ABSTRACT
This chapter captures some of the varying content in the international context of post-broadcast television. Within Anglo-American media and cultural studies, it has become something of an orthodoxy to see the current formations of television as enmeshed within a process that has the medium moving from regulation to deregulation, from a mix of public and private ownership to overwhelming commercialization, and from broadcast and cable into broadband. The chapter questions how comprehensively such an account covers the various formations of television, while also considering what kinds of social and cultural roles television plays within the nation-state, the local community, or the transnational geo linguistic region. China’s strategic engagement with the global media companies is among the primary means through which the state is modernizing its local media. A feature of much of Western media studies’ discussion of post-broadcast television, convergence, and the emerging capacities of the online environment is the politics of consumption so often attributed to the changing environment.
