Number Of Television Channels Research Articles

The Growth of the offer and the Perceptions of Television Content Quality

ABSTRACT This article examines the evolution of the attitudes of Spanish viewers to television from 2008 to 2016. This has been a period of time characterised by a substantial increase in the number of television channels. More specifically, the analysis is focused on audience satisfaction, perceptions of content quality and moral and pragmatic concerns. The data used in the empirical analysis come from three rounds of a survey conducted in 2008, 2012 and 2016. The size of the sample is 1,000 respondents for each year. The findings suggest that the attitudes to television have remained very stable in spite of the changes in the growth of the offer and technological upgrading.

‘Broadcast to mark Holocaust Memorial Day’: Mass-mediated Holocaust commemoration on British television and radio

This article examines the various programmes that British television and radio broadcast to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, between 2002 and 2016. Adopting a content analytic methodology, I quantified the broadcast schedules of 15 successive Holocaust Memorial Days, as recorded in archived copies of the Radio Times. My analysis reveals significant variations in mass-mediated Holocaust commemoration. Principally, I found a decrease in programming, despite a significant increase in the number of television channels; a tendency towards ‘anniversarism’ in the form and frequency of broadcast programmes; a stress on Auschwitz, as metonym of the Holocaust, and on survivors, children and music; and that commercial channels were significantly more likely to broadcast documentaries (and repeats) than the BBC’s more varied and original outputs. These variations appear to be the result of three interlinked factors: First, a sense that the audience had grown weary of World War II commemoration, following saturation broadcasting of anniversaries in 2004 to 2005; changes in the management and programming priorities of key broadcasters, particularly the BBC; and that Holocaust Memorial Day has not yet become an established day for broadcasters in the nation’s commemorative calendar.

‘Reality Television’ and Content Regulation – Perspectives and Challenges

The introduction and popularity of new genres of ‘reality television’ have created significant challenges for regulation of broadcast content. The availability of a larger number of television channels, where particular reality television shows might be broadcast live for many hours in the day, combined with the unpredictable activities of ‘reality television’ participants raises significant difficulties both for broadcasters and regulators. There is a significant need to consider the rationale for content regulation in this context, and the appropriate regulatory response where infringements take place, in both their theoretical and practical contexts.This article examines the regulatory approach for offensive content in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The study has adopted a comparative approach in order to determine whether regulators across the Atlantic are confronted with similar challenges and whether similar solutions are adopted in order to address these challenges. The examination of the regime in the United Kingdom assesses the effectiveness of the Broadcasting Code <http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/codes/bcode/> (the Code) adopted by the British communications regulator Ofcom on setting standards for broadcasting content. The discussion focuses on the application of the Code in practice, by analysing the official inquiry and ruling by Ofcom on Channel Four’s response to the 2007 Celebrity Big Brother (CBB) incident. The analysis of the system in the United States of America examines the approach adopted by the American communications regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in dealing with offensive content, focusing on the free speech provisions under the First Amendment of the American Constitution and on FCC’s mandate to act in the pursuit of the public interest. The discussion will examine, inter alia, FCC’s response to complaints regarding the broadcast of indecent material in the ‘reality television’ programme Married by America. A particular feature in both jurisdictions is the tension between regulatory intervention in broadcasting content and considerations for freedom of expression. Both systems are affected by the lack of adequate definitions of the limitations to freedom of expression. This study aims to determine what the current approach is in these jurisdictions for addressing this tension and what lessons might be learned for the future.

Efficient utilization of buffer storage in conservative staircase broadcasting scheme

The staircase scheme requires minimum buffer storage among all the broadcasting schemes that provides the video services. It however does not always deliver the video data to users in time. This problem has been overcome in the conservative staircase scheme, but the scheme requires more resources especially the buffer storage. In the conservative staircase scheme, the video is divided into segments depending upon the number of video channels allocated to it by the video server. The bandwidth of a video channel is equal to the viewing rate of the video. The segments are further divided into subsegments and the video channels into subchannels in such a way that a subchannel transmits all the subsegments of a single segment. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism for utilizing the buffer storage efficiently in the conservative staircase scheme. In the proposed scheme, the segments transmitted by each of the video channels are arranged in decreasing order of their indices. By doing this, the data of the segments can be delayed without failing their availability to the users in time. By delaying downloading of the data, only that data is stored in the buffer storage at the user's site that is needed immediately and in very near future. This scheme not only provides the video services using less storage space but also requires less disk transfer rate as compared to the conservative staircase scheme. Furthermore, the complexity of this scheme is much less than that of the conservative staircase scheme because it does not require the segments to be divided into subsegments and the video channels into subchannels1.

Dimensioning the capacity of true video-on-demand servers

The need to reduce the huge bandwidth demand of video-on-demand (VoD) services has led to the conception of both multicast and broadcast based techniques for the deployment of such services on a large scale. Interactivity, a desirable feature for video services, includes the capacity to perform VCR operations. However, whenever a viewer requests the performance of a VCR operation, his/her video stream becomes unsynchronized with that of his/her multicast group, and a new channel must be allocated for the performance of this operation. The present paper introduces a novel approach for determining the number of video channels needed to support such interactivity. Moreover, it investigates the performance of interactive systems with a pool of channels reserved for the support of VCR operations. Systems with both batching and piggybacking are analyzed. Results indicate that for a medium to high number of users performing VCR operations the number of channels required to achieve target levels of quality-of-service is lower for systems with no pool of reserved channels than it is for systems with such a pool.

Dumbing down: bottoming out?

Weighs up whether a dumbing down has taken place in the British tabloid and broadsheet press. Material is presented from The Sun, The Daily Telegraph and The Times, and also from a number of television channels for comparison. Provides evidence which suggests that, while there has been changes in news reporting it is not strictly one way and down; indeed, there is some evidence to indicate an upmarketing amongst the tabloid press and television.

Privatizing the airwaves: the impact of globalization on broadcasting in India

Media globalization and the resultant expansion of mainly Western transnational media empires have transformed broadcasting in India. An exponential growth in the number of television channels from one state-controlled channel in 1991 to nearly 70 in 1998 (18 of which are national in reach and in Hindi or English, others are regional), within such a short span of time, has profoundly changed the electronic media landscape, as India adapts its broadcasting industries to the deregulated and privatized media environment of the late 1990s. India’s growing economy, a vast, rapidly expanding middle class (variously estimated to be between 200 and 250 million) with aspirations to a Western lifestyle, and a fast-growing advertising sector have made the Indian media market exceptionally attractive for US-dominated transnational broadcasters. With its huge numbers of potential consumers, India provides transnational media corporations with unrivalled opportunities — it is one of the fastest growing and potentially one of the biggest English language media software markets in the world. An established satellite network provides cheaper and quicker nationwide coverage of broadcasting in a continental-size country, while the diversity of cultures in India means that demand for a wide array of satellite channels, catering to different languages and tastes, is even stronger than in Europe or the USA. The impact of globalization on the Indian media should be considered in the context of the media’s evolution and the role of the press as a fourth estate in the world’s largest democracy, where the past 50 years of multi-party polity have ensured a diverse, vibrant and relatively free press. On the other hand, as in most countries of the South, electronic media in India were, until recently, for the most part, a propaganda tool for the government.

Development of the German Media Market: Opportunities and Challenges for U.S. Media Firms

Due to technological development and economic pressures, deregulation of the West European broadcasting market during the 1980s has led to an enormous increase in the number of television channels. The opening of the markets to commercial interests and the demand for TV software (programming material) at the same time give media companies diverse opportunities to become active across frontiers. Being the biggest broadcasting and advertising market in Western Europe, Germany has become an interesting target for foreign companies. The introduction of digital television in the summer of 1996 and further liberalization of ownership regulations have made entry into the German broadcasting market even more attractive. This article describes the development of the German TV sector and analyzes opportunities, restrictions, and consequences of international and particularly U.S. activities in the German market.

Enforcing application-level QoS by frame-induced packet discarding in video communications

Advances in networking are making it feasible to support a wide spectrum of video services over fast packet-switched networks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of providing efficient QoS guarantees for video communication, when they are expressed at the application-level, in terms of video frames, rather than at the network-level, in terms of packets. We propose a simple to implement, yet effective, strategy called frame-induced packet discarding (FIPD), in which, upon detection of loss of a threshold number (determined by an application's video encoding scheme) of packets belonging to a video frame, the network attempts to discard all the remaining packets of that frame. We present extensive, trace-driven performance simulations that demonstrate the efficacy of the FIPD strategy. Networks employing the FIPD strategy exhibit significant increase in the number of video channels that they can support. Towards such networks, using a discrete time Markov chain model of the FIPD strategy, we devise a method for computing the frame loss probabilities of video applications, which then serves as the criterion for admission control: the network admits an incoming application only if the predicted frame loss probability (in the event of admission) does not exceed the frame loss bounds of any of the applications being serviced.