show how, in historically and geographically contingent ways, these terms and ideas have been dynamically adopted and contested in order to address a multiple and changing object of analysis

TRAINER COLOR TELEVISION WITH DIGITAL SETTINGS AS A LEARNING MEDIA ON TELEVISION RECEIVER SYSTEM IMPROVEMENTS LESSON

This study aims to create a design trainer color television with digital settings, determine the performance of a trainer color television with digital settings, and to test the feasibility of a trainer color television with digital settings as a medium of learning in subjects receiving television repair system in vocational schools. This study uses a method of research and development. Object of this study is a trainer color television with digital settings. Product development phase includes 1) Analysis, 2) Design, 3) Implementation, 4) Testing, 5) Validation, and 6) the use of trial. Methods used in collecting data include 1) testing and observation of performance, 2) Questionnaire study. validation of a medium of learning involving two expert learning materials and three expert instructional media, test usage by 33 students. The results showed that the trainer color television with digital settings can be worked in accordance with the objective being able to demonstrate 16 simulated real damage to the television so that it can make students more careful and scrupulous in observing symptoms on color television. Results of the content validation test instructional media from this study obtained a percentage of 89.9% so it makes a very feasible category. Construct validation test in this study obtained the percentage of 88.99% thus categorized as very feasible. testing the use of vocational students, the percentage obtained was 76.44% so it makes a very feasible category Keywords: Research and Development, color television, TV trainer, learning medi

What is the ‘Television’ of the European Journal of Cultural Studies? Reflections on 20 years of the study of television in the journal

Over 20 years, the European Journal of Cultural Studies has been an important resource for those writing and thinking about television, and this article reflects on the rich material contained in the long run of issues published since 1998. As part of ‘On the Move’, the Special Issue to mark the 20th anniversary of the journal, it also introduces the special online dossier of articles on television. It offers an impressionistic reflection on the author’s experiences of engaging with work on television as it has appeared in this journal. In homage to Raymond Williams, that great writer about television (and much else), this article focuses on three key words which seem crucial to this enterprise – journal, television and European

Sexual diversity on the small screen : mapping LGBT+ characters in Flemish television fiction (2001 – 2016)

Apart from figures on LGBT+ characters in television fiction produced by the American television industry, such as the ‘Where We Are On TV’ – reports by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), quantitative data on LGBT+ representation television fiction series remains scarce internationally. With this working paper, we aim to address this lack in the context of Flemish television fiction. To meet the challenges posed by a lack of centralized data on Flemish television fiction in general, and LGBT+ characters and storylines specifically, we constructed a three-tiered database. Comprising of all 156 domestic television fiction series between 2001 and 2016, the quantitative presence of LGBT+ characters in these series, and individual traits of the 117 collected LGBT+ characters respectively. In doing so, we provide an overview of Flemish television fiction in general, the distribution in these series of characters who identify as LGBT+ and the storylines that relate to sexual and gender diversity, and offer a tool to identify individual pertinent characters. Flanders presents itself as having a dynamic television fiction industry in the past fifteen years, with genre diversity and a sizeable output. In its general output, LGBT+ characters have had a significant habitual presence since 2001, with a noted correlation to specific ‘lowbrow’ genres, and a noted lack in ‘quality’ series. The collected characters display a severe lack of diversity, with most LGBT+ characters being gay male characters, a significant majority being middle class, and few non- white LGBT+ characters

'It's a film' : medium specificity as textual gesture in Red road and The unloved

British cinema has long been intertwined with television. The buzzwords of the transition to digital media, 'convergence' and 'multi-platform delivery', have particular histories in the British context which can be grasped only through an understanding of the cultural, historical and institutional peculiarities of the British film and television industries. Central to this understanding must be two comparisons: first, the relative stability of television in the duopoly period (at its core, the licence-funded BBC) in contrast to the repeated boom and bust of the many different financial/industrial combinations which have comprised the film industry; and second, the cultural and historical connotations of 'film' and 'television'. All readers of this journal will be familiar – possibly over-familiar – with the notion that 'British cinema is alive and well and living on television'. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when 'the end of medium specificity' is much trumpeted, it might be useful to return to the historical imbrication of British film and television, to explore both the possibility that medium specificity may be more nationally specific than much contemporary theorisation suggests, and to consider some of the relationships between film and television manifest at a textual level in two recent films, Red Road (2006) and The Unloved (2009)

The Effect of Entertainment in Newspaper and Television News Coverage

In this paper, we analyze the equilibrium amount of entertainment in news coverage of newspapers and television stations. We find that a shift in the inclination to read, expressed by a shift in the (psychological) distance costs, induces both media outlets to incorporate more entertaining elements in news coverage. The introduction of commercial television, however, which leads to a unilateral fall in the distance costs to the television broadcast, yields different results. It induces a negative effect on the profits of both media outlets, and increases price competition. Furthermore, the newspaper offers less while the television channel offers more entertainment. Overall, this leads to a marginalization of informational content, as the television channel gains market shares at the expense of the newspaper