Abstract
Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) was born and shaped within the national boundaries of each European country. However, as the audiovisual market started to become more transnational and interconnected, the European Union began to play a role in the regulation of such public service. During the past two decades, the main issue concerning European public service broadcasting policy was -and still is- how to regulate the expansion of PSB towards new media. This transition was mostly regulated through the decision-making of the European Commission regarding the State aid granted to PSB by their respective Member States. This paper depicts the evolution of the European Commission’s approach to the regulation of PSB, taking the ex ante test for the inclusion of new media services within the public service remit as a sign of the turn towards a new paradigm in media policy where the market perspective prevails over the public interest approach.
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Acknowledgments
The results of this paper correspond to the project “Indicators of governance, funding, accountability, innovation, quality and public service of European PSM applicable to Spain in the digital context” (Reference CSO2015-66543-P), from the State programme “Fomento de la Investigación Científica y Técnica de Excelencia”, State Subprogram of “Generación de Conocimiento” from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad de España, cofounded by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) of the European Union. It is also funded by the activity of Red Internacional de la Investigación de Gestión de la Comunicación (REDES 2016 G-1641 XESCOM), supported by the Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria of the Xunta de Galicia (reference ED341D R2016/019). The author Marta Rodríguez Castro benefits from an FPU Contract (FPU16/05234) from the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte.
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Rodríguez-Castro, M., Campos-Freire, F. (2019). The Ex Ante Test as a Sign of the Evolution of the European Commission Decision Making in the Field of Public Service Media. In: Rocha, Á., Ferrás, C., Paredes, M. (eds) Information Technology and Systems. ICITS 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 918. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11890-7_85
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