Transnational Television in Europe

Reconfiguring Global Communications Networks

Jean K. Chalaby

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780857737526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Fernsehen

Today transnational TV networks count among television's most prestigious brands and rank among Europe's leading TV channels. This is the first, dynamically told story of the extraordinary journey of transnational television in Europe from struggling origins to its present day boom. It is based in extensive research into the international television industry and makes full use of its author's remarkable access to leading industry figures, from Sky and Turner to Discovery and BBC World.The tale begins with a few cross-border TV channels, who fought hostile governments, faced antagonism from the broadcasting establishment and provoked the contempt of advertisers. But, Jean Chalaby argues, the planets came into alignment for pan-European television in the late 1990s, when a transnational shift in European broadcasting was produced. He shows how transnational television and globalization have transformed one another, and how transfrontier TV networks reflect - and help sustain - a global economic order in which the connection between national territory and patterns of production and distribution have broken down.

PART ONE

IMPOSSIBLE BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER 1

PIONEERS IN SATELLITE
TELEVISION, 1982–4

This chapter retraces the early years of transfrontier television in Europe. In a sense, TV channels have always crossed borders because of the natural overspill of terrestrial television signals. However, communication satellites revolutionized television transmission in the early 1980s, allowing for the emergence of the first international channels. Pioneers in satellite television in Europe had to surmount formidable obstacles and very few were able to reap the rewards for the risks they took.

TRANSFRONTIER TELEVISION BEFORE COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES

Channels began crossing borders when television was still firmly in the hands of nation-states and when governments expected public broadcasters to make a strong contribution to national culture. Thus the international reach of these channels was incidental to their main purpose. At first, it happened purely by accident when the television signal overspilled to neighbouring countries. Progressively, some signals were relayed terrestrially and then transmitted to local cable networks. It was a widespread phenomenon in all the small European countries, particularly those which shared a language with their bigger neighbours, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Germany’s ARD and ZDF, France’s TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3, and the BBC and ITV were the stations with the largest foreign audiences.

There was nothing accidental about the overseas audience of British stations: their signal was picked up by a huge terrestrial antenna near Calais, which was then transmitted by the French PTT (the former Post, Telegraph and Telephone administration responsible for telecommunications) to Belgian and Dutch cable networks. Until copyright agreements were signed in Belgium and the Netherlands in 1984 (Chapter 4), it was totally illegal and not very effective: whenever a tanker went along the Channel, the signal would disappear.

Before the fall of the Iron Curtain, the overspill of Western channels in Eastern Europe was not purely fortuitous either: high-power transmitters were positioned near the borders of East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.¹ Although the terrestrial signal from Western transmitters covered about 85 per cent of East Germany, the local authorities happily added ARD and ZDF to the cable networks when they discovered that ‘citizens who could receive West German TV were less likely to want to emigrate to the West than those who could not’: Western entertainment helped them numb the pain of living in a communist regime.² Like elsewhere in Europe, cable networks were built in part to respond to the popularity of ‘foreign’ TV channels, a fact that has been overlooked by the nation-centric accounts of television history.

The audience for overspill channels was significant, particularly in small countries. An early 1990s estimate suggested an audience share of 5 per cent across the whole of Europe. But while it was practically non-existent in the large countries, it reached up to 60 per cent in places like Ireland and Switzerland.³ In these territories, foreign channels constituted most of viewers’ choice. For instance, when the copyright agreement was signed in Belgium in 1984, 11 of the 15 channels on the cable networks came from abroad.⁴

CLT: a pioneering international broadcaster

Europe’s sole international broadcaster of the pre-satellite era was the Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Télédiffusion (CLT). Its predecessor, the Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Radiodiffusion (CLR) had broadcast Radio-Luxembourg from the heart of the continent since the interwar years. Following the rebuilding of the station in the aftermath of the Second World War, the government of the Grand Duchy granted a television licence to the CLT – taking the new acronym for the occasion – on 1 July 1954. The broadcaster designed a francophone channel for Luxembourg, France and Wallonia. Transmission tests began in January 1955 and the official inauguration followed on 14 May. RTL TV was not only Europe’s first purposely international TV channel but among the first advertising-funded stations.⁵

For many years, the over-the-air service, which broadcast from a transmitter near Dudelange, did not reach beyond the adjacent regions of France and Belgium. Its distribution expanded in the 1970s when it began to be carried on the fledgling French and Belgian cable networks. Its popularity prompted the authorities in Wallonia to grant it a licence in the 1980s, and CLT split the channel in two. In Belgium, the broadcaster formed a joint venture with local press owners and launched RTL TVi (RTL Télévision Indépendante), which broadcast on local terrestrial frequencies. In France, the cable version of RTL TV also received a licence from the local regulatory body but the terrestrial version continued to broadcast from Luxembourg.⁶

The French government was suspicious of the CLT and always tried to curtail its independence. In the 1960s it occasionally cut the cable connecting the Paris-based studios of the radio service to the transmitter in Luxembourg. It put pressure on appointments of journalists and executives and tried to exert even more control after 1970, when French companies held nearly 60 per cent of the company’s shares.⁷

THE EMERGENCE OF COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES

Europe was only the third world region to place a television channel on satellite. The first satellite TV system was built by the Soviet state, which faced the challenge of distributing a TV signal across a territory that spread across 11 time zones. In the mid-1960s, the government realized that it was no longer practical to try to reach remote and sparsely populated areas with a terrestrial broadcast network. The Molnya communication satellite system became operational around the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, in October 1967. As the satellite signal was relatively weak, the ground stations necessitated dishes between 10 and 20 metres in diameter, and since the satellite was not geostationary, the antennas had to be able to track it in orbit.⁸ Although the ground stations were costly, the system remained cheaper than a network of terrestrial transmitters, and by the end of the decade receiving stations had been installed all over the Soviet Union.

Molnya was supplemented by a more powerful and geostationary satellite system in 1976, the Ekran TV broadcasting system. The much stronger signal from the Ekran satellites reduced the system’s receiving costs, enabling the authorities to install earth stations in some of the remotest parts of the Soviet empire. The Ekran system helped deliver central television to the least populated areas of the north, Siberia and Kazakhstan. In turn, it was complemented by the Gorizont satellite network, coupled to the Moskva distribution system, which the Russians commissioned to cover the 1980 Moscow Olympics. By the mid-1980s the three satellite distribution networks covered most of the Soviet territory and reached 90 per cent of its population.⁹

While the Russians built a satellite TV system for a national broadcaster, satellites were initially used by local cable channels in the United States. Satellite communications were pioneered by a Manhattan cable service called Home Box Office (HBO) founded by Charles F. Dolan and partly owned by Time Inc. In order to recoup some of the operating and programming expenses they decided to expand the service to other cable systems. HBO first reached 365 homes in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on 8 November 1972, transmitting to their cable operator via microwave link. In September 1975, in order to broadcast a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier taking place in the Philippines, Gerald Levin, who headed HBO, rented transponder space on a recently launched RCA satellite. HBO used the spacecraft to retransmit the match from Manila and make it available to a couple of cable networks in Florida and Mississippi, thus inaugurating the era of satellite cable networks in the USA. Levin subsequently took a loan from HBO’s parent company to finance a long-term lease on the RCA spacecraft. When HBO was made available to local cable systems nationwide its distribution dramatically increased. By the mid-1980s, about 6,000 cable operators relayed HBO to a total of 20 million subscribers.¹⁰

Further south, a young man by the name of Ted Turner had inherited a billboard company following his father’s suicide. He diversified the company to radio in 1968 and made his first purchase in television two years later when he acquired WJRJ-Atlanta, a struggling television station that he renamed WTCG. Turner felt inspired by Soviet satellites, and the possibilities of satellite distribution as demonstrated by Levin were not lost on him either. In December 1976, following authorization from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), he began transmitting WTBS – as the station was now called – via satellite to cable operators. When Turner transformed a local station into a national network WTBS developed into the first ‘superstation’.¹¹

As cable expanded, the idea of a 24-hour news channel began to float around in the fledgling cable industry. Turner was first to take on a project that was presented to him by Reese Schonfeld in 1978. The executive promoted the channel to cable affiliates up and down the country, who keenly signed up to it. Cable News Network (CNN) was launched on 1 June 1980 with Schonfeld as president. International expansion quickly followed, beginning with Asia in 1982.¹²

From Satellite Television plc to Sky Channel

Ted Turner was the inspiration behind Europe’s first satellite TV channel. Brian Haynes, a producer for Thames Television, was sent by the This Week programme to the United States in 1978 for a documentary on Turner who, he thought, had ‘discovered satellites’.¹³ Back in Europe, Haynes wished to start a similar service and received the support of Jim Shaw, a director at Thames Television’s sales department, who saw it as an opportunity to sell international advertising. Looking for a satellite, Haynes came across the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Orbital Test Satellite (OTS), which showed its capacity to transmit TV programmes during a demonstration at Wembley, North London, in September 1978. The ESA needed fresh money to keep the satellite running and was happy to rent a transponder to Haynes. Although an agreement was reached with the ESA, an authorization had to be granted from at least one of the Eutelsat signatories, the European PTTs that still held a monopoly over telecommunication (Chapter 4). Echoing the initial developments of wireless telegraphy earlier in the twentieth century, satellites were first designed for telecommunications purposes and, although the OTS footprint could be received anywhere in Europe (with a decent-sized dish), Haynes needed to designate a point B that he claimed he wanted to reach. All the Eutelsat signatories who were contacted refused to breach the monopoly over telecommunications relays and declined to downlink the channel’s signal. Haynes looked at alternatives, including the British Forces in Germany and oil rigs in the North Sea and Gibraltar, until Malta finally agreed to it in late 1981. Their part of the deal was a free dish and the rights to rebroadcast football matches. With the Malta agreement and the Eutelsat clearance in his pocket, Haynes turned to British Telecom (BT), then part of the Post Office, to secure an uplink service. BT and the Home Office reluctantly agreed to it since a member of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) – Malta – had requested a service from the ESA satellite.¹⁴

In London, Guinness Mahon, a merchant bank, helped raise risk capital. Thames Television pulled out of the project, anxious about the reaction of the British regulatory agency (the Independent Broadcasting Authority) and the effect it might have on its licence renewal. £4 million was successfully raised from a variety of investors, including Barclays, Ferranti (a British electronics company), the National Magazine Company (a Hearst subsidiary), and publishers DC Thomson in Britain and Mondadori in Italy. Broadcasting tests ‘to Malta’ began in 1981, in effect offering cable operators across Europe full view of the channel. They quickly showed interest. The official launch took place on 26 April 1982 with a regular broadcast of two hours a night. In addition to Malta, cable operators received the authorization to downlink Satellite Television’s signal in two other countries: Finland and Norway. Approximately 116,000 households were able to receive Europe’s first satellite TV channel on that first night. Very few of them were in Malta, for reason of technical delay, and more than half were found in Helsinki. Heavily cabled markets such as Switzerland, Belgium and Holland would soon open up. This launch took place in a very difficult context: there was no pan-European legislation, advertising regulations were not only very restrictive but different from one country to another, commercial television was banned in most countries and state monopolies prevailed in the telecommunication sector.

Satellite Television’s programming was in English, light and entertaining. It was a diet of pop music, soap opera, cheap TV series and sport. English football was particularly popular in Scandinavia but broadcasts were stopped by request of the Football Association of Norway, who accused Satellite Television of emptying their stadia. Early advertisers included Coca-Cola, Philips and Unilever.¹⁵

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch had convened his companies’ chief executives to his alpine retreat in Aspen, Colorado. There, John Tydeman told the ‘newspaper tycoon’ – as Murdoch was referred to at the time – that he ought to get a foot in the new media door. Upo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Television’s Transnational Paradigm Shift
• Part One: Impossible Beginnings
• Part Two: The Coming of Age of Pan-European Television
• Part Three: Transnational Television in Europe
• Part Four: Inside Globalization: The Transnational Shift
• Conclusion: New World, New Networks
• Notes