In locations where it is both accessible and affordable, television continues to be the most popular form of media. According to the International Telecommunications Union in 2009, there were significant regional differences in television ownership. Europe, the Americas, and the Commonwealth of Independent States all showed household ownership as 95% or more. Arab States, and Asia and the Pacific, showed lower statistics of 82% and 75% respectively. Estimates for Africa were well below those of other regions, with only 28% ownership.[i]
Categorization of television ownership per region can be misleading however, as statistics for countries within the regions can vary dramatically. A 2007-2008 comparison of radio and television set ownership clearly shows that ownership of the former far surpasses that of the latter for the majority of 50 of the world’s “least developed countries.” Yet many of these countries fall into the general regions listed above which show overall high (consolidated) television ownership. Some countries which did not demonstrate this trend were Bangladesh, Cambodia, Djibouti, Laos and Myanmar, where television ownership was near equivalent to radio ownership or indeed surpassed it. Furthermore, individual statistics demonstrate that significant proportions of these countries’ population do not own either a radio or a television set; in many cases television ownership was well below 30%.[ii]
Nevertheless, television remains one of the most dynamic and ever-expanding forms of media. In addition to terrestrial television programming (by way of transmission towers), there is now satellite programming available to viewers. Satellite transmission has made television ‘global’ in characteristic, in that satellites cover large regions of the world. This has had a dramatic effect on how international news and general programming is viewed and consumed. It has also plays a pivotal role in opening up access to information in otherwise relatively closed countries, countries with limited media freedom. For example, in 2009 in Egypt, satellite television penetration was 43% (by comparison, broadband penetration was 7.4%),[iii] allowing residents access to non-state media, as well as to independent media that was not indirectly controlled by way of self-censorship and fear. Similarly, in 2009, 74% of the population in Syria had access to satellite television (only 0.5% had access to Internet broadband).[iv]
Terrestrial television has also diversified. Analogue television, transmitted through electromagnetic waves, is slowly giving way to digital terrestrial programming, a process that began in the 1990s. Digital programming allows for transmitted code to be compressed, which in turn allows for a greater amount of channels to be broadcast within one bandwidth. Not only has this change made for a sizable increase in programming available to viewers, but it has allowed for diversification of how television programming is accessed: on a computer through the Internet, on a mobile phone, or at home over a regular television set.
Due to extremely high costs that are involved, countries have staged switchover to digital broadcasting. The Netherlands was one of the first countries to fully switch off analogue broadcasting, followed shortly by Finland, Andorra, Sweden and Switzerland. The United States made a complete switch in 2009 after a process that took almost 10 years. At an International Telecommunications Union conference in 2006, nations of Europe, Africa and the Middle East agreed to phase in digital broadcasting. A statement released by the conference stressed that
...digitization of broadcasting in Europe, Africa, Middle East and the Islamic Republic of Iran by 2015 represents a major landmark towards establishing a more equitable, just and people-centered information society. The digital switchover will leapfrog existing technologies to connect the unconnected in underserved and remote communities and close the digital divide.[v]
As of mid 2012, roughly twenty-five European countries, including Estonia, France, Malta, Slovenia and Spain, had made the switch. European countries such as Greece and Ireland had not yet made the change.[vi] These Wikipedia pages show the on-going progression of digital switchover across the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Worldmap_digital_television_transition.svg [vii] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television_transition
[ii] As cited in Ibid, 166
[iii] Jeffrey Ghannam, Social Media in the Arab World: Leading up to the Uprisings of 2011, A Report to the Center for International Media Assistance, (Washington DC: National Endowment for Democracy, 2011), 26
[vi] Petros Iosifidis, “Mapping Digital Media: Digital Television, the Public Interest, and European Regulation”, Reference Series 17 (London: Open Society Media Program, 2012): 12-13
[vii] Thumbnails at the lower half of the webpage demonstrate the progression of world maps according to digital switchover updates.
