The first in a new series, this book provides a short history of communications satellites in Western Europe, information about the funding and development of satellite channels and the audiences they are reaching. The monograph also includes a description of the complex of currently operative satellites and the channels they are carrying together with a prognosis of the future of satellite television in Western Europe in its third generational phase.

As we enter the age of digital television with its potential offering of five hundred channels, this volume addresses the implications of the rapidly changing television environment: for societies, for groups, for identities, for communication, for our sense of time, space, place, for education, for language, for genres, for our whole way of life.

Private Television in Western Europe: Content, Markets, Policies describes, analyses and evaluates the phenomenon of private television in Europe, clustered around the themes of European and national experiences, content and markets, and policies.

Today transnational TV networks count among television's most prestigious brands and rank among Europe's leading TV channels. This is the first, dynamically told story of the extraordinary journey of transnational television in Europe from struggling origins to its present day boom. It is based in extensive research into the international television industry and makes full use of its author's remarkable access to leading industry figures, from Sky and Turner to Discovery and BBC World.The tale begins with a few cross-border TV channels, who fought hostile governments, faced antagonism from the broadcasting establishment and provoked the contempt of advertisers. But, Jean Chalaby argues, the planets came into alignment for pan-European television in the late 1990s, when a transnational shift in European broadcasting was produced. He shows how transnational television and globalization have transformed one another, and how transfrontier TV networks reflect - and help sustain - a global economic order in which the connection between national territory and patterns of production and distribution have broken down.

This book explores television's role in fostering European cultural identity and the extent to which European public service broadcasters were able to meet the challenges posed by the introduction of new communication technologies.

Private Television in Western Europe: Content, Markets, Policies describes, analyses and evaluates the phenomenon of private television in Europe, clustered around the themes of European and national experiences, content and markets, and policies.

"These essays critically address ... the assumptions from which media analysts and communication scholars have customarily approached television."--Preface.