Children’s Television: A Comparative Analysis of Offers on Free-to-Air Television in the United Kingdom and Finland

Abstract

Commercial television in Europe has undergone radical changes in commercial, political and paradigmatic terms over the past three decades. While commercial television prior to the 1980s was considered an abnormality, with just the United Kingdom, Finland, Italy, Monaco and Luxembourg featuring private television, liberalisation of broadcasting markets — a process that gained its full momentum in the 1990s — led to unprecedented growth in commercial broadcasting in Europe. Advances in communications technologies since the 1990s have transformed the spectrum scarcity of foregoing decades to capacity abundance, and allowed new companies to enter the broadcasting market. Concurrently, broadcasting policies have been gradually reformed to allow commercial broadcasters to operate with lesser public service obligations and regulatory control. While the liberalisation of broadcasting has simultaneously resulted in increasingly fragmented audiences, many commercial broadcasters have found themselves in an increasingly competitive market, where holding a commercial broadcasting licence is no longer a “license to print your own money”, as a former ITV network company executive once described it (quoted in Sendall, 1982: 150).