Public service media, innovation policy and the ‘crowding out’ problem

ABSTRACT

Public service media organisations manage the challenges they face as they transition to a converged environment by innovating in the areas of distribution, programming, and engagement. Many commercial media companies critique public service innovation and argue that it is ‘crowding out’ the private market. Focusing on public service media organisations in Germany and Australia, this article examines the relationship between innovation, regulation and resilience. We argue that while the Australian model of innovation performs a vital role for the domestic media industry, it does not always contribute to the long-term resilience of individual innovations brought out by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Conversely, while innovation is hamstrung by layers of bureaucracy in Germany, once innovations developed by Second German Television are legally approved, they operate in a relatively uncontested manner. To explain the findings, we propose a comparative framework consisting of four factors: size, public/private divide, regulatory frameworks and legal traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Public service media
• media systems
• media policy
• comparative analysis
• innovation
• resilience
• crowding out
• Australian Broadcasting Corporation
• Second German Television

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DE190100458].

Notes on contributors

Christian Herzog

Christian Herzog is a Lecturer and Project Coordinator at Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany. His research is concerned with digital media, media policy and qualitative methods. It has been published in European Journal of Communication, The Communication Review and Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. He has authored and edited the books Towards a Market in Broadcasting: Communications Policy in the UK and Germany (Palgrave) and Transparency and Funding of Public Service Media (Springer VS).

James Meese

James Meese is a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society. His research interests include media and telecommunications policy, journalism, and intellectual property. He regularly publishes work in leading media and communication journals and his two books are Authors, Users, Pirates: Subjectivity and Copyright Law (MIT Press) and Death and Digital Media (Routledge, co-authored).