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ABSTRACT
This article discusses whether European or national-level media policies are suitable for facilitating a Europeanisation of national cultural public spheres. It is argued that current EU media policy initiatives and the activities of globally operating private corporations (e.g. Netflix and HBO) cannot achieve transnational cultural co-imbrication, strengthen horizontal ties among citizens from different countries, or increase the social inclusivity of public spheres. National public service media (PSM) have a potential to do so, but only to a limited extent, because in many EU countries, they face financial, competitive, managerial and political pressures binding them to nationally delimited roles. Nevertheless, drawing on examples of PSM successes in fostering Europeanisation and normative debates on transnational public spheres, ideals for a network of European PSM are presented, which offer a vision of PSM that (re-)legitimises themselves as key players in the building and accessibility of Europeanised public spheres for EU cohesion.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. This article is a based on a chapter within the DETECt Project Deliverable 6.3 (Antoniazzi and Bengesser Citation2022). The research was carried out by both authors. The paper was jointly discussed, conceptualised and structured. Luca Antoniazzi wrote section 1 and 6; Cathrin Bengesser sections 3, 4 and 5. Section 2 was jointly written.
2. In their 2020 report on film and TV content in VoD catalogues, the European Audiovisual Observatory notes: ‘On TVOD [Transactional Video on Demand], EU27 content represented 22% when films and TV seasons were counted, 21% if films and TV episodes were considered. On SVOD [Subscription Video on Demand], the share of EU27 content was 17% when considering films and TV seasons but fell to 12% when counting films and TV episodes’ (Grece and Jiménez Pumares Citation2020, 9).
3. In 2013, 21% of fiction content offered by private broadcasters in the EU (sample of 15 MS) was of European origin. The majority of this European content was accounted for by national fiction, leaving less than 10% for films and series from other European countries (Kevin and Ene Citation2015, 9).
4. In 2013, public service broadcasters derived 53% of their fiction content from Europe, of which half was of non-domestic European origin (Kevin and Ene Citation2015, 9).
5. In 2019, public service TV achieved an average audience share of 25.4% in EU27, but this share varies significantly between countries: while PSM account for 76.4% in Denmark, they only achieve a 3.5% share in Romania or 8.3% in Greece (EAO Citation2020).
6. Content from the UK accounted for 55% of non-national titles in SVoD catalogues in 2019 (Grece and Jiménez Pumares Citation2019, 15). British content is still considered European content, since the definition of European in the AVMS Directive is based on the signatory parties to the European Convention on Transfrontier Television, of which the UK is a part (Cabrera Blázquez Citation2021, 19).
7. With 19 million video views per month from outside France and Germany, the platform is on the rise (Gourdin Citation2019), but still the audience shares of 2.6 and 1.2 percent in Arte’s home countries indicate that its actual reach is limited.
8. However, it must be noted that the choice of subtitling only runs counter to the customs of the bigger European dubbing markets (see Antoniazzi and Barra Citation2022) and may thus limit the programmes’ appeal to local audiences.
9. Jacobsen and Jensen (Citation2016) demonstrate how audiences were profoundly confused by the constant switching of languages in the series and how they perceived The Team to be a constructed version of Europe, built on stereotypes and a ‘EU type agenda’.
10. Similarly, the German public service broadcaster ARD faced criticism (e.g. Jahberg Citation2017) for its co-production of Babylon Berlin with the pay-TV service Sky, because even though the former had financed the lion’s share of the budget, the latter received exclusive rights to premiere the series in 2017.
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Notes on contributors
Luca Antoniazzi
Luca Antoniazzi (PhD, Leeds) is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of the Arts, Università di Bologna. As a post-doc in the Horizon 2020 project DETECt, he has worked on European audiovisual media circulation and previously worked on film archiving and cultural policy. He has published in international journals such as Information, Communication and Society, Museum Management and Curatorship and The Moving Image.
Cathrin Helen Bengesser
Luca Antoniazzi (PhD, Leeds) is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of the Arts, Università di Bologna. As a post-doc in the Horizon 2020 project DETECt, he has worked on European audiovisual media circulation and previously worked on film archiving and cultural policy. He has published in international journals such as Information, Communication and Society, Museum Management and Curatorship and The Moving Image.
Cathrin Helen Bengesser is Assistant Professor for Digital Media Industries at the Department of Media and Journalism Studies at Aarhus University and an affiliated research fellow at King’s College London. Her research interests include national and EU media policies regarding the regulation of the VoD market and public service media. She is a PI on an AUFF-funded (2021-23) project that studies the impact of media systemic differences on the transformation from broadcast to VoD markets in Europe. As a post-doc in the Horizon 2020 project DETECt (2018-21), she has been working on the study of national and European Creative Industries policies, the study of European crime TV audiences and the development of the DETECt Aarhus Web-App. Cathrin completed her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London (2016-19) with a thesis on the legitimation crisis of European PSM.