Market position of public television in post-transition countries of the European Union from 1995 to 2019

Public television is present in every European country, and it position on the market has been changing during the process of transition from monopoly to oligopoly and further towards monopolistic competition market. In most transition countries of the European Union, this process started in early 1990s and today public television represents only one player on the market. This paper analyzes the position of public television in 8 countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia for the period from 1995 till 2019. The goal of this research is to analyze the changes in the market share of public television, as well as to compare public television position in these 8 countries. This will be done by applying descriptive statistic methods on the data about audience. The audience represents the market share, and it is analyzed on the level of each public TV channel. Countries are further divided into three groups, those with strong, middle and weak position of public television. Additionally, concentration analysis based on HHI will show how similar or different these markets are. The results show that the market power of public television has fallen in the analyzed period. Despite of that, in the majority of the 8 analyzed countries, public television still plays an important role on the market.