Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

BROADCASTING POLICY 99
European Parliament and critics. Broadcasting in general has defined the
EU as a single market contributing to the biggest and most impressive
experiment in territorial economic integration in the region. The Television
Without Frontiers Directive (TVWF) introduced in 1989, amended
in 1997 and currently under revision still remains the definitive document
of broadcasting policy (EP and Council 1987; Council 1989) because it
sets out the general principles that rule transborder media services market
today, with a particular emphasis on the unrestricted movement of media
content. Broadcasting policy and in particular the audiovisual arm of
the industry became the means that tested the functionality of the single
market, but also boosted its operation. It has been the ultimate test for
the circulation and market validity of products that cannot be understood
in physical terms, such as cars, oranges and coffee makers that are easier
to circulate. The exceptional thing about ‘symbolic’ products, or in other
words ‘cultural’ products, is that in most cases they can be reproduced,
distributed and broadcast for an almost unlimited number of times. Apart
from taste, which changes with time, very little else can affect negatively
the profit-making ability of these products. The powerful commercial
arm of the film industry repackages products that have lost their novelty
and reintroduces them in a variety of ways that help maintain their
market value, in forms such as special ‘seasons’ dedicated to Hollywood
stars, according to genre, or releasing different versions of perceived ‘cult’
films (the ‘director’s cut’ are some of the best examples). The audiovisual
sector, currently boosted by the increasing prominence of the electronic
sector and e-commerce, is in a unique position to reproduce goods at
minimal cost, which is not the case with other products, such as the automotive
industry. Digitization and the expansion to the ‘virtual’ realm,
where storage and connection to receivers and therefore customers, are
theoretically at least infinite, and provide content providers and media
owners with the conditions to move in (almost) unlimited market spaces.
For that of course access to nationally controlled markets is necessary.
Sometimes referred to as ‘cultural goods’ and more often defined as
‘services’, broadcasting content became the object of liberalization in
European societies and markets in the last two decades of the twentieth
century. At an EU level, a battalion of neoliberalists working together
with the telecommunications companies put forward reports and policy
proposals for the full liberalization of telecommunications and broadcasting
as the drivers for economic progress. Under this light, the TVWF
directive became a major document of mainly competition policy, which
treats content as a ‘service’ partly because juristically the EU’s competencies
did not expand to non-economic sectors. Additionally, the dominance
of market-driven objectives are partly due to the fact that the interests