An introduction to television studies. 3rd edition.

This is a comprehensive textbook for students of Television Studies, now updated for its third edition. The book provides students with a framework for understanding the key concepts and main approaches to Television Studies, including audience research, television history and broadcasting policy, and the analytical study of individual programmes. The book includes a glossary of key terms used in the television industry and in the academic study of television, there are suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, and chapters include suggested activities for use in class or as assignments. The case studies in the book include analysis of advertisements, approaches to news reporting, television scheduling, and challenges to television in new contexts of viewing on computers and mobile devices. The topics of individual chapters are: studying television, television histories, television cultures, television texts and narratives, television genres and formats, television production, television quality and value, television realities and representation, television censorship and regulation, television audiences, and the likely future for television.

Extraordinary television time travel and the wonderful end to the working day

In this article I will present two arguments. First, the argument that the time travel television series historically provided viewers with a spectacular temporal and spatial alternative to the routine of everyday life, the regulation of television scheduling, and the small-world confines of domestic subjectivity. Taking the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, predominantly in a UK viewing environment, I will suggest that the special effect rendering of the time travel sequence expanded the viewer’s material universe, and affectively wrenched the television set free from the strictures of scheduling and realist programming. Further, the time travel series readily and regularly took the domestic space, the ordinary day and the everyman/ person into awesome environments and situations that suggested alternative lifestyles and behaviours, with a different existential tempo and rhythm. At a narrative, thematic, meta- textual, and aesthetically spectacular level, television time travel saw to the wonderful end of the working day. Case studies include Sapphire and Steal, Dr Who, and Quantum Leap. Second, the article will argue that rather than the contemporary time travel television series being an extraordinary alternative to ordinary life, they instead articulate convergence culture, deregulation, multiple channel viewing, and time-shift culture where there is no such thing as an ordinary working day or domestic viewing context.

Digital broadcasting : a double edge sword in protecting children from disturbing news content

New technologies have the potential to both expose children to and protect them from television news footage likely to disturb or frighten. The advent of cheap, portable and widely available digital technology has vastly increased the possibility of violent news events being captured and potentially broadcast. This material has the potential to be particularly disturbing and harmful to young children. But on the flipside, available digital technology could be used to build in protection for young viewers especially when it comes to preserving scheduled television programming and guarding against violent content being broadcast during live crosses from known trouble spots. Based on interviews with news directors, parents and a review of published material two recommendations are put forward: 1. Digital television technology should be employed to prevent news events "overtaking" scheduled children's programming and to protect safe harbours placed in the classifications zones to protect children. 2. Broadcasters should regain control of the images that go to air during "live" feeds from obviously volatile situations by building in short delays in G classification zones.

Seasons, Family and Nation in American Horror Story

Arguably, the title of American Horror Story sets out an agenda for the program: this is not just a horror story, but it is a particularly American one. This chapter examines the way that the program uses seasonal celebrations as a way of expressing that national identity, with special emphasis on the importance of family to those celebrations. The particular seasonal celebrations focused on are those of Halloween and Christmas, each of which has associations with the supernatural. However, the use of the supernatural at those seasons is one which is particularly associated with the US, presenting Halloween as a time of supernatural incursion and horror, and of disruption to society and the normal order of things, while Christmas is presented more as a time of unity for the family. Where the supernatural emerges in American Christmas television, it is typically as a force to encourage togetherness and reconciliation, rather than as a dark reminder of the past. While these interpretations of these festivals have been broadcast abroad by American cultural products, not least American television, they have different associations and implications elsewhere, as will be shown. So the particular uses of these festivals is part of what marks American Horror Story out as American, as is the way that the program's narratives have been structured to fit in with US television scheduling. This chapter, then, argues that the structures of the narratives combines with their use of the festivals of Halloween and Christmas in order to enhance the sense of this series as a particularly American horror story.

Plataforma de gestão de guias de programação de TV digital

Com o consumismo de mais variedade e qualidade de informação, assim como, produtos interativos, surgiu a necessidade de apresentar mais conteúdos, para além da programação de televisão comum. Com os avanços tecnológicos ligados à indústria da televisão e sua distribuição nos lares portugueses pelos operadores de TV, a quantidade de oferta de canais deixou de ser um foco, passando a ser prioritário a melhoria da experiência do cliente. Com a introdução de novas funcionalidades nas caixas recetoras de sinais de transmissão de canais, como por exemplo, a capacidade de apresentar informações adicionais sobre os programas, desde da sua apresentação em modo trailer até ao elenco detalhado que o compõe, os clientes podem ter uma nova experiência de interação com os serviços de TV. A funcionalidade de gravação agendada de programas levou ao próximo ponto de melhoria de experiência do cliente. As gravações que resultavam em programas indevidamente cortados, quer no seu início quer no seu fim, foi um dos motivos que levou os operadores de TV a procurarem um melhor serviço de gestão de guias de programação digitais. A InfoPortugal, entidade detentora do seguinte projeto e EPG Provider de algumas operadoras de TV nacionais, viu-se obrigada a atualizar os seu sistemas de distribuição de conteúdos, para responder à evolução dos requisitos dos seus clientes.

Television and the popular: viewing from the British perspective

The academic discipline of television studies has been constituted by the claim that television is worth studying because it is popular. Yet this claim has also entailed a need to defend the subject against the triviality that is associated with the television medium because of its very popularity. This article analyses the many attempts in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to constitute critical discourses about television as a popular medium. It focuses on how the theoretical currents of Television Studies emerged and changed in the UK, where a disciplinary identity for the subject was founded by borrowing from related disciplines, yet argued for the specificity of the medium as an object of criticism. Eschewing technological determinism, moral pathologization and sterile debates about television's supposed effects, UK writers such as Raymond Williams addressed television as an aspect of culture. Television theory in Britain has been part of, and also separate from, the disciplinary fields of media theory, literary theory and film theory. It has focused its attention on institutions, audio-visual texts, genres, authors and viewers according to the ways that research problems and theoretical inadequacies have emerged over time. But a consistent feature has been the problem of moving from a descriptive discourse to an analytical and evaluative one, and from studies of specific texts, moments and locations of television to larger theories. By discussing some historically significant critical work about television, the article considers how academic work has constructed relationships between the different kinds of objects of study. The article argues that a fundamental tension between descriptive and politically activist discourses has confused academic writing about ›the popular‹. Television study in Britain arose not to supply graduate professionals to the television industry, nor to perfect the instrumental techniques of allied sectors such as advertising and marketing, but to analyse and critique the medium's aesthetic forms and to evaluate its role in culture. Since television cannot be made by ›the people‹, the empowerment that discourses of television theory and analysis aimed for was focused on disseminating the tools for critique. Recent developments in factual entertainment television (in Britain and elsewhere) have greatly increased the visibility of ›the people‹ in programmes, notably in docusoaps, game shows and other participative formats. This has led to renewed debates about whether such ›popular‹ programmes appropriately represent ›the people‹ and how factual entertainment that is often despised relates to genres hitherto considered to be of high quality, such as scripted drama and socially-engaged documentary television. A further aspect of this problem of evaluation is how television globalisation has been addressed, and the example that the issue has crystallised around most is the reality TV contest Big Brother. Television theory has been largely based on studying the texts, institutions and audiences of television in the Anglophone world, and thus in specific geographical contexts. The transnational contexts of popular television have been addressed as spaces of contestation, for example between Americanisation and national or regional identities. Commentators have been ambivalent about whether the discipline's role is to celebrate or critique television, and whether to do so within a national, regional or global context. In the discourses of the television industry, ›popular television‹ is a quantitative and comparative measure, and because of the overlap between the programming with the largest audiences and the scheduling of established programme types at the times of day when the largest audiences are available, it has a strong relationship with genre. The measurement of audiences and the design of schedules are carried out in predominantly national contexts, but the article refers to programmes like Big Brother that have been broadcast transnationally, and programmes that have been extensively exported, to consider in what ways they too might be called popular. Strands of work in television studies have at different times attempted to diagnose what is at stake in the most popular programme types, such as reality TV, situation comedy and drama series. This has centred on questions of how aesthetic quality might be discriminated in television programmes, and how quality relates to popularity. The interaction of the designations ›popular‹ and ›quality‹ is exemplified in the ways that critical discourse has addressed US drama series that have been widely exported around the world, and the article shows how the two critical terms are both distinct and interrelated. In this context and in the article as a whole, the aim is not to arrive at a definitive meaning for ›the popular‹ inasmuch as it designates programmes or indeed the medium of television itself. Instead the aim is to show how, in historically and geographically contingent ways, these terms and ideas have been dynamically adopted and contested in order to address a multiple and changing object of analysis.

Internationalisation of Singapore television : Singaporean regional and global perspectives and contexts

In this study l investigate the Singaporean characteristics of broadcast media internationalisation. I ask the question "e; Does Internationalisation lead to homogenisation and commercialisation of the television culture in Singapore or does it give way to more diversity, thus stimulating cultural differentiation?"e; . I articulate the constraints and/or tensions of supranational regulation, foreign policy, regional and intraregional alliances upon communication and the cultural and social effects as they impact on and respond to production, programming, scheduling and output in Singapore. I explain how Singaporean Television media culture takes part in the processes of globalisation, and how it challenges existing cultures and creates new and alternative symbolic and cultural communities, within the context of regional communication. In this thesis 1 conclude that whilst Singapore definitely does not have equity in information, wealth or resource flows it is attempting to liberalise. To do so, the government recognises that serious inadequacies and imbalances must be addressed and that the path to greater political and economic growth is through an actively informed public. Despite regulatory restrictions on data flow and technical and service ownership, Singapore is encouraging regional alliances, depoliticising cultural differences and concentrating on economic imperatives to build mutual knowledge and understanding, multilateral agreements, collective ownership, mutual exchange and cooperative dissemination.

Public knowledge beyond journalism : infotainment, satire and Australian television

This thesis examines the changing relationships between television, politics, audiences and the public sphere. Premised on the notion that mediated politics is now understood “in new ways by new voices” (Jones, 2005: 4), and appropriating what McNair (2003) calls a “chaos theory” of journalism sociology, this thesis explores how two different contemporary Australian political television programs (Sunrise and The Chaser’s War on Everything) are viewed, understood, and used by audiences. In analysing these programs from textual, industry and audience perspectives, this thesis argues that journalism has been largely thought about in overly simplistic binary terms which have failed to reflect the reality of audiences’ news consumption patterns. The findings of this thesis suggest that both ‘soft’ infotainment (Sunrise) and ‘frivolous’ satire (The Chaser’s War on Everything) are used by audiences in intricate ways as sources of political information, and thus these TV programs (and those like them) should be seen as legitimate and valuable forms of public knowledge production. It therefore might be more worthwhile for scholars to think about, research and teach journalism in the plural: as a series of complementary or antagonistic journalisms, rather than as a single coherent entity.

Comparing international television news : the case of violence presentation in Germany, Great Britain and Russia -- [in German : Gewalt in internationalen Fernsehnachrichten - eine komparative Analyse medialer Gewaltpräsentation in Deutschland, Großbritannien und Russland]

This is an important book that ought to launch a debate about how we research our understanding of the world, it is an innovative intervention in a vital public issue, and it is an elegant and scholarly hard look at what is actually happening. Jean Seaton, Prof of Media History, U of Westminster, UK & Official Historian of the BBC -- Summary: This book investigates the question of how comparative studies of international TV news (here: on violence presentation) can best be conceptualized in a way that allows for crossnational, comparative conclusions on an empirically validated basis. This book shows that such a conceptualization is necessary in order to overcome existing restrictions in the comparability of international analysis on violence presentation. Investigated examples include the most watched news bulletins in Great Britain (10o'clock news on the BBC), Germany (Tagesschau on ARD) and Russia (Vremja on Channel 1). This book highlights a substantial cross-national violence news flow as well as a cross-national visual violence flow (key visuals) as distinct transnational components. In addition, event-related textual analysis reveals how the historical rootedness of nations and its symbols of power are still manifested in televisual mediations of violence. In conclusion, this study lobbies for a conscientious use of comparative data/analysis both in journalism research and practice in order to understand what it may convey in the different arenas of today’s newsmaking.