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Transnational Television

From Broadcast to Broadband

There are few issues in contemporary television studies that cannot be traced back in some way to the 1974 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form by Raymond Williams. Of particular interest for scholars of internet-distributed television is the book’s final chapter, “Alternative Technology, Alternative Uses,” which offers a richly textured account of new distribution technologies and their sociopolitical implications. Writing in the early 1970s, Williams could not have foretold the rise of Netflix. Nonetheless, his discussion of emerging satellite television services identifies issues that are directly relevant to today’s debates about transnational television in the internet age.

Figure 2.1. Video platforms, including YouTube, operate transnationally but are territorialized through geolocation and personalization. Photo by Kapustin Igor/Shutterstock.

Williams viewed satellite television as a site of structural conflict—between competing institutions, business models, and visions of what television is and should be—as well as being a staging ground for Cold War politics. He was especially interested in the transnational dimension of satellite distribution and what this might mean for global communication. Noting on the one hand that satellite’s “probable” evolutionary trajectory would be to “penetrate or circumvent existing national broadcasting systems, in the name of ‘internationalism’ but in reality in the service of one or two dominant cultures” (Williams 1974, 147), Williams offers a highly ambivalent assessment of the forms of television that may result from satellite distribution:

A world-wide television service, with genuinely open skies, would be an enormous gain to the peoples of the world, as short-wave radio, bypassing national controls, has already clearly been. Against the rhetoric of open skies, which in fact, given the expense and sophistication of satellite technology, would be monopolised by a few large corporations and authoritarian governments, it will sound strange and reactionary to defend national autonomy. But the probable users of the technology are not internationalists, in the sense of any significant mutuality. The national or local components in their services would be matters merely of consent and publicity: tokenism. (149)

In this quote, we can observe several clashing ideas that continue to structure today’s debate about internet-distributed television. On the one hand, there is the utopian vision of a “world-wide television service,” seen here as a potential global agora—a space of free and reciprocal exchange. On the other hand, there is the recognition that this space is likely to be organized around existing forms of industrial and geopolitical power; hence the cosmopolitan space of transnational communication also becomes a space of domination. Finally, there is Williams’s qualified appeal to national regulation as a bulwark against multinational corporations. Using language reflecting 1970s debates about cultural imperialism, Williams warns that the advent of commercial direct-to-home satellite television systems may make independent production “very difficult or impossible” and that most “inhabitants of the ‘global village’ would be saying nothing … while a few powerful corporations and governments, and the people they could hire, would speak in ways never before known to most of the peoples of the world” (149).

It is not difficult to see the links between Williams’s Cold War–era predictions of cultural imperialism from above and current fears about U.S. cultural domination in internet-distributed television services. More than 40 years after the publication of Williams’s book, we still do not have a single “world-wide television service”—a distribution system or platform that is widely accessible in every part of the world. We do, however, have a range of transnational multiplatform television services—including international news channels (CNN, Al Jazeera, Russia Today), internet-distributed subscription services (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video), and online video-sharing platforms. Each of these services has its own underlying technologies, distribution patterns, and ways of reaching dispersed markets. They are all transnational but in different ways, and just as Williams predicted, many of these services have become controversial because of the way they impact national markets, allegedly reshape national cultures, and evade national regulations.

This chapter asks: What is distinctive about the transnational character of internet-distributed television compared to earlier forms of transnational television? In answering this question, it seeks to locate current debates in a wider historical context. While we often think about digital media in a vacuum, as though each new innovation was the first of its kind, many of the concerns about Netflix and other transnational internet-distributed television services have clearly been raised before—including the fear of cultural penetration by powerful nations, the weakened power of the nation-state, the lack of local content, and the privatization of public institutions. With these issues in mind, the present chapter will describe key structural changes in television distribution since the 1970s and explain how today’s multiterritory SVOD services appear when seen through the lens of historical debates.

From National to Transnational Television—and Back

“Transnational television,” as I use the term here, refers to the propensity for television distribution systems to cross one or more national borders. It is a deceptively simple term that invokes a wide range of scenarios, including both cosmopolitan and culturally intrusive distribution. For our purposes, the related term “global television” will refer to television services that operate in a large number of international markets simultaneously. Netflix, by my definitions, is both transnational and global. HBO, in contrast, is transnational but not global, because it offers its standalone internet-distributed service (HBO Now/Go) only in select markets in Latin America, Central Europe, and Asia. Most national catch-up services are neither transnational nor global, at least from the point of view of distribution.

The history of broadcast television is closely tied to the history of the nation-state. Since the interwar period, the organization of television systems in almost every country has mirrored and indeed reinforced national boundaries. The nationwide distribution of television has shaped advertising markets, has propagated official language policies, and has established common frames of national discourse. As Jean K. Chalaby writes,

For much of its history, television has been closely bound to a national territory. Broadcasters exchanged programmes and set up international associations, but operated within national boundaries. Their signal covered the length and breadth of the country, from the nation’s capital to the remotest parts of the countryside. Foreign broadcasters were not allowed to transmit on national territory and attempts to do so were seen as breaches of sovereignty. Television was often tied up with the national project and no other media institution was more central to the modernist intent of engineering a national identity. (Chalaby 2005, 1)

These institutional contexts produced a particular industrial structure. Distribution was contiguous with territory, and control over television institutions rested clearly (though not always easily) with national governments. Regulation ensured a national “container” around television, creating markets, institutions, and viewing cultures that aligned predominantly with national borders.