ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with theories of television institutions that analyse how the making and distribution of programmes currently take place. It looks at British patterns of commercial and public service broadcasting, and places these in the context of American and European television. Television in the developed world is still largely organised on national lines, but the increasing significance of international flows from West to East and North to South has been hotly debated, so any discussion of television today needs to take account of the social and political significance of how transnational and national television cultures work in relation to each other. What is at issue is the degree to which the meanings of television are dependent on the kinds of institutions which make and distribute it, and the conclusions which can be drawn from studying television in terms of its ownership, organisation and spread around the world. There are inequalities in production funding, and different roles of domestic and imported programming in national television cultures, and this chapter refers to television in the less developed world to explain how theorists of television have understood these inequalities.
