Sally Broughton Micova

Content Quotas: What and Whom Are They Protecting?

When private television started to take off in Europe in the 1980s it confronted an environment in which the role of television and radio in cultural and national identity formation had already been established through national public service broadcasters (Gripsrud, 2007; Price, 1995). Having relied largely on publicly funded television and the film industry to produce such content, European countries lagged far behind the United States in terms of their capacity to generate content for television (Esser, 2009; Tunstall and Machin, 1999). The large private television networks and production houses in the United States were well situated to sell their content, particularly fiction and entertainment, to the new private channels in Europe.