Global television format: Understanding television across borders

Abstract

Television (TV) has undoubtedly gone global since the early 1980s. A handful of media conglomerates have woven a tight distribution network around global Hollywood, only intersected by program flows from a few other major production centers in Asia, Europe, and South America. Transnational (de)regulation and commercialization have posed an increasing threat to the remnants of national public service broadcasting and local television. Although viewers may still statistically prefer programming in local languages, even local shows increasingly derive from globally circulating formats. Media and communication studies, much like cinema studies at an earlier stage, have responded to these transformations by serious attempts to de-Westernize, internationalize, and transnationalize. The number of recent book series, journals, conferences, and various activities coordinated by international organizations such as the International Communication Association are testament to a collective effort to revisit basic questions, assumptions and knowledge and develop comparative methodologies demanded by an increasingly convergent global media. Yet, as the editors of Global Television Formats note in their introduction, the profile of television studies as an academic enterprise remains resolutely English-speaking and almost entirely based in the United States and Britain.