“La lliga dels magnats”. La Premier League i el negoci del futbol en l’era dels mitjans globals

The relationship between the mass media and sport has reached a state of symbiosis. The great media companies and sports organizations have combined synergies to get the best return on their products, both communicationrelated and sports-related. To define this situation, some authors have spoken of the “new sport oligopoly” or of the “global media sports complex”. This article analyzes the formation of this complex based on real examples of financial relations between media companies and sports organizations and, finally, draws attention to how these relations took place in the Premier League during the 2009-2010 season, taking into account the fact that this was the European football league which consolidated the process of international commercialization the soonest, which has the most highly valued football brand (Manchester United) and which has the clubs that make the most money from television rights and commercials.

Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production

Many concepts have been developed to describe the convergence of media, languages, and formats in contemporary media systems. This article is a theoretical reflection on “transmedia storytelling” from a perspective that integrates semiotics and narratology in the context of media studies. After dealing with the conceptual chaos around transmedia storytelling, the article analyzes how these new multimodal narrative structures create different implicit consumers and construct a narrative world. The analysis includes a description of the multimedia textual structure created around the Fox television series 24. Finally, the article analyzes transmedia storytelling from the perspective of a semiotics of branding.

Broadband prices in the European Union : competition and commercial strategies

This paper analyses the determinants of broadband Internet access prices in a group of 15 EU countries between 2008 and 2011. Using a rich panel dataset of broadband plans, we show the positive effect of downstream speed on prices, and report that cable and fibre-to-the-home technologies are available at lower prices per Mbps than x DSL technology. Operators’marketing strategies are also analysed as we show how much prices rise when the broadband service is offered in a bundle with voice telephony and/or television, and how much they fall when download volume caps are included. The most insightful results of this study are provided by a group of metrics that represent the situation of competition and entry patterns in the broadband market. We show that consumer segmentation positively affects prices. On the other hand, broadband prices are higher in countries where entrants make greater use of bitstream access and lower when they use more intensively direct access -local loop unbundling-. However, we do not find a significant effect of inter-platform competition on prices.