American Television in the International Marketplace

Abstract

The power and influence of the American television industry in today's world market is examined. Based on interviews with media buyers and sellers from the United States and other countries, the argument is advanced that the goal of attracting large audiences dominates program selection. It is the audience in each country, with its own system of cultural values and beliefs, that ultimately decides the popularity of programs. This plays a decisive role in influencing the types of shows imported from the United States.

Examining International Country-to-Country Flow of Theatrical Films

“…Audiences in disparate societies are, in effect, separate cultural markets for media products. As such, content goods are discounted in their raw worth when traveling to a culturally different market (Cantor & Cantor, 1986; Hoskins & Mirus, 1988; Straubhaar, 1991; Waterman, 1988; Wildman & Siwek, 1988; Wildman, 1995). The greater the cultural distance between the originating and importing markets, the greater is this value reduction.…”

Staking Claims: Conveying Transnational Cultural Value in a Creative Industry

“…Scholarship on the television market tends to foreground television's economic properties rather than those that are cultural. Media economists, for example, regard television programs as "assets consisting of bundles of broadcast rights" (Owen & Wildman, 1992, p. 181), and other scholars emphasize the contractual nature of business arrangements versus relational arrangements (Cantor & Cantor, 1986;Caves, 2000). Consequently, information about corporate "brands," "ratings," and "going prices" dominates the attention of the industry and its analysts, whereas considerations about product differentiation, originality, novelty, and related factors that signal potential entertainment value are transmitted in less clear-cut ways or are pushed to the background.…”

“…Since its inception, the marketing environment for television distribution has been regarded as chaotic, with little that can reliably account for why programs export one year to a particular locale or region and not the next (Cantor & Cantor, 1986). Although there are many reasons for this unpredictability, chief among them are the market's wide range of nation-specific origins and development, government regulation, and ever-transforming audience tastes (D. D. Bielby & Harrington, 2008).…”

Transnational Cinema: A Cross Culture Communication Medium

“…In this vein, it is proposed that audiences negotiate foreign programs in a manner molded by the indigenous contexts of the locality, rather than swallowing original meanings wholesale. This active disposition of audiences is also echoed by international media distribution experiences [29]. The acceptance is also influenced by the cultural propinquity audience feel for the product, as has been stated by Straubhaar [30,31], "…audiences tend to prefer and choose media material produced by cultures closer to their own.…”