Children’s Television: Markets and Regulation

No other area of television programming has probably been so deeply transformed over the past three decades as children’s television. Once a small, prevalently national, public service endeavour, children’s television has been transformed into what is arguably one of the most globalised forms of television and a highly complex industry, primarily driven by commercial demands as well as by more traditional creative and public service stimuli (Steemers, 2010). A fundamental driver behind these changes, of course, has been the introduction of private television across most of Western Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s. This opened the gateway to US children’s networks which exploited the technical possibilities that multichannel television offered to gain direct access to European audiences from the mid-1990s onwards. In this chapter we consider the contribution of private television to children’s television provision in Western Europe, both domestic commercial broadcasters and the US children’s networks. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.