The Values of Public Service Media in the Internet Society

Public Service Media (PSM) organizations have been facing major challenges as digital platforms disrupt the media environment, consumption habits change, their funding models are reformed, and attacks from political actors intensify. In this situation, the best solution for PSM to build a case for themselves and navigate the storm is to use their values as a compass. The combination of core, traditional values and new, emerging ones is key for PSM to adapt to the transformation of the current societies’ communication needs and thus legitimize themselves in front of the citizens they serve. This book presents different ways in which PSM can create value for different stakeholders, in different contexts and through different means.

This chapter provides a review of the main research topics in Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) that have been discussed in the last years, such as digitalization and new technologies development, business model and funding, policies and regulation, and public value and citizen interest. Based on this thematic summary, this chapter offers suggestions on how to move forward in PSB research and identifies some of the main challenges and limitations on this area of inquiry.

The aim of this chapter is to analyze contemporary Public Service Media (PSM) under the frame of critical political economy of the media and discuss the future of PSM in the age of online platforms. We will start analyzing the evolution of the debate on Public Service Media values, paying particular attention to the paradigm change envisioned by Bardoel and Lowe in 2007. In the age of platformization of culture (Nieborg and Poell, The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. New Media & Society. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​1461444818769694​, 2018) and broader process of platformization of society (Van Dijck et al., The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), PSMs are facing a new turn in their history and a further semantic extension of the boundaries of their meaning is needed: from Public Service Media to Public Service Platforms (PSP). This chapter will try to describe the challenges facing PSM companies in this emerging technological and economic environment.

The contemporary media environment challenges Public Service Media (PSM) values as algorithms optimize content exposure. Niche audiences seek social media platforms and enjoy content specifically targeted to them. PSM organizations can however in their own way engage in similar strategies, while also leading an innovative charge toward socially responsible media automation practices. Digital intermediation is thus a process that enables cultural production through the combination of technology (platforms), digital agencies (Multichannel Networks), and automation (algorithms) to increase the visibility of popular users and their content, specifically through digital influencers. In this chapter, we highlight and discuss how PSM can integrate cutting-edge digital intermediation strategies to increase its visibility through the combination of digital first personalities (Hutchinson, Digital First Personality: Automation and Influence Within Evolving Media Ecologies. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2019) and innovative algorithmic strategies (Sørensen, Public Service Media, Diversity and Algorithmic Recommendation: Tensions Between Editorial Principles and Algorithms in European PSM Organizations. INRA at RecSys 2019: 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems Copenhagen, Denmark, 2019).

This chapter analyzes the shutdown and later recovery of the public service broadcaster of the Valencia Community region in eastern Spain, a territory that accounts for 10% of Spanish GDP, with over five million inhabitants. In November 2013, the public service broadcaster, after 24 years of history, was closed down. In May 2015, the new administration of the Generalitat Valenciana (regional government), a coalition of left-wing parties, took up the challenge of initiating a new Public Service Media institution, essentially transmedia, with the intention of being relevant and useful for citizens. In 2018, À Punt Mèdia became a reality, offering a public service communication platform which is an extraordinarily interesting example for analyzing the public service remit in the new transmedia audiovisual environment.

European Public Service Media (PSM) have a long history, throughout which they have had to transform themselves to face technological challenges and competition with private companies. This chapter aims to reflect on the impact that blockchain can have on Public Service Media. Blockchain is characterized by being a transparent, democratic, secure, instantaneous, consultable, and decentralized technology that is irreversible in its annotations. Blockchain makes it possible to change the economic models that the Internet introduced for cultural industries, for which it also presents advantages and development opportunities. Despite this, little development of this technology on PSM is revealed, something that invites deep reflection, due to the leading role that PSM are required to play in fulfilling their public service functions.

The justification and legitimacy of autonomic and regional public television networks are traditionally built upon proximity content and their advocacy of the cultural identity of the regions where they conduct their activity. However, the economic crisis of 2008 caused and is still producing negative consequences when providing these public audiovisual services, a trend that impacts the complete European continent and, specifically, the countries following the Mediterranean model (Hallin and Macini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Marzal Felici and Zallo Elguezabal, Comunicación y sociedad, 29(4), 1–7. https://​doi.​org/​10.​15581/​003.​29.​4.​1-7, 2016). In the European Union, the regional public television networks show significant differences of governance, resources, and funding, but they all have in common their function of proximity public service in an uncertain context, where large private operators threaten to occupy the whole audiovisual space. Considering this starting point, the quality of the websites of regional and proximity Public Service Media of the EU are analyzed: Spain (FORTA and CEXMA), Belgium (VRT, RTBF, and BRF—despite its recent loss of autonomy), and Germany (ARD).

The public broadcasting governance system has been facing the challenge of transformation and adaptation to the Internet era for decades by trying to adopt governance mechanisms that can help update its values, principles, and Public Service Media offer for the digital society. This approach is the starting point for tracing the genealogy of the origin, regulation, structure, governing system, and governance landscape of the different management models of European public service broadcasting.

During the twentieth century, regulation of broadcasting and telecommunications in Canada in culture and media sectors was based on notions such as national sovereignty and public service. Moreover, all policies put forward until the turn of the 2000s followed the same orientation. Since its establishment in Canada in 2010, Netflix, the international film streaming platform, has benefited from a favorable environment for its development following the 1999 decision of the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission), the federal regulatory authorities, ensuring the exemption of digital media from the Canadian public system rules, that is, the requirement to broadcast a percentage of Canadian content and contribute to the national television and film production. This is while domestic companies from the audiovisual sectors are subject to a strict unchanged regulation.

This chapter explores the relationship between Public Service Media (PSM) and the market through the lens of risk. Instead of approaching PSM’s market impact from a crowding-out perspective, we focus on how these organizations contribute to creating, shaping, and sustaining markets. We identify two key areas of risk that PSM organizations are actively negotiating and/or as part of a change to their remit and responsibilities: first, in creating and sustaining a supply base of indigenous content, and second, in contributing to innovation capacity. Whilst we don’t argue that all PSM organizations are engaging in these equally, or even delivering effectively on these agendas, we want to highlight the important contribution that PSM makes to creative economies and to economic and cultural activity within nation states more generally. The chapter concludes by arguing that by undermining the scale and funding of PSM their capacity to assume that risk is weakening, and that this will have implications for the entire marketplace.

Technological breakthroughs are an enabler in the convergence between telecommunications operators and media. Close economic examination put at stake the interpretation based on vertical integration and complementary strategies of telecom operators and content producers. Approach to convergence must be renewed because situation is not the same as 20 years ago. The multiplication of TV channels, the development of Internet, and the growing bandwidths have resulted in the explosion of online content. This has contributed to the expansion and predominance of digital platforms that invested significantly in content production and network infrastructure. These original converging strategies call for regulatory issues because the changes raise new challenges associated with the new market structure: segmentation of regulation perspective, competitive and non-price strategies, and net neutrality.

Media capture, a situation in which the media can no longer function independently but is controlled by vested interests, has been researched as a concept and empirical phenomenon in a variety of contexts. The capture of Public Service Media has received less scrutiny, even though media organizations with a public service mandate are facing increased pressures from governments and commercial competitors alike. This chapter proposes a framework for assessing the impact of media capture on Public Service Media organizations in different national contexts. It highlights the importance of both media systems and public discourses in understanding the forms in which Public Service Media capture can emerge and become manifest.

Media and Information Literacy is regarded as a great challenge for Public Service Media now more than ever; not just as a right that they must respect but as a new policy they need to foster. The main reason is that we are living in turbulent times. Disinformation, fake news, and poor journalism (against quality journalism) are symptoms that the current communication ecosystem is negatively influencing the quality of democratic societies. Therefore, this problem cannot be merely addressed through local policies; a global human approach is needed. This chapter aims at reflecting on how a comprehensive approach that includes the right of Media and Information Literacy as a crucial part of public policies (and public service media) is now an urgent matter. The article emphasizes that the application of this right contributes to improving the communication system and consequently democracy in societies. Promoting quality in Public Service Media is one of the main actions that demonstrate keenness on citizens’ right to become well informed. However, how can public policies and Public Service Media contribute to making citizens’ right to Media and Information Literacy a reality? This is the main question addressed in this chapter.

Electoral debates in television are one of the most powerful instruments that broadcasters, namely those of a public nature, have to comply with one of their more relevant objectives: to contribute to the shaping of an informed and educated public opinion, strengthening citizen participation in public issues, legitimizing those institutions with which, this way, they identify, and, ultimately, improving their trust on their political system and reinforcing democracy. On this ground, after conducting a thorough study of the electoral debates that have been organized in Spain thus far, this chapter proposes a set of indicators of value for television debates that allows for the standardization of the evaluation of this format.

The coordinates for the general television channels have changed. Young audiences watch less and less television. Mostly, they subscribe to some video-on-demand platform and consume content, especially fiction, on multiple screens. They are on the Internet and on the networks. The public television service faces the challenge of being part of its information and entertainment time. The chapter studies the current relationship between the PSM in Spain, Italy, and Portugal and their younger audiences and proposes lines of action to improve their interaction. A public television service with the participation of young generations in the present guarantees its continuity and necessary role in the society of the future.

In recent years, various Latin American countries have witnessed movements around state-run media. These movements come at a time of significant transformations brought along by the possibilities offered by information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the process of building a public sphere that is not merely analog but also digital, with citizens whose rights, responsibilities, and exclusions are under discussion. This chapter reconstructs the regional landscape focusing on the approach taken by state media to embrace digital transformation and the capacity to contribute to the configuration of a digital citizenship whose rights are more widely recognized.