{"title":"Interactive television? A retrospective analysis of why red button content failed","authors":"Andy Fox","doi":"10.1386/JDMP.10.2.203_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/JDMP.10.2.203_1","url":null,"abstract":"Interactive television was intended to provide the viewers with an enhanced experience of television. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, both public service and subscription-based television broadcasters provided the audience with a variety of ‘interactive’ applications. By 2012, most of the interactive applications had been either reduced in scale and ambition or withdrawn completely. This article is an overview of why the interactive television experiment failed. The methodological framework is a content analysis undertaken in the summer of 2012 which found a small amount of red button content supporting traditional broadcasts. The little found was either pre-existing content or entailed the button’s use as, effectively, the portal to a supplementary television channel. Moving forward, the article provides a discussion on why the optimism that television could be an interactive experience in the early 2000s dissolved in a relatively short period of time. The conclusion is that interactive television did not fit the political economy of the media landscape.","PeriodicalId":40702,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Media & Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45985052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Possible models of local news provision by radio in Scotland: A mixed-methods study","authors":"A. Kocic, J. Milicev","doi":"10.1386/JDMP.10.2.183_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/JDMP.10.2.183_1","url":null,"abstract":"Scotland does not have any public service radio on a local level, except for a few bulletins or programmes offered by BBC Radio Scotland on an opt-out basis. Scottish commercial radio stations do cover local issues but within brief hourly news bulletins, without any in-depth coverage, while community radio by and large lacks resources for any news coverage of its own. Through a review of the existing literature on the role of media in democracy, and in particular the role of local radio, interviews with stakeholders and experts and history, and focus groups with ordinary people, this study formulates several possible solutions for future local news provision by radio in Scotland.","PeriodicalId":40702,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Media & Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42940549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, S. Zuboff (2018)","authors":"Blayne Haggart","doi":"10.1386/JDMP.10.2.229_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/JDMP.10.2.229_5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40702,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Media & Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48293736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Public policy and the digital deadline: The implementation of the Digital Addressable System (DAS) in West Bengal","authors":"S. Pandit","doi":"10.1386/JDMP.10.2.217_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/JDMP.10.2.217_1","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction of the mandatory Digital Addressable System (DAS) with strict, phase-wise deadlines for different provinces within India has compelled us to reconsider not only the television apparatus itself but also broadcast policies, television industry, content and reception. The introduction of DAS can be posited within a series of similar public policies starting from the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) project in 1975 to the more recent Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) or Aadhaar project and Digital India campaign, all folded into the developmental rhetoric of the welfare state. The rollout of DAS provides the site to explore the relationship between the government, neo-liberal market and digital technologies that underscores the contradictions which are constitutive of modernity, and invests in the study of the neo-liberal cultural sites of statist intervention. Within this conceptual framework, this article would focus on West Bengal as a case in point to read the implementation of mandatory DAS both as a site of hegemonic projects embodying promises of neo-liberal development and of the incongruities that are inherent in them. While the union government claimed that any cable television service provider who does not switch to digital signal within deadline can be penalized and the equipment confiscated, the state Government said that they would launch an agitation if analogue cable signals were blacked out after the deadline for cable digitalization and thus, the deadline was extended for several months. The confrontation over cable digitalization in West Bengal offers a site to explore in what way, contrary to its typical image of a fully automated digital ecosystem of governance, as the modern states would like to conceive, it is loaded with internal contradiction. My inquiry moves across a range of discursive locations and registers, aiming to explore in what way various local stakeholders negotiate in this policy implementation? How does DAS help theorization of a changing relationship between the market, digital technology and the developmental modern? While raising these questions, this article would try to explore in what way DAS can be located within the historical trajectory of techno-cultural rhetoric of public policy and how it invests in the shifting political economy of broadcasting in India.","PeriodicalId":40702,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Media & Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42786788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Public policy, independent television production and the digital challenge","authors":"G. Doyle","doi":"10.1386/JDMP.10.2.145_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/JDMP.10.2.145_1","url":null,"abstract":"Television production is a vital component of the media and a sector whose performance has important cultural and economic ramifications. In the United Kingdom, the growing prosperity of the programme-making sector – attributable partly to historic policy interventions – is widely recognized as being a success story. However, a recent wave of corporate consolidation and takeovers, characterized by many leading UK production companies being bought out and often by US media conglomerates, has raised concern about the ability of the independent production sector to flourish in an increasingly globalized and competitive digital environment for television. Although preserving indigenous television production and associated audience access to locally made content remain important goals for media policy, achieving these has become more difficult in the face of trends towards consolidated ownership and ‘the emergence of powerful transnational platforms commercialising cultural goods and services online’ (García Leiva and Albornoz 2017: 10). This article examines the challenges raised for public policy as ownership structures in the television production sector adjust in response to new distribution technologies and to the transformative forces of digitalization and globalization. Focusing on the United Kingdom as an example, it asks do we still need television production companies that are indigenous and independent in a digital world and if so why? What role can and should public policy play in supporting the sustainability of an ‘indie’ sector? Drawing on recent original empirical research into the association between corporate configuration, business performance and content in the television production sector, it reflects critically on historic and recent approaches to sustaining independent producers and it considers how, in a digital world, public policy may need to be re-imagined for a rapidly evolving television landscape.","PeriodicalId":40702,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Media & Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43553366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Stefan Gadringer, Ricard Parrilla Guix, Josef Trappel
{"title":"Spectrum allocation, media policy and the key stakeholders’ understanding of digitalization in Austria: A shift in the regulatory preferences from broadcasting to broadband","authors":"Stefan Gadringer, Ricard Parrilla Guix, Josef Trappel","doi":"10.1386/JDMP.10.2.163_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/JDMP.10.2.163_1","url":null,"abstract":"Recent developments regarding media services transmitted through broadcasting and broadband technology have sparked new trends in digitalization and media convergence. Digitalization was supposed to safeguard the key social role of broadcasting in Europe, but it has mainly intensified its market dependence and orientation. Broadcasters no longer have priority in spectrum policy over online audio–visual services and broadband. Against this background, we analyse how much broadcasting is losing ground as a privileged cultural form as well as a widely used form of electronic mass communication technology in Austria. Through document analysis and stakeholder interviews, this article addresses how far, between 2007 and 2017, regulation, frequency allocations and the preferences of politicians and key stakeholders point at the substitution of broadcasting by broadband as the main means for the provision of media mass communication. The project draws on a new-institutionalist approach, which states that the output in a given policy process can be understood by researching technological change and the preferences of state and market actors together with the ideological cleavages and the formal and informal institutional rules affecting the process. The research objectives are: (1) to assess the evolution of media policy and communication legislation affecting broadcasting and electronic communication during the final stage of TV digitalization in Austria; (2) to assess the available supply and demand of the radio spectrum for free-to-air (FTA) broadcasting and the frequency share of broadcasters and (mobile) broadband operators; (3) to assess the understanding that political decision-makers and key stakeholders have regarding the role of broadcasting and broadband services both as social practice and as a technological solution for mass communication. The findings, which generally point to a shift from broadcast to broadband, are analysed against the background of the WRC 2015 outcome.","PeriodicalId":40702,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Media & Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46007885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The multifaceted policy challenges of transnational Internet-distributed television","authors":"A. Lotz","doi":"10.1386/JDMP.10.1.27_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/JDMP.10.1.27_1","url":null,"abstract":"As services such as Netflix and Amazon Video have overcome the business challenges that long stymied the technological potential of Internet-distributed television, they have also introduced a range of policy challenges. Not only do these services lack governance by a clear regulatory regime in many countries, but their entrance to the competitive field of audio-visual service providers refigures the policy established for broadcast, cable and satellite industries. These challenges are simultaneously opportunities, as Internet-distributed television also provides tools that might effectively achieve policy goals.","PeriodicalId":40702,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Media & Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1386/JDMP.10.1.27_1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45524564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The challenge of forward-looking regulation","authors":"Chi Onwurah","doi":"10.1386/JDMP.10.1.9_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/JDMP.10.1.9_1","url":null,"abstract":"Good regulation must be forward looking, otherwise it is quickly obsolete. The 2003 Communications Act asked what the communications industries would look like in ten years’ time and set out a regulatory framework to address future developments in the interests of citizens and consumers. It decided that the key theme of the next ten years would be the convergence of platforms, industries and services including audio-visual. It created Ofcom – a converged regulator that had the right powers to deal with a converged world. When Chi Onwurah was Head of Telecoms Technology at Ofcom, she worked closely with industry and legislators in the United Kingdom and across Europe to ensure that citizens and consumers benefitted from convergence. This was possible thanks to the forward-looking regulatory framework that had been put into place by the 2003 Act. There was a long period of debate and discussion with a green paper and a white paper before the 2003 Communications Act was passed. This was necessary to understand the likely impact of convergence. The next big transformation in communications is data – and we are not even in the discussion stage, let alone in a position to legislate. From the regulation of opaque machine learning algorithms to fake news to data rights, technological evolution is generating challenges legislators and regulators do not seem close to solving. In this article the author will discuss these issues and the need to bring about forward-looking changes to the law.","PeriodicalId":40702,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Media & Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1386/JDMP.10.1.9_1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47632772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century, Kevin McDonald and Daniel Smith-Rowsey (eds) (2016)","authors":"Jessica L. Ford","doi":"10.1386/JDMP.10.1.127_5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/JDMP.10.1.127_5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40702,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Media & Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1386/JDMP.10.1.127_5","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45039714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Anne-Sofie Vanhaeght, Karen Donders, Leo Van Audenhove
{"title":"Literacy of digital television policies: A case-study analysis of audiences’ knowledge and ‘willingness-to-know’ in Flanders, Belgium","authors":"Anne-Sofie Vanhaeght, Karen Donders, Leo Van Audenhove","doi":"10.1386/JDMP.10.1.51_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/JDMP.10.1.51_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores what media users know about media policy, what they expect to know and if they care. We adopted a case-study approach, researching this question for the region of Flanders based on a combination of both quantitative and qualitative data. We focused on knowledge of digital television and compared these findings with knowledge on emerging Internet policies. One objective was to assess whether there is a difference between people’s knowledge of the former, older and the latter, newer and emerging policy domain. While the article focuses on the case of Flanders, its theoretical basis, as well as conclusions, are relevant beyond this specific context. They show that knowledge of media policies is low. Nevertheless, it seems that ‘willingness-to-know’ about policies is higher for issues such as privacy and data than for, more traditional media policy areas related to digital television.","PeriodicalId":40702,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Media & Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1386/JDMP.10.1.51_1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45811757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}