Making a difference? Public service broadcasting, distinctiveness and children’s provision in Italy and Spain

This article evaluates the performance of public service broadcasters in the area of children’s television in Italy and Spain. It asks: how distinctive is the output of public service children’s channels? As core area of public service provision, children’s television represents an important testing ground for wider debates about the distinctiveness of public service broadcasting in a digital age. Public broadcasters in Southern Europe have historically been more vulnerable to market pressure than their counterparts in continental and Northern Europe, and this is believed to have impacted negatively on their ability to maintain a distinctive public service profile. After engaging with debates on distinctiveness in order to develop a framework for the analysis, the article presents the results of a two-week analysis of the TV schedules of the main children’s channels operating in the two countries. It finds evidence that in both countries the output of public service children’s channels is distinctive to a degree, but also that there are important gaps in public service provision as well as some significant differences between the public service children’s channels analysed.

AR-based Technoself Enhanced Learning Approach to Improving Student Engagement

The emerging technologies have expanded a new dimension of self – ‘technoself’ driven by socio-technical innovations and taken an important step forward in pervasive learning. Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) research has increasingly focused on emergent technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) for augmented learning, mobile learning, and game-based learning in order to improve self-motivation and self-engagement of the learners in enriched multimodal learning environments. These researches take advantage of technological innovations in hardware and software across different platforms and devices including tablets, phoneblets and even game consoles and their increasing popularity for pervasive learning with the significant development of personalization processes which place the student at the center of the learning process. In particular, augmented reality (AR) research has matured to a level to facilitate augmented learning, which is defined as an on-demand learning technique where the learning environment adapts to the needs and inputs from learners. In this paper we firstly study the role of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) which is one of the most influential theories applied in TEL on how learners come to accept and use a new technology. Then we present the design methodology of the technoself approach for pervasive learning and introduce technoself enhanced learning as a novel pedagogical model to improve student engagement by shaping personal learning focus and setting. Furthermore we describe the design and development of an AR-based interactive digital interpretation system for augmented learning and discuss key features. By incorporating mobiles, game simulation, voice recognition, and multimodal interaction through Augmented Reality, the learning contents can be geared toward learner's needs and learners can stimulate discovery and gain greater understanding. The system demonstrates that Augmented Reality can provide rich contextual learning environment and contents tailored for individuals. Augment learning via AR can bridge this gap between the theoretical learning and practical learning, and focus on how the real and virtual can be combined together to fulfill different learning objectives, requirements, and even environments. Finally, we validate and evaluate the AR-based technoself enhanced learning approach to enhancing the student motivation and engagement in the learning process through experimental learning practices. It shows that Augmented Reality is well aligned with constructive learning strategies, as learners can control their own learning and manipulate objects that are not real in augmented environment to derive and acquire understanding and knowledge in a broad diversity of learning practices including constructive activities and analytical activities.

CNN Interactive just got more interactive

Interactive gallery installation which playfully re-contextualised online news feeds from CNN’s website with a soundtrack of found music in order to comment on an online environment where 'serious' news and trivial 'infotainment' often occupy the same space. ‘CNN Interactive just got more interactive’ aimed to investigate the balance between information and ‘info-tainment’ on the web. It demonstrated how the authority and presence of global news corporations online could be playfully subverted by enabling the audience to add a variety of emotively titled soundtracks to the monolithic CNN Interactive website. The project also explored how a work could exist dually as website and gallery installation. ‘CNN interactive’ contributes to the taxonomy of new media art as a new form of contemporary art. One of the first examples in the world of a gallery installation using live Internet data, it is also one of the first attempts in a new media art context to address how individuals respond to and comprehend the changed nature of the news as an immediate phenomenon as relayed by network communications systems. 'CNN interactive’ continues Craighead and Thomson’s research into how live digital networked information can be re-purposed as artistic material within gallery installation contexts but with specific reference to online-international news events, rather than arbitrary data sources (see e-poltergeist, output 1). ‘CNN Interactive’ was commissioned by Tate Britain for the exhibition ‘Art and Money Online’. This was the first gallery exhibition in Tate Britain featuring work that utilised and explored new media as an artistic area, and the first work commissioned by the Tate to operate simultaneously as an online gallery artwork. Selected reviews and citations include ‘Digital Art’ by Christiane Paul, 2003; ‘Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce’ by Julian Stallabrass. (2002); ‘Thomson & Craighead’ by Lisa Le Feuvre for Katalog Journal of Photography and Video, Denmark. All work is developed jointly and equally between Craighead and her collaborator, Jon Thomson, (Slade).

Children's television: the soft underbelly of public service broadcasting

The provision of children's content should be a key constituent of the public service brand, but has often been viewed as a programme category at risk. Certainly in many countries children's television has moved from the 'scarcity' associated with terrestrial provision, to the 'plenty' of digital (see Ellis 2000). However in spite of a range of dedicated public service children's channels in Europe (CBeebies, Kika, Z@ppelin), domestically produced children's television in Europe is notoriously under-resourced if not marginalised. There is a pronounced reliance on imports (particularly on commercial television) notwithstanding the launch by US-owned multinationals (Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network) of localised versions of their children's television channels in many European countries. Within the broader context of global developments in children's media, this paper starts by outlining the recent and rapid crisis in British children's television and the factors that caused it. This was a crisis, which caught broadcasters and producers by surprise in the middle of 2006, but reflects many of the challenges faced by the children's television sector in other countries. It clearly demonstrated how a combination of the lack of regulatory protection, a change in commercial priorities among broadcasters, advertising restrictions, budgetary pressures and the competitive environment at home and abroad all combined to reinforce the trend towards a contraction of domestic production. The crisis also served to underline the dominance of the BBC - both as a representative of public service principles, and as the dominant producer and commissioner in the market. With the reasons underpinning the crisis explained, the paper will then analyse how the children's television community responded to the crisis and with what effect. Based on interviews, contemporary accounts and documentary evidence the paper will chart the converging and diverging views of broadcasters, producers, regulatory authority Ofcom, and a range of advocacy groups which represent children's interests and the industry. What arguments were elaborated in favour of protecting children's television as an integral part of the public service media brand? Can lessons be learned about how best to ensure the origination of children's media within a public service environment? Can developments in the UK be used to provide insight into how children's media might develop further?

Against divisiveness: Digital workers of the world unite! A rejoinder to César Bolaño and Eloy Vieira

This piece is a short rejoinder to César Bolaño’s paper The Political Economy of the Internet and related articles (e.g., Comor, Foley, Huws, Reveley, Rigi and Prey, Robinson) that center around the relevance of Marx’s labor theory of value for understanding social media. I argue that Dallas Smythe’s assessment of advertising was made to distinguish his approach from the one by Baran and Sweezy. Smythe developed the idea of capital’s exploitation of the audience at a time when both feminist and anti-imperialist Marxists challenged the orthodox idea that only white factory workers are exploited. The crucial question is how to conceptualize productive labor. This is a theoretical, normative, and political question. A mathematical example shows the importance of the “crowdsourcing” of value-production on Facebook. I also point out parallels of the contemporary debate to the Soviet question of who is a productive or unproductive worker in the Material Product System.

The relation between content providers and distributors: Lessons from the regulation of television distribution in the United Kingdom

Using the United Kingdom (UK) as a case study, this article analyses the growing commercial and regulatory significance of broadcaster-distributor relations within the contemporary television industry. The first part of the article argues that despite important changes in broadcast delivery technology, more recently shaped by the growth of the Internet, and the associated growth of options of receiving television content, the traditional delivery platforms (digital terrestrial, satellite and cable) remain by far the preferred choice for viewers in Britain. At the same time, public service broadcasters continue to be the biggest investors in domestic original non-sport content and account for over half of all television viewing. The strength of PSBs in content and their growing reliance on commercial proprietary subscription platforms (cable and satellite) and gradually on the Internet presents challenges in the nexus between broadcasters and distributors. The article focuses on the debate over retransmission fees between PSBs and Sky, and on the question of whether Sky should be required to offer some of its premium content to rival pay-TV platforms. These two examples highlight the impact regulatory intervention can have on the balance of power between broadcasters and distributors. The article concludes that such debates concerning the commercial relations between content providers and distributors will remain pivotal and become more heated given that similar issues are raised in the Internet environment.

International Sales of UK Television Content: Change and Continuity in ‘the space in between’ Production and Consumption

Focusing on the UK, this article addresses key issues facing the international distribution industry arising from over-the-top digital distribution and the fragmentation of audiences and revenues. Building on the identification of these issues, it investigates the extent to which UK distribution has altered over a ten-year period, pinpointing continuities in the destination and type of sales alongside changes in the role and structure of the industry as UK-based distributors adapt to a changing UK broadcasting landscape and global production environment. At one level increasing US ownership of UK-based distributors and the arrival of OTT players like Netflix, highlight the tensions between the national orientations of UK broadcasters and the global aspirations of independent producers and distributors. At another level VOD has boosted international sales of UK drama. Although the full impact of SVOD on content and rights has yet to materialise, significant changes in the industry predate the arrival of SVOD.