3
have allowed various national and regional agents to create cultural products in an increasingly
industrialized way.
The main Latin American television broadcasters tend to be private, as in Brazil, Chile,
Mexico and Venezuela. Government or public channels have been very limited across the
continent. However, two of the primary channels in Chile for a number of years have been
university channels, which take in advertising support and tend to behave like commercial
channels. Similarly, in Colombia, the government owned the channels, providing educational
material during the day and then leasing out time for commercial broadcasting in the evening. The
main stations or networks in most Latin American countries have produced increasing amounts of
their own programming, as we shall see below, but new stations or networks have imported
relatively more, since until recently, imported programming was cheaper than the cost of local
production. Growing advertising revenues, decreasing production technology expenses and the
development of low cost genres have changed that picture, but imported programming, particularly
from the U.S., still tends to be a fall-back for times when audiences are low and local production is
not economically advantageous.
The media markets within North American (NAFTA) countries are a very diverse group:
Anglo-Canada, French Canada, Mexico, Anglo United States and Hispanic United States. In both
Mexico and the U. S., private commercial networks have been dominant since the inception of
television broadcasting. In the U. S. model, multiple networks have competed for ratings;
however, in Mexico, effective competition to the primary network, Televisa, only arrived in the
late 1990s from TV Azteca (Sinclair 1999). Canada typically strikes a better balance between the
public BBC and the private competing networks than do its NAFTA partners. A complex regional
market has developed within NAFTA in which Mexican and U.S. commercial television networks
now produce the majority of their own programming (almost all in the U.S. case), while the
Hispanic U.S. networks import most of their programming from Mexico or other Latin American
nations. Anglo-Canadian networks import almost half of their programming from the United
States, while Franco-Canadian networks import somewhat less (Straubhaar and Campbell 1995).
The main East Asian television broadcasters have been more heterogeneous. China has
had two or three government channels. Japan has a mixed system with both commercial and non-
commercial networks. Taiwan and South Korea have had stations with shifting degrees of
government ownership and control, but that essentially use commercial finance operations for
support. All of the East Asian broadcasters have benefited from steadily growing production
resources and, as a result, have progressively increased their cultural output.
The television industry in Taiwan is privatized, but it still suffers strong interference from
the government. Ownership of stations is restricted to the three authorized television companies,
but a number of private competitors have entered the market via cable television broadcasts. The
Convention