ABSTRACT
Brazilian businesses have long enjoyed official aid and comfort in making everything from canned goods to computers. Television was equally coddled. Backed by constitutional bans against outsiders, the central government controlled the domestic broadcast market and severely restricted the number of TV concessions. “The proliferation of channels means a bigger market and more competition, which can only help to raise the quality of television production to a higher common denominator,” says Gabriel Priolli, director of TV Gazeta, a regional broadcast station in Sao Paulo. The Marinhos and Civitas, by contrast, are smaller fry in these rugged waters. They have no maps, no familiar compass and, for the first time, no comfortable constitutional safety nets to fall back on. Long accustomed to dominating a closed and comfortable world of national broadcasting, they are now in the company of true giants.
