Multi-cultural Switzerland – multicultural public service media?

In this article a special attention is paid to the to the role of public service broadcaster in cultural diversity societies. The main aims of the author was answering the following questions: how cultural pluralism is implemented by the public service broadcaster in Switzerland? How the Swiss PSB implements the principle of cultural pluralism, particularly in the context of the access of national, language communities and the migrants minorities to the media? Are all groups recognized by the public broadcaster in the same way? The second goal of the author was delivering answer to a question about the manner of how public broadcaster has adopted to the new situation and how the new ethnic groups are recognized by SGR SSR.The considerations are related to a cultural pluralism, which assumes that the media provide a guarantee of cultural diversity in a society. This article is a case study of Swiss public service broadcaster – SGR SSR idee suisse

The closure of ERT: public service broadcasting and austerity politics in Greece

Opinion piece on the closure of the Greek Public Service Broadcaster (PSB

Regulating advertising in the presence of public service broadcasting

Television advertising levels in Europe are regulated according to the Audiovisual Service Media Directive where member states of the European Union usually impose stricter regulation on their Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) channels. The present model evaluates the effects of symmetric and asymmetric regulation of ad levels on competition for viewers and advertisers in a duopoly framework where a public and a private broadcaster compete. If both broadcasters face the same advertising cap, regulation can be profit-increasing for both channels. If the public broadcaster is more strictly regulated, this may benefit the commercial rival if higher revenues in the advertising market outweigh the loss in viewership. --media markets,two-sided markets

Towards Hybrid Cloud-assisted Crowdsourced Live Streaming: Measurement and Analysis

Crowdsourced Live Streaming (CLS), most notably Twitch.tv, has seen explosive growth in its popularity in the past few years. In such systems, any user can lively broadcast video content of interest to others, e.g., from a game player to many online viewers. To fulfill the demands from both massive and heterogeneous broadcasters and viewers, expensive server clusters have been deployed to provide video ingesting and transcoding services. Despite the existence of highly popular channels, a significant portion of the channels is indeed unpopular. Yet as our measurement shows, these broadcasters are consuming considerable system resources; in particular, 25% (resp. 30%) of bandwidth (resp. computation) resources are used by the broadcasters who do not have any viewers at all. In this paper, we closely examine the challenge of handling unpopular live-broadcasting channels in CLS systems and present a comprehensive solution for service partitioning on hybrid cloud. The trace-driven evaluation shows that our hybrid cloud-assisted design can smartly assign ingesting and transcoding tasks to the elastic cloud virtual machines, providing flexible system deployment cost-effectively

The Premier League: European Commission broadcasting negotiations

This intervention analyses the new arrangements for the sale of live television rights to FA Premier League (FAPL) games. The new procedures have been produced as a result of ongoing discussions between the FAPL and the European Commission. To ensure compliance with European Union competition legislation, the Premier League has accepted the Commission’s calls for an end to its exclusive distribution of live broadcast rights, bringing to an end BSkyB’s 15-year monopoly of its main subscription driver (Buck and Terazono, 2005). Here, we examine the aims of the European Commission in pursuing the FAPL’s exclusive deal with BSkyB (Sky) and consider whether the deal that has been brokered provides any tangible benefits to the consumer

Sustaining local audiovisual ecosystems: shifting modes of financing and production of domestic TV drama in small media markets

Various trends, both technological and economic in nature, have led to a shift in the financing and production of serial television fiction (principally television drama and episodic comedy), resulting in pressure on existing financing of TV fiction. These pressures prove especially difficult for small nations and regions, being characterized by restricted markets, a limited number of active players, and barriers for export and scale. For media policy-makers, these transitions invoke a series of new challenges to sustain existing audio-visual ecosystems. Based on a case study of TV fiction in Flanders, and presenting evidence from a financial analysis of 46 TV fiction productions, this article analyses current financing streams, patterns and dynamics of TV fiction in small media markets. It seeks to reveal the composition of budgets and the relative importance of diverse agents and funders involved in TV fiction production. Critical evaluations are then offered as to whether current financing models and policy support mechanisms are fit to tackle the challenges posed by the increasing number of windows and increased fragmentation of TV fiction financing

Public Television in Europe: The French and Greek Cases

The aim of this article is to examine the way technological developments and the internationalisation of the television industry affects public television (PTV) broadcasters in Europe. The work focuses on the policies pursued by PTV broadcasters in selected European countries in response to the challenges that confront them in the era of digital convergence. The changes in the European television landscape force public channels to rethink their position towards new digital technologies, organisational structures and programming policy and scheduling. To illustrate the difficulties but also the opportunities that arise during this period of change, the article analyses specific activities and strategies undertaken by public channels in the main areas examined (reorganisation, programming and technology) in one large (France) and one small European country (Greece)