Television in Transition in East Asia by Ki-Sung Kwak

Author:Ki-Sung Kwak [Kwak, Ki-Sung]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Asian American Studies, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317235675
Google: vs1JDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-31T04:40:44+00:00

Reshaping the regulatory framework in the emergence of new broadcast media

With the achievement of rapid economic growth, all three countries have exhibited a certain affinity to new broadcast media and technologies. The new media technologies in all three countries brought deregulation of television broadcasting in the early 1990s, aiming for the provision of diversity of channels and the promotion of competitiveness in the local economy. The introduction and development of pay television has followed a different pattern in each of the three countries. Given the diversity and complexity of the national contexts in which pay television was introduced and developed, it is not easy to single out any one general feature common to all of the three countries. Nor is it easy to categorise the national differences along a single continuum. This is particularly true when we consider that pay television in each country started using different technologies of television distribution. In Hong Kong, pay television started with cable in 1993. Two years earlier, STAR-TV launched its regional satellite broadcasting service (transmitting only outside of Hong Kong). In Korea, pay television started with cable in the absence of any other new technologies. In Japan, urban-type cable television started earlier than the satellite service and was subscription based. However, it has been largely a community-based service providing retransmission function to technically poor reception areas. Nevertheless, a closer examination of the regulatory changes made in the process of incorporating pay television into the existing broadcasting structure in the three countries reveals a number of similarities as well as differences.

Despite the growing recognition of new broadcast media, the level of regulatory change made initially was minimal. Indeed, the new broadcast media in all three countries were placed under the same regulatory framework designed for existing terrestrial television broadcasting. This was most visible in Korea, where the same regulatory framework as that adopted by the government to control terrestrial television broadcasting was imposed on cable television. The regulatory structure designed for cable television – the Cable Broadcast Law in 1989 (revised in 1991 and 1993) and a separate regulatory body for cable television, the Korean Cable Broadcasting Commission (KCBC) – was identical with that of terrestrial television. This regulatory structure remained unchanged until 1999. The major framework of the Cable Broadcasting Law and the specifications contained in it, in the area of control measures in particular, were surprisingly similar to the Broadcast Law, which regulated terrestrial broadcasting. To put it in another way, the Korean Government regulated cable television under a similar framework and logic to that applied to terrestrial television broadcasting (Lee et al. 1999). This means that the aim of the government’s regulation was mainly to control, rather than to promote and develop, the new cable television industry.

The development of both cable and satellite television in Korea has been government led. Their introduction was not driven by consumer demand. Rather the aim of the government was to provide consumers with more channel choice. Prior to this, the existing terrestrial broadcasters have dominated the industry.

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