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While Portuguese television broadcasting has yet to develop significantly, Brazil has shown that it
can overcome, at least partially, some of the constraints that hold back developing countries from
competing with more developed countries. It has done so even though its development has been heavily
influenced by the United States, resulting in a form of commercial media operating in a laissez-faire
capitalist economy (Straubhaar, 1991). Despite this, Brazilian television – dominated by the quasi-
monopolistic TV Globo – introduced a number of local innovations within the commercial television
format, the most prominent of these being the creation of the now-famous telenovelas, an essentially
Brazilian genre of soap opera whose format has spread to most of Latin America and even parts of
Europe. From the 1970s these telenovelas began to be exported overseas, including Portugal. Since then
Brazil – as well as other Latin American producers such as Mexico – has found success adapting
American variety and sit-com genres to the local market, producing popular shows first for domestic
audiences and then for export. Straubhaar sums up the change in the shift in Brazilian audience
preferences for American-produced shows to domestic products.
TV Globo’s programming strategy reflected this preference by filling prime time with
telenovelas, music, and comedy; creating increasing quantities of national programming
for mornings and afternoons; and pushing U.S. imports into off-hours and a few prime-
time slots reserved for U.S. genres, such as a few action series and periodic films, that
retained an audience (1991, p. 50).
Meanwhile, Brazil has begun to penetrate even the U.S. market – at least its rapidly expanding
Spanish-language segments – in recent years. Again, it has been the telenovelas that have led the way in
this small-but-growing assault on the American television scene (Wildman & Siwek, 1988). Overall,
then, the picture that emerges of the Brazil-U.S. trade relationship in television programming is one of
falling, but still significant, Brazilian dependence on the United States and a minuscule but rising
American demand for what Brazil has to offer.
Case study 4: India, Britain, and the United States (U.S./India and India/Britain)
Convention