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Television
Media Abroad

CANADA: Early Television
CANADA: Television Regulation
CANADA: Over-Air Television Networks
CANADA: Cable Television
CANADA: Television Ratings
FRANCE: Canal+
INDIA: Booming Television
JAPAN: NHK Network
QATAR: Al Jazeera Network
UNITED KINGDOM British Broadcasting Corporation

CANADA
EARLY
TELEVISION
While there were several experimental television broadcasts in Canada through the 1930s and 1940s, most Canadians were first exposed to television signals from stations in the United States. If you lived close enough to the border, you probably watched Milton Berle or wrestler Gorgeous George on the Dumont network. Television officially arrived in Canada in 1952. As had been the case with the radio 30 years earlier, the first television station was in Montreal. CBFT, a public station, began broadcasting on September 6, with CBLT Toronto, broadcasting two days later. At first, programming was a mix of Canadian and American fare. A microwave link between Buffalo and Toronto made it possible to carry American programs live. The first privately owned television station was CKSO in Sudbury, Ontario, in 1953.

CANADA
DATABANK

Population
28.1 million

Literacy
97 percent

Television sets
1 per 1.7 people

Gross Domestic Production
$22,760 per capita

Adapted from The Media of Mass Communication, Canadian edition, by John Vivian and Peter Maurin (Allyn & Bacon Canada, 1997)

© 1999, by John Vivian, Route 1, Box 32, Lewiston, Minnesota USA 55987-9706

CANADA
CANADIAN
BROADCASTING CORPORATION
Canadian television, like radio, historically has been a system of both public and private stations. Initially, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which operated a public network and local stations, was the agency that issued all broadcast licenses in the country. Private broadcasters saw a conflict of interest with CBC, a broadcaster itself, overseeing private broadcasting.

The Fowler Commission, a government task force, recommended a new agency, not the CBC, to oversee licensing, and Parliament went along in 1955. The decision pleased private broadcasters. So did Parliament's acceptance of another recommendation that facilitated the start of a second network -- besides CBC. Thus Canada's first private network, CTV, came to be. The private broadcasters, making lots of money airing U.S. shows, were uneasy that the law called for programming to be as Canadian in "content and character" as possible, but the language was not any more specific than that. Private stations continued largely as conduits for American fare.

In 1959 the government decreed that 45 percent of programming had to be Canadian in nature and 55 percent by 1962. Private broadcasters did not appreciate cutting back on profitable American shows. Also, they knew home-grown shows would cost a lot to produce and might not compete well with American shows from U.S. stations across the border. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters fought back, and the legislation was loosened so much that even the World Series came to be defined, under law, as Canadian in nature.

Parliament remained concerned that Canada's identity was being subsumed by U.S. television. In 1968 Parliament told television broadcasters to air 60 percent Canadian content. Parliament also specified Canadian broadcasting should be owned and operated by Canadians. Another step toward Canadianizing television was a mandate that CBC provide a national service in both English and French, the nation's official languages, and to help develop national unity and allow for Canadian cultural expression.

In 1991 Parliament again addressed television cultural issues. A new broadcast law stressed the importance of Canadian programming, but as far as private broadcasting was concerned, the law was not much more than rhetoric -- no teeth. The law redefined the CBC's role to help create a "Canadian consciousness" but did not define "Canadian consciousness." Nor did Parliament provide funding to carry out further Canadianization. The law called on cable owners to deliver Canadian stations.

CANADA
DATABANK

Population
28.1 million

Literacy
97 percent

Television sets
1 per 1.7 people

Gross Domestic Production
$22,760 per capita

Adapted from The Media of Mass Communication, Canadian edition, by John Vivian and Peter Maurin (Allyn & Bacon Canada, 1997).

© 1999, by John Vivian, Route 1, Box 32, Lewiston, Minnesota USA 55987-9706

CANADA
OVER-AIR
TELEVISION NETWORKS
Canada has two national television networks, CBC and CTV, which supply programming to over-air television stations.

The CBC, Canada's public broadcaster, owns and operates 23 television stations -- 18 English and five French. The CBC was Canada's only national network during television's infancy. CBC began television broadcasting in September 1952 with stations in Toronto and Montreal. The CBC's entire prime-time lineup is now Canadian. Some of the network's most popular Canadian programs, other than "Hockey Night in Canada," include "Rita and Friends," "The Royal Canadian Air Farce," "Marketplace" and "The Fifth Estate."

While CBC is Canada's public network, CTV is Canada's only private network. It began broadcasting in 1961 with only eight affiliates: CJCH in Halifax; CFCF in Montreal, CJOH in Ottawa, CFTO in Toronto, CKY in Winnipeg, CFCN in Calgary, CFRN in Edmonton, and BCTV in Vancouver. Today CTV has 18 affiliates and seven supplementary affiliates.

CTV's mandate, as specified by the national government in the network's license, is to provide:

Fifty percent Canadian programming in prime time, 60 percent overall.
Three hours of Canadian drama per week in prime time.
Forty-eight hours of Canadian features in prime time per year.
Between 18 and 26 hours of Canadian specials per year.

CTV's Canadian programming includes U.S.-style programs, shot in Canada. "Lonesome Dove: The Series," "Robocop" and "F/X" all qualify as Canadian programs, although none of them have anything to do with Canada. An exception is "Due South," which attracts a large following in Canada. The bulk of CTV's ratings success comes when it carries American shows. CTV's news and public affairs programs include "Canada AM" and "The CTV National News."

In addition to CBC and CTV, Canada also supports several regional networks, among them, the Baton Broadcasting System and CanWest Global.

Baton Broadcasting is a communications company whose holdings include stations in Ontario and Saskatchewan. It produces several shows aired on CTV, including Blue Jays baseball.

CanWest Global, with stations in seven provinces, is a strong player in Canadian television. CanWest boasts several of the top-rated shows from the United States: "Seinfeld," "The X-Files," "Friends," "The Simpsons," "Mad About You" and "Fraser." CanWest has produced several Canadian series, including "Traders" and "Destiny Ridge." Numerous failed attempts to build a national network haven't dimmed the spirits of chief executive Izzy Asper, who seems intent on giving Canadians a third national network.

CANADA
DATABANK

Population
28.1 million

Literacy
97 percent

Television sets
1 per 1.7 people

Gross Domestic Production
$22,760 per capita

CANADA
CABLE
TELEVISION
Cable television arrived in Canada before the nation's first over-air station. Reflecting a desire for American programming, a cable system to redistribute U.S. over-air signals was built in 1951 in London, Ontario. Today, 76 percent of Canadian homes are wired for cable, from a high of 87 percent in British Columbia to a low of 61 percent in Saskatchewan.

Canadian cable program services, like TMN, TSN, MuchMusic, SuperÉcran and Viewers Choice reach 40 percent of Canadian homes. U.S. cable services, like A&E, CNN and ESPN, reach 27 percent.

CANADA
DATABANK

Population
28.1 million

Literacy
97 percent

Television sets
1 per 1.7 people

Gross Domestic Production
$22,760 per capita

CANADA

TELEVISION
RATINGS
system designed to help parents screen out programs with objectionable language, sex and violence, but abandoned it three years later. In thousands of test runs, every program had a rating from 0 to 5 in each of three categories:

L=Language.
S=Sex.
V=Violence.

The system had so many combinations that, finally, Canadian television executives concluded it would be unworkable and not meet the needs of most parents.

The system was designed for the V-chip, a technology to block certain programs from being played on individual television sets through coding sent over-air or through cable from stations and networks. Ottawa television writer Tony Atherton, who tried out the system, reported the L, S and V codes he chose for his children ended up blocking the Disney children's movie The Lion King.

The issue was whether anyone could delegate to someone else the job of rating television programs. All kinds of tricky problems came up in the three-year Canadian test, like whether an L=5, S=1 and V=1 episode of Seinfeld would really be more objectionable to most parents than a L=1, S=5 and V=5 episode of ER. Critics said these needed to be individual judgments calls that no combination of rating criteria could adequately address.

The Canadians returned to the drawing board, hoping to devise a more satisfactory system, about the same time, in 1996, that the U.S. television industry announced a different kind of V-chip rating system. The U.S. didn't separate out language, sex or violence but rated programs as suitable for age groups:

TV-Y: For all children.
TV-7: Unsuitable for children under 7.
TV-14: Unsuitable for children under 14.
TV-PG: Parental guidance suggested.
TV-G: For general audiences.
TV-M: Mature audiences only.

Some critics of the proposed U.S. system said it didn't provide enough detailed information to parents and pointed to the Canadian alternative. There seemed to be no rating system that would please everyone.

Meanwhile, cynics gigged the politicians in both countries who had been to quick to back a ratings system in proclaiming themselves champions of the vague concept of family values. The cynics said the politicians made hay by endorsing something that sounded good at first blush but would be a nightmare, if not an impossibility, to make workable.

Critics also pointed out that the ratings would be made by the television industry rather than external regulators, which raised questions whether ratings could be manipulated in self-serving ways to jack up audience size. The monumental task of rating shows was also seen as a problem. A typical household has access to more than 10,000 programs a week.

CANADA
DATABANK

Population
28.1 million

Literacy
97 percent

Television sets
1 per 1.7 people

Gross Domestic Production
$22,760 per capita

FRANCECANAL+
Incredible as it seems, an over-air network that charges a subscription fee emerged as the most financially successful television service in France -- in fact, in all Europe -- in the 1990s. Why do French people choose a pay channel, Canal +, when other channels, underwritten by advertising or license fees on TV sets, are available? One reason is the mess that the French government made in restructuring the nation's television system again and again starting in 1986.

Before 1986, France had three television networks all operated at government expense. It was a stable arrangement that had made France a major producer of programming for transmission to 20 million French households and for export. In 1986 the government authorized two new commercial networks. Then a new government shut down those two new networks and put one of the old state-operated networks into private hands, which meant, of course, that the network began carrying advertising. Then came another change in government leadership, and two of the commercial networks that had been created in 1986 and then shut down were allowed to return to the air.

These reforms, one after another, included all kinds of content requirements:

Half of fiction production, including movies, needed to be produced in French.
No more than 40 percent of this fiction production could come from non-European sources.
Networks could not show movies on Wednesday, Friday or Saturday nights.
A network was limited to showing 192 movies a year, with no more than 104 of them in prime time.
A movie could be interrupted for advertising only once.
The networks had to turn over part of their income to French producers.

One of the goals in the confusing, sometimes contradictory series of reforms, was to assure that French culture was not diluted with foreign television. While the goal was laudable from some perspectives, the regulations overlooked that French people could do things besides watch television. The audience dwindled, sending the French television industry into a tailspin.

Amid the chaos, Canal + emerged as a pay service that, by carrying no advertising, sidestepped a lot of the regulations. A price for the special privilege, to sidestep the regulations, was to make lunch and dinner time slots available free to nonsubscribers. Canal + used those slots to provide popular music and talk, which attracted viewers, and to heavily promote its programs at other times of the day when the service was available only to subscribers. Canal + picked up three million subscribers.

FRANCE
DATABANK

Population
58.0 million

Literacy
99 percent

Television sets
1 per 2.0 people

Gross Domestic Production
$18,670 per capita

INDIA
BOOMING
TELEVISION
Rupert Murdoch rushed to fill a major void in his global media empire in 1991 with STAR-TV, short of Satellite Television for the Asia Region. Based in Hong Kong, STAR-TV's reach included most of China, the Asian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. These were areas largely unreached by outside television, and Murdoch saw great potential being there first as backward economies took off. He hoped to offer multinational advertisers exclusive access to millions of customers who, for the first time in their lives, would have enough discretionary income to be worth trying to sell things to.

STAR-TV had much to offer. At the beginning there were five channels, four in English (entertainment, sports, MTV and BBC) and one in Cantonese. Learning the Chinese government objected to particular BBC news coverage, Murdoch, in a disgraceful moment, kowtowed and dropped the BBC programs. He didn't want disapprobation by the Chinese government to interfere with his long-term plan for STAR-TV to penetrate the expanding China marketplace.

STAR-TV had an unexpected influence on India, where the government operated the only television network -- Doordorshan. With STAR-TV signals beaming down, local entrepreneurs throughout India put up reception dishes, strung wires through their neighborhoods to carry the captured signals, and charged people $3 to $5 a month to hook up. Clearly, the state monopoly of the nation's television view was loosening. In 1995, the India Supreme Court overruled the government's ban that forbid fledgling television companies from uplinking to satellites to extend their signals to the whole country.

After the Supreme Court decision, one pioneer nongovernment network, BiTV, short for Business India Television, which had been using an uplink station in neighboring Nepal to transmit signals to an orbiting satellite and then back down to the local cable systems throughout India, moved its transmission facilities back to India. Soon other India channels were widely available too: Asianet, EL-TV, GEC, Gemini TV, India TV, JAIN, JJ TV, NECP, SUN, YES and ZEE. There also are a raft of new, nongovernment channels that serve particular cities, like IN Mumbai and IN Delhi.

Rupert Murdoch had failed to foresee that his STAR-TV would spawn competitors in India, which he expected to remain a fertile, virgin territory for his satellite service. What his STAR-TV did was trigger audience interest that, in a round-about way, led to changes in India's government policy so an indigenous, nongovernment television system could develop. STAR-TV still has viewers in India, but Murdoch won't have the exclusivity he had hoped as a television advertising medium for the country.

Cultual sociologists who descry the cultural influence of the world's major economies can take some satisfaction in what's happened in India television, but they also have much to be dissatisfied with. The new India television programming bears heavy Western influences on content and style. Western shooting and scripting techniques are everywhere. The production, however, is mostly in India, and programming is more Indian than STAR-TV could ever be, geared as it is to a multinational audience.

INDIA
DATABANK

Population
952.1 million

Literacy
52 percent

Television sets
1 per 47 people

Gross Domestic Production
$1,360 per capita

JAPAN
NHK
NETWORK
Anyone who owns a television set in Japan can expect a knock on the door every couple of months. It is the collector from NHK, the Japan Broadcast Corporation, to pick up the $16 reception fee. This ritual occurs six times a year in 31 million doorways. The reception fee, required by law since 1950, produces $2.6 billion annually to support the NHK network.

NHK is a Japanese tradition. It went on the air in 1926, a single radio station whose first broadcast was the enthronement of Emperor Hirohito. Today, NHK operates three radio and two domestic television networks. It also runs Radio Japan, the national overseas shortwave, which transmits 40 hours of programs a day in 21 languages.

The primary NHK television network, Channel One, offers mostly high-brow programming, which gives NHK its reputation as "the good gray" (dull) network, Medieval samurai epics have been a long-term staple.

NHK also is known for programs like the Silk Road documentary, 30 hours total, which traced early Europe-Japan trade across Asia. NHK airs about 600 hours a year of British and American documentaries and dramas from the BBC and PBS. The network prides itself on its news.

Some NHK programs, such as the 15-minute Sunday morning Serial Novel, have huge followings. Ratings regularly are 50 percent.

Japanese viewers also watch stations served by three other Tokyo-based networks -- Fuji, NTV and the Tokyo Broadcasting System. A few independent stations complete the nation's television system.

Commercial stations all offer similar fare: comedies, pop concerts and videos, quiz shows, sports and talk shows. In recent years, news has gained importance in attracting viewers and advertisers at these networks, encroaching on one of NHK's traditional strengths.

JAPAN
DATABANK

Population
125.4 million

Literacy
100 percent

Television sets
1 per 1.2 people

Gross Domestic Production
$20,200 per capita

QATAR
AL JAZEERA
The emir of the tiny Persian Gulf country of Qatar was fascinated with CNN's growing global reach in the mid-1990s. But for the Arab world, CNN's English-language presentation may as well have been Greek. In 1996, Sheik Hamad bin Khalif al-Thani decided to fill the niche. He launched Al Jazeera, an Arabic-language all-news service beamed by satellite to the Arab world from north Africa to south Asia.

Al Jazeera was a bold move. In a region infamous for biased news and dull propaganda on state-owned channels, Al Jazeera offered comparatively independent coverage. It was a bid for a pan-Arab audience that transcended national boundaries. Soon, by most estimates, Al Jazeera was the region's second most-watched television network, trailing only the entertainment network LBC Sat from Lebanon.

Al Jazeera was not welcomed by governments that had enjoyed strict control of the media within their borders. The kingdoms of Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia blocked Al Jazeera signals, but the censorship spawned a black market in videotapes of Al Jazeera programs. The censorious governments resigned themselves to coexistence with the upstart news source. From its base in Qatar and with the sheik's deep pockets, Al Jazeera remains an autonomous source of news for Arabs of diverse political and religious creeds.

Al Jazeera content is lively with no-holds-barred political talk shows. Perhaps the strongest testament to the network's record of independence is that global political rivals eventually sought air time to espouse their causes. Global terrorist Osama bin Laden, for example, released his tapes from Afghan hiding places to Al Jazeera. In the United States, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Charlotte Beers, acknowledged that the U.S. government had considered buying airtime on Al Jazeera to get its message to the Arab world after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Despite its journalistic success, Al Jazeera was far from profitable for Sheik bin Khalifi al-Thani and fellow investors. Many Arab companies shun the network rather than risk angering the governments. In Qatar itself, only the Doha Bank buys time on the network. Also, Al Jazeera's advertising policy recognizes certain political realities: No advertising is accepted from Israel because of the risk of an Arab backlash.

The biggest advertisers are non-Arab auto manufacturers General Motors, Mitsubishi and Nissan. Procter and Gamble put a lot of money into pushing Head & Shoulders shampoo. Even so, Al Jazeera ad revenue was estimated at a mere $15 million in 2001, less than a sixth of LBC Sat from Lebanon.

UNITED KINGDOM
BRITISH
BROADCASTING CORPORATION
Everybody's heard of the BBC, England's venerable public service radio and television system. Parliament created the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927 as a government-funded entity that would have as much programming autonomy from the government as possible. The idea was to avoid private ownership and to give the enterprise the prestige of being associated with the crown. The government appoints a 12-member board of governors, which runs BCC. Although the government has the authority to remove members of the board, it never has. BBC has developed largely independent of the politics of the moment, which has given it a credibility and stature recognized worldwide.

The BBC had a monopoly on British television until 1955, when a commercial network, Independent Television, better known as ITV, began. It took ITV until 1962, however, to offer full programming. Faced with competition, the BBC created a second network, BBC-2. In the meantime, Parliament established a second government-sponsored entity, the Independent Broadcast Authority, to bring new independent stations under a single umbrella. Today IBA operates 15 regional channels, including Thames and Granada, which are known for programs they export to the United States and other countries. IBA also operates Channel 4, which produces no programs except for a weekly viewer feedback show. Channel 4 programs are acquired from other sources.

The BBC is financed through a US$130 a year tax on television sets. The ITV and Channel 4 systems are financed through advertising.

In summary, Britons can watch four national television networks: BBC, BBC-2, ITV and Channel 4. In addition, there are regional networks and local stations. Since 1984, Rupert Murdoch's B-Sky-B, short for British Sky Television, has beamed programs from an orbiting satellite, first to local cable systems and later directly to consumers. Cable serves fewer than 20 percent of England's households. Other DBS system, besides B-Sky-B, have also come on line.

UNITED KINGDOM
DATABANK

Population
58.5 million

Literacy
100 percent

Television sets
1 per 2.9 people

Gross Domestic Production
$17,980per capita