International Journal of Digital Television - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2015

It is commonly accepted that the independence of media regulators is essential for ensuring the legitimacy of implemented policies and achieving the objectives of media regulation. However, recent literature has also pointed to the need to consider how accountability of these institutions could and should be provided in the framework of democratic governance mechanisms. In this article we identify three key areas of regulatory performance of media authorities that relate to their accountability to the subjects of regulation and the public. We present our findings in the case on Hungary assessing transparency of the regulator’s work, tendencies in access to market and sanctioning practices based on an extensive review of the regulator’s actual work and decisions. In conclusion we reflect on the function of these areas as indicators in the context of the principal-agent relationship and propose the introduction of enforceable normative criteria in European audio-visual media policy.

This article is a comparative analysis of the transition of the public broadcasting system in Croatia (HRT) and Macedonia (MRT) from state control to a public broadcasting system. Croatia, a European Union (EU) member, and Macedonia, an EU candidate, have followed the European dual broadcasting model and therefore should have well-developed public service broadcasting (PSBs). However, these two television stations today are non-functioning centralized organizations highly influenced by politics with too many employees and no proactive leaders capable of handling the task. This article concludes that neither the Croatian HRT nor the Macedonian MRT has transformed to become effective independent PSB because although the legislative framework in each country is ostensibly ‘good’, having passed the scrutiny of the EU accession process, these frameworks have still resulted in strengthened political control of the public service stations.

This article investigates the extent to which Serbian media institutions that have been initiated and supported through media assistance programmes have actually reached a level of sustainability and functionality. Analysing the establishment and transformation of public service broadcasters in Serbia, the author discusses the main achievements, failures and challenges of media assistance programmes that aim to contribute to Serbia’s democratization. As media institutions in transition countries are often designed after similar institutions in Western European democracies, the outcomes regularly differ from the initial model. This article sheds light on the question of what happens to imported models when they are transposed onto the newly evolving media systems of transitional societies using the case of Radio-Television of Serbia.

Estonia is recognized for its optimism with regard to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) – the country has benchmarking online services, and the number of start-ups per inhabitant is the highest in Europe. The ways this enthusiasm is translated into its audio-visual policy is the topic of this article. Estonia’s internal market for audio-visual services is very small, and this limits the degrees of freedom for its institutional actors – commercial broadcasters do not drive market innovation. Yet the responsibility of public service broadcasters for innovation coordination is not recognized in Estonia’s policy frameworks. In contrast, many new initiatives are funded that are aimed at supporting the cooperation of the audiovisual industry’s small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with ICT sector. Such initiatives rely on the hope for scalable returns to national gross domestic product (GDP) rather than generating diversity in media. Yet these measures suffer from structural constraints that limit the growth of media SMEs in small peripheral countries. This article raises related issues for both national and European policies.

We focus on the method of rule of the last Macedonian government led by the rightwing VMRO-DPMNE with respect to (TV) media-political clientelism. An ongoing phone-tapping scandal has made overt what past research has only suggested was taking place – that the new ‘phase’ of the patron-broker-client relationships in the country has suppressed rational legal authority to the extent that it has shaken the very core of state institutions’ legitimacy. Since 2006, a reordered media-political clientelism gradually enabled the emergence of a propagandistic media setting, which in turn facilitated a lack of public resistance to party’s colonization of the state and enabled its move towards an authoritarian fashion of rule. We claim here that in the regime’s manner of rule, the journalists and media professionals played the role of both victims and collaborators.

This article presents an analysis of Lesotho’s apparent challenges in its quest to migrate from analogue to digital terrestrial television broadcasting (DTTB) from 2006 to 2015. The move towards DTTB had given the state-owned Lesotho National Broadcasting Services a glimmer of hope to strengthen its position in the local market and thwart competition from South African broadcasters. However, the country lacked a policy direction or a clear road map to gain resources for DTTB development and subsequently failed to meet the international analogue switchoff deadline of 17 June 2015. Given the high level of foreign television service penetration in Lesotho, I argue that the government’s weak and sluggish intervention spells tragedy for the national broadcaster in the digital era, unless corrective policy measures based on comparative lessons from early adopters, with a rapid and coordinated implementation strategy as proposed in this article, are vigorously pursued.

One promise of the switchover from analogue to digital television was new accessibility solutions. In the case of deaf and hard-of-hearing audiences who rely on subtitling for comprehension, the digital switchover makes it possible for greater provision of subtitling or improvements in accuracy. Utilizing quantitative data from a questionnaire completed by 339 participants with varying degrees of hearing difficulty in Wales, this article assesses perceptions of subtitling pre- and postdigital switch. A within-group comparison across age groups is also used to assess whether improvements in service are age defined. The results found that difficulties in accessing quality subtitling are still experienced by this audience post-digital switchover and that there are no significant differences in age in experiencing these difficulties. Knowledge of other digital services is subject to a significant difference in age, which indicates more work is required to inform older audience members of the affordances of digital television.

The Media Welfare State. Nordic Media in the Digital Era, by Trine Syverts en, Gunn Enli, Ole J. Mjøs and Hallvard Moe (2014) Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 164 pp., ISBN 978-0-472-12031-4, paperback, $30

Conn ected Viewing: Selling, Streaming, & Sharing Media in the Digital Era, edited by Jennifer Holt and Kevin Sanso n (2014) New York: Routledge, 265 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-81360-0, paperback, $43.95