Although television has developed into a major agent of the transnational and global flow of information and entertainment, television historiography and scholarship largely remains a national endeavour, partly due to the fact that television has been understood as a tool for the creation of national identity. But the breaking of the quasi-monopoly of public service broadcasters all over Europe in the 1980s has changed the television landscape, and cross-border television channels - with the help of satellite and the Internet - have catapulted the relatively closed television nations into the universe of globalized media channels. At least, this is the picture painted by the popular meta-narratives of European television history. Transnational Television History asks us to re-evaluate the function of television as a medium of nation-building in its formative years and to reassess the historical narrative that insists that European television only became transnational with the emergence of more commercial services and new technologies from the 1980s. It also questions some common assumptions in television historiography by offering some alternative perspectives on the complex processes of transnational circulation of television technology, professionals, programmes and aesthetics. This book was originally published as a special issue of Media History.

This book is the first to offer a global perspective on the unique contemporary media phenomenon of transnational television channels. It is also the first to compare their impact in different regions of the globe. Revealing great richness and diversity across some of the world's main geocultural regions (Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Greater China and Latin America), international contributors with in-depth industry knowledge examine the place of these channels in the process of globalization, their impact on the nation-state and on regional culture and politics. The book also considers audiences and geocultural TV markets, providing new ways of thinking about the emerging transnational media order.

Today transnational TV networks count among television's most prestigious brands and rank among Europe's leading TV channels. This is the first, dynamically told story of the extraordinary journey of transnational television in Europe from struggling origins to its present day boom. It is based in extensive research into the international television industry and makes full use of its author's remarkable access to leading industry figures, from Sky and Turner to Discovery and BBC World.The tale begins with a few cross-border TV channels, who fought hostile governments, faced antagonism from the broadcasting establishment and provoked the contempt of advertisers. But, Jean Chalaby argues, the planets came into alignment for pan-European television in the late 1990s, when a transnational shift in European broadcasting was produced. He shows how transnational television and globalization have transformed one another, and how transfrontier TV networks reflect - and help sustain - a global economic order in which the connection between national territory and patterns of production and distribution have broken down.

This history of British and American television drama since 1970 charts the increased transnationalisation of the two production systems. From The Forsyte Saga to Roots to Episodes , it highlights the close relationship that drives innovation and quality on both sides of the Atlantic.

"When STAR TV began broadcasting into India in 1992, it was at the vanguard of an influx of transnational television networks trying to tap into one of the world's largest consumer markets. STAR's Western programming, bold marketing, and its later ownership by one of the world's largest media conglomerates, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, saw thename inextricably linked with the debate surrounding cultural change in India in the 1990s. This book is not just a history of the development of TV in India, nor solely an exploration of its impact. It measures cultural change by looking at changing perceptions of Indianness, or the understanding of what it means to call oneself an Indian, and the role of transnational TV in the process of defining, creating and maintaining that identity." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0657/2003003591-d.html.

The central focus of this study is to provide an improved basis for articulating the politics of transnational television and its potentials for improving relations among nations. In this context, the politics of transnational television means the decision-making process that determines the degree of freedom of the press tolerated by individual governments and how that could affect broadcasting mode and attitudes toward other nations.The motivation for this research stems from a conviction that the cultural imperialism perspective on the nature and modes of transnational television are erroneous and therefore susceptible to a wide and often misleading theoretical assumption, with wide ranged implications.In reevaluating the concept of cultural imperialism, some fundamental questions are raised to determine to what extent its arguments are true. Using the elite theory of power in various societies, aided by Johan Galtung's model of a global communication in four worlds, we see a pattern of global television that suggests a similar motivation underlying media ownership in all societies.We acknowledge, with the support of a literature review and other data sources, the existence of a global systemic order where technology rich nations dominate technology over poor nations. But there is also substantial evidence to prove some of the poorer nations exercise some degree of autonomy. This makes it more difficult to explain cultural imperialism simply as a relationship where developed and developing nations are arranged in dominant/subordinate or top/down order.Through a strategy of original intent, we are able to show the elite in various societies acquire television mainly to satisfy their political, economic, or social interest. Media attitudes, therefore, are largely the ideological expression of local elite who determines foreign policy.

European Television History brings together television historians and media scholars to chart the development of television in Europe since its inception. The volume interrogates the history of the medium in divergent political, economic, cultural and ideological national contexts Taking a comparative approach to the topic, the volume is organized around a set of common questions, themes, and methodological reflections Deals with European television in the context of television historiography and transnational traditions Case study chapters written by scholars from different European countries to reflect their specific areas of expertise

Providing a cross-cultural investigation of the current phenomenon of transnational television remakes, and assembling an international team of scholars, this book draws upon ideas from transnational media and cultural studies to offer an understanding of global cultural borrowings and format translation. While recognising the commercial logic of global television formats that animates these remakes, the collection describes the traffic in transnational television remakes not as a one-way process of cultural homogenisation, but rather as an interstitial process through which cultures borrow from and interact with one another. More specifically, the chapters attend to recent debates around the transnational flows of local and global media cultures to focus on questions in the televisual realm, where issues of serialisation and distribution are prevalent. What happens when a series is remade from one national television system to another? How is cultural translation handled across series and seasons of differing length and scope? What are the narrative and dramaturgical proximities and differences between local and other versions? How does the ready availability of original, foreign series shape an audience’s reception of a local remake? How does the rhetoric of ‘Quality TV’ impact on how these remakes are understood and valued? In answering these and other questions, this volume at once acknowledges both the historical antecedents to transnational trade in broadcast culture, and the global explosion in, and cultural significance of, transnational television remakes since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum.

In Network Nations, Michele Hilmes reveals and re-conceptualizes the roots of media globalization through a historical look at the productive transnational cultural relationship between British and American broadcasting. Though frequently painted as opposites--the British public service tradition contrasting with the American commercial system--in fact they represent two sides of the same coin. Neither could have developed without the constant presence of the other, in terms not only of industry and policy but of aesthetics, culture, and creativity, despite a long history of oppositional rhetoric. Based on primary research in British and American archives, Network Nations argues for a new transnational approach to media history, looking across the traditional national boundaries within which media is studied to encourage an awareness that media globalization has a long and fruitful history. Placing media history in the framework of theories of nationalism and national identity, Hilmes examines critical episodes of transnational interaction between the US and Britain, from radioâe(tm)s amateurs to the relationship between early network heads; from the development of radio features and drama to television spy shows and miniseries; as each otherâe(tm)s largest suppliers of programming and as competitors on the world stage; and as a network of creative, business, and personal relationships that has rarely been examined, but that shapes television around the world. As the global circuits of television grow and as global regions, particularly Europe, attempt to define a common culture, the historical role played by the British/US media dialogue takes on new significance.