European Audiovisual Policy in Transition

This is a precious contribution to understand the European Union’s regulatory posture on audio-visual services while addressing the challenges of governing digital developments. Historically grounded, and aware of the geopolitical context within which the EU operates, the collection offers a comprehensive reading of the AVMSD, through in depth analyses of the intersections and delicate balances between principles, actors, interests, and levels of intervention. Claudia Padovani, Associate Professor in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Padova (Italy) Ranaivoson, Broughton Micova and Raats have brought together an outstanding line-up of scholars to offer us a wide-ranging and authoritative account of the European Union’s 2018 Audiovisual Media Services directive and its predecessors going back to the Television without Frontiers in 1989. As the contributors show, enduring tensions between markets and public values, Europe and America, and new technologies versus abiding concerns with diversity, the role of the state, freedom of expression, the protection of children, and non-commercial values have crystallized in new ways as Europe’s media giants and national public media service providers clash with Netflix, Google, Amazon, Disney and so on for market dominance and over what Internet and digital media policy should look like in the 21st Century. The volume’s authors offer us a valuable guide to what we should be fighting for (and against) as a new stage of audiovisual media services regulation made available over the Internet takes shape in one country after another. Dwayne Winseck, Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Ottawa (Canada)