Last arrival of the techniques of communication general public, television eclipsed all the other media. Its power rassemblor - family hearth at the “total village” expensive with Canadian Marshall McLuhan - caused the most euphoric speeches on the achievement of the human community and most critical on the acceleration of the loss of the direction of the things and the world.

In the center of modern mythologies, television is also an institution registered in the particular history of each company.

The electronic images being likely to be broadcast - i.e. transmitted by Hertzian waves -, following the example of the sounds, the establishment of television fitted naturally in the wake of radiophony, marrying the institutional forms that this one had covered as of second half of the years 1920, time when the radiophonic models had crystallized.

In 1926, the firm Radio Corporation off America (RCA) repurchases first American station of broadcasting, the WEAF, inaugurated in 1922 in New York by American Telegraph & Telephone (ATT), thus posing the first stake of what will become one of the three wide-area networks of radio - then of television - of the United States, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Its specifications: entertainment, information and education, with an accent on the entertainment. Publicity is largely authorized there.

In 1926 also, Great Britain chooses to place radiophony within the framework of a true public service; the State repurchases the six private companies which had started to emit in 1922 and creates the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). Publicity is prohibited on the waves. In these two countries, television will perpetuate the model inaugurated by the radio: commercial statute in the United States; public service in Great Britain.

In France, the radio operator fact its first steps in 1921, with a hybrid mode. Radios of State and private radios coexist. On these last, publicity is tolerated. But when the second world war bursts, the State puts under supervision the whole of the radiophonic system. The public service of broadcasting will be born only once the finished war. Becoming hegemonic, it will relegate the radios deprived to the statute of “private radio stations”. This model of public service, appeared tardily compared to that of on the other side of the channel, will be the reference which will prevail during the launching of the first channel of television.

As of the year 1947, television is introduced into the American home, and a year and half later in the British hearths.

In 1951, there are 10 television sets for 100 inhabitants to the United States and 3 per 100 inhabitants in Great Britain, whereas in France there is not always, in 1954, that 1 % of the households to being equipped with a station. Thereafter, the disparities of the rhythm of equipment of the various European countries remain important. Thus, in 1962, only 25 % of the French hearths have television, against more than 80 % in Great Britain and 50 % in the Netherlands. It is only during year 1974 that the rate of equipment of the French households will reach 80 %. The differences are also sensitive between the areas of the same country: in 1962, whereas the rate of the hearths equipped with television sets is about 35 % in North and the Pas-de-Calais, it does not exceed 25 % in the Rhone and the Paris region, 12 % in all South-west and hardly arrives at 5 % to Brittany.

On the international plan, apart from the large industrialized countries, of the considerable chronological variations are noted in the development of television. In Thailand, the first station is inaugurated in 1955; in Egypt, 1960; in New Guinea, 1987. All in all, the Black Africa is the part of the world who reaches later on television: if it starts in 1963 in Congo and in Coast-Ivoire, it appears only in 1984 in Burundi and that in 1986 in Cameroun. In India, the new means of communication are spread really only at the end of the years 1980; in 1990, it covers yet only two thirds of the territory and touches only half of the population.

On the other hand, the Latin America constitutes, with many regards, an exception. On the one hand, television appears there very early: since 1950 in Cuba, and 1951 in Brazil and Mexico. In addition, unlike many regions of the third world, where the fate of audio-visual is related to that of the State (often under mode of sole party), most Latin-American countries choose from the start for a commercial television, reproducing the model of the United States.

In the American model, the chains are structured in networks (networks) and draw the near total from their resources of publicity. Three networks form the historical base of the system: NBC (already quoted), ABC (American Broadcasting Company) and CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System). The local stations affiliated with these networks diffuse programs which, in majority (on average 60 % of the time of antenna), come from the network head (films, serials, retransmissions of sports events, national and international information). The remainder of the programming either local (weather, regional information, debates), or is bought to other suppliers.

Competition thus plays on two levels: room, between the stations; national, between the networks. Such an installation made networks and their associates of true “salesmen of audience to the advertisers”, according to the judicious expression of the economist américano-Canadian of the media Dallas Smythe. What explains the advance taken by the american companies in the development of the methods of measurement of the audience. Since 1939, the firm of Arthur C. Nielsen experienced a mechanical system of measurement of the radiophonic audience, the audimeter, developped at the point in collaboration with researchers of MIT (Massachusetts Institute off Technology). In 1950, a similar system is used to measure the audiences of television. As comparison, in France, the first in-depth survey on the televisual public goes back to 1964, time when the Office of French broadcasting-television (ORTF) starts to constitute a permanent sampling listeners.

Other exemplary figures of the installation of commercial televisions in network: Brazil and Mexico. Vast Federal state, Brazil sees merging the history of its national integration with the setting in network of its television broadcast stations; it is held of 1950 to 1978. Irradiating starting from the two large development poles urban and industrialist who are São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, television succeeds in covering all the country - what the radio had not done. A true national system of television and telecommunications are created thanks to the satellites - with those of Intelsat initially, then with Brazilian satellites. As of the years 1970, the televisual landscape appears dominated by a great multi-media group, Globo. It is the same in Mexico, where television is related to the destiny of the Azcarraga family, owner of Televised.

With their origin, the European televisual systems do not know the formula of the network. The great majority of the countries of Western Europe is placed under the double mode of the public monopoly and the public service. The first means, above all, the property by the State of the infrastructures of diffusion and transmission; he answers an old tradition of control by the public power of the hertzian spectrum, designed like a highly strategic field of the national security. Guided by the principle of the general interest, the public monopoly ensures the cover of the whole of the national territory - including the most difficult areas of access and the least populated. The royalty, paid by all the users, arose with the same philosophy; it constitutes the means of financing the new good of the Nation as a community. Consequence of the public monopoly, the number of authorized chains is limited.

Initially, televisions of public service are seen assigning a triple mission: to inform, educate, distract, the third function being strongly enfeoffed with the two first and being influenced by them - unlike commercial televisions, which support the function of entertainment deliberately (“entertainment”). The concept of public service supposes that it can remain, in a company governed by the law of the market, a sector escaping the rules from commercial profitability. The benefit which is expected from it is of a political nature: to take part in the construction and the reproduction of social cohesion, the consensus. Strongly inspired by the idea of State-nation, the public service of television adopts a teaching model showing its will to diffuse the cultural heritage.

However, the genesis of the public utilities strongly differs from a country with another, according to the traditions institutional and of the statute of the various political clouts and social in the national democratic game.

In the Netherlands, for example, the television, introduced in 1951, ratifies the ideological partitioning which had governed the pluralist organization of the radio stations: a chain for the protesting current, another for the catholic confession, a third for the socialist movement. It should be waited until 1969 so that a law founds a compromise between holding of the compartmentalized organization and the defenders of a national radio-television.

In Italy, they are the three great parties - the Christian Democrat, the Communist party and the socialist party - which, in the course of time, are distributed the three chains of the public monopoly of the SPOKE (Radio televisione italiana).

Great Britain represents a deeply original case, characterized, since 1955, by the harmonious cohabitation of two systems of television: one public (BBC celebrates it), the other private (system ITV, or Independent Television). Only the last is authorized to resort to publicity. Two control and arbitration boards ensure an effective protection against an abusive intervention of the public power: Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) for the private stations; Board off Governors for the BBC.

The televisual landscape of Germany marries the methods of the territorial political organization, who grants a broad autonomy to Länder, i.e. in the various States which constitute the Federation.

As for France, its system of television translates the strong influence of the State and the central power. To describe the period ranging between 1958 and 1969, during which the de Gaulle general was president of the Republic, a historian of television speaks even about “monopoly of the General”.

As of the end of the year 1970, in Europe, the audio-visual public sector expresses obvious signs of crisis, and the following decade sees starting a privatization process and of deregulation which affects in to a very diverse way the old public utilities.

The inflationary spiral and the compression of the national expenditure erode the financial base on which public television rested traditionally. Vis-a-vis a market of first equipment which tends to be saturated, the royalty perceived on the television sets and the authorized advertizing resources are not enough to compensate for the increase in the production costs and the needs for investments. In addition, the widening of the audio-visual markets, ordered by new technologies of communication, and the multiplication of the channels of diffusion cause the entry in force of the private sector. This widening has a direct incidence on the structure of the request and the methods which the consumption of audio-visual at the users adopts.

The loss of legitimacy of the public service comes from the difficulty of meeting the requirements with the televiewers, the fragmentation of their interests entering in conflict with the constraints of the public monopoly and its profile of audience of mass. This crisis pushes the various governments to slacken the direct control of the State on radio-television and to support private initiatives. But this dispossession is only apparent: through new articulations which are done day between the State and the private sector, the political clouts with the power try to reconstitute the forms allowing the exercise of their control.

On all these national factors come to be grafted the tendencies of the worldwide economy and their repercussions in the field of the communication. The stress laid on the productivity and the accelerated profitability of the capital upsets the organization of work and the production processs themselves. Television is seen forced to implement a production in which the series take place more and more. In addition, one witnesses an increasing internationalization of publicity, marketing and audio-visual production - whose the increasing penetration of the national markets of television by the foreign programs attests -, sanctioned by a redoubled competition. The existence in certain countries of important stocks of audio-visual products likely to be exported is a powerful element of pressure for the opening or the creation of new markets.

The cable and the satellites become the determining vectors of this opening to the international programs. The necessary considerable investments to industrialize such processes and the length of the times of damping cause new types of alliances between the State, the financial sector and private industry. While taking charges the costs with them with the infrastructure of transmission, the public power stimulates the development of new markets of industrial goods and services: the “opening” of the Minitel in France in is a good illustration.

But the financial crisis which allocates the public resources led to imagine new means of making take part the users in the financing of this infrastructure. Until the end of the years 1960, only Great Britain, as we saw, had bet on a rival system private-public. In countries like France and Italy, the timid introduction of publicity as element of financing of the public companies had constituted the first exemptions from the law of the public service. These openings towards other rules were remained subjected to a strict framework of control.

On the other hand, in the years 1970, the deregulation - savage - starts in Italy. The crisis of the public service leads there, in 1975, to an attempt at insufficient reform to put the monopoly of the SPOKE out of reach. A situation of gap in the law settles then, which will support the explosion of private local televisions - one will count some more than 900 in 1981, year when they will reach their maximum number. Between 1976 and 1981, the Italian cinemas lose each year an average of 49 million spectators. Does one estimate between 300? 000 and 400? 000 the number of the films which were diffused, or repeated, on the television screens of the peninsula in 1981. Since 1980, Italy became the first world importer of Japanese cartoons; two years later, it couples this title with that of first importer of American emissions. 21? 000 series and television programs imported into 1982 represent an increase in 100 % compared to the previous year, and of 400 % compared to 1980. This same year 1982, the private television broadcast stations collect 46 % of the average rate of listening, vis-a-vis a SPOKE which, because of the competition, was led, since 1975, to radically transform its choices of production and its program timetable. From 1980 to 1984 are formed the private networks which, by successive concentrations, will give rise to the empire of Silvio Berlusconi. In 1984, the Italian audiovisual landscape appears thus dominated by a true duopoly where the public service is regulated in a not very satisfactory way and where the private sector can act without constraints. It will be necessary to await the turning of the years 1990, and a new law, so that the SPOKE manages to reconquer a balanced share of audience.

Subjected to a strong official tradition, France will know a less brutal and less chaotic deregulation. In April 1968, the publicity of marks is authorized on the first channel and the second, created four years before. This same year 1968, whereas breaks the studied movement, the first strike bursts with the ORTF to denounce the seizure of the government on television. In 1974, the ORTF, considered to be unmanageable, is dismantled: it bursts in September autonomous companies placed under the supervision of the Prime Minister: TF1, A2, FR3 (chain with regional vocation created on this occasion), TDF (Remote transmission of France), INA (National institute of audio-visual), Radio France, SFP (French company of production). The advertizing resources of the public service are reached a maximum to 25 %. Eight years later, in 1982, on the initiative of the Socialist government elected the previous year, a law abolishes the monopoly, institutes the first administrative authority independent in the field of audio-visual (High ranking authority), removes the ceiling of 25 % for publicity and opens the waves with private televisions. The following year is founded the hertzian chain with toll, Canal +, under the aegis of multi-media group Havas.

The “cable plan” is launched in 1982 by the Head office of telecommunications (DGT). In February 1986, the programs begin from the fifth chain, property of Silvio Berlusconi and Jerome Seydoux, chairman and chief executive officer of the brought together Chargers. Little time after is inaugurated TV6 (which will become M6), right before the legislative elections which see the defeat of the presidential party and give the majority to the right-hand side. During the period of the cohabitation, the government of Jacques Chirac proposes the privatization of chain TF1 - regarded hitherto as the “voice of France” -, and, on on April 16th, 1987, the first emissions of TF1 privatized are with the screen.

Deregulation versifies with privatization and internationalization. In the years 1980, one attends a set of movements of concentration in the field of culture industries. New multimedia groups are created, while others consolidate their positions on the international markets. Japanese electronic large companies, such Sony, make control on the American cinematographic firms, like Columbia; so that at the end of the decade the quarter of the studios of Hollywood became the property of the companies Japanese, eager to extend their productive range to the industry of the programs. The latter appears indeed as an asset of size per hour when high definition television (TVHD) becomes a considerable industrial stake. The response of the American groups is not made wait.

The bringing together, in 1989, of the firms Time and Warner marks the beginning of a reorganization which is far from being completed. In the following decade, data-processing firms and telecommunications post, they also, their claims to build multimedia groups to benefit from the gigantic development which the digitalization of the images and the “highways of data” of the future promise.

The European groups are not in remainder. That which was a long time the only multinational television of Europe, Radio-TV-Luxembourg (RTL), ramifies towards Germany, enters in force to Belgium and takes shares in new French and British private televisions. The Fininvest group, of Berlusconi, is established in Spain and in many countries of the old socialist block. The company Channel + makes a breakthrough in Germany, in Spain, in Belgium, in Great Britain and in the Scandinavian countries. All and sundry find themselves in the forefront in the race with the privatization of audio-visual which opened in the East.

Period of great international expansion, years 1980 are also remembered by euphoric speeches on the communication of the future. But, in 1991, the fine tragedy of the tycoon - surendetté - British press Robert Maxwell, emblematic figure of the formidable growth of the groups of total communication, comes to recall the industrialists of the sector to reality: the “made worldwide in scope” cultural products penetrate only slowly the national companies and local, attached to their singularity. Thus, the Pan-European chains launched in the years 1980 by the Australo-American Rupert Murdoch (Sky Chanel) and by the proper Robert Maxwell (Superchannel) are far from to have filled the hopes of their creators, so much the mosaic of the cultures, the languages, the practices and of the aspirations of the inhabitants of the various European countries opposed resistances to their unifying project.

On the other hand, as regards information, the cabled chain CNN (Cable News Network), created in June 1980 by the Ted Turner American, opened the era of the planetary diffusion well. Outstanding political events, as the revolt of the students on the place Tian Year Men, the fall of the Berlin Wall and especially the war of the Gulf, made the chain of international reference of it. In 1993, CNN is distributed in 123 countries; it reaches more than 70 million hearths all over the world, including more than 13 million in Europe; moreover, approximately 400 foreign televisions signed agreements enabling them to diffuse a selection of CNN programs. With its continuation, other companies launch out to the conquest of the world spectrum. One of the rivals best placed of CNN is BBC World Service Television, subsidiary company (created in 1991) of old the BBC, which is pressed on the 50 world desks and the 200 correspondents of its radiophonic international service - whose fame of independence is not any more to make. French-speaking chain TV5, with vocation general practitioner, launched in January 1984 to make known in the world the French-speaking television programs, is the only public international chain of French language to being diffused by satellite.

Much country perceives the arrival of the transborder chains like a threat for their cultural sovereignty, which they try to protect by lawful measurements. Since 1984, the European Community makes public a bulky study entitled “Television without borders: Deliver green on the establishment of the Common Market of the radio-remote transmission, in particular by satellite and cable”, where it invites the various actors of audio-visual Europe to make known their opinion. On its side, the Council of Europe proposes, at a meeting in Vienna in 1986, a draft convention on television transborder. After many discussions and a formidable work of lobbying on the part of Tripartite of the media, advertizing advertisers and companies (European Advertizing Tripartite, founded in 1980), a minimal agreement is obtained, with the snatch, in October 1989, in Brussels as in Strasbourg.

In article 4 of the directive of the EEC, the Twelve advise “to hold for European works a majority proportion of the time of diffusion in the field of films, the fictions and the documentary ones, each time that is possible”. However, the EEC specifies that it is of a political position and not about a legal obligation, the Twelve not having managed to agree to impose quotas of European works. Great Britain, controlled at the time by the Prime Minister néolibéral Margaret Thatcher, is then in charge of the against regulations coalition. The opposing side, taken along by France, in vain tries to defend the idea of a threatened “European cultural identity”. In spite of this defect of legal sanction, the organizations representing the interests of the American producers accommodate with force criticisms what they interpret like a violation of the free flow of the communication. Similar argumentation will be taken again by the American delegation, during the discussions on free trade within GATT (General Agreement one Tariffs and Trade) in 1993, to prevent that is recognized with the audio-visual products the statute of “cultural exception”.

At the time of all these debates, the stake which for culture industries of the United States the development of the European markets of audio-visual represents became manifest. Indeed, the deregulation of the national systems of television made Europe the world importing primary market and the best customer - in addition one of rare solvent - American industry of the programs.

The deregulation completed to destabilize the primarily teaching and cultural vocation which had been that of the public utilities of television at their beginnings and which, in a certain way, took over school. According to specific methods to each national context, this vocation entered little by little in competition, to Europe, with another design of the use of the small screen, where the function of entertainment takes the essential place. Not that the public utilities had sacrificed this last aspect before, but they subjected it to the will to democratize the culture, to put its expression at the disposal of all the classes of citizens. However commercial televisions bring another idea of the distraction - quite far away from the ascetic image of the cultural training -, which will constitute a real challenge for the public utilities.

Pressure of the audience

With the deregulation, the commercial model of television triumphs indeed. The pressure of the TV rating becomes the major feature of the new audiovisual landscape; it defines new balances, always precarious, which the strategies of programming seek to establish. From now on, the life and the death of a program are closely related to its success of audience, whose figure is scanned by the advertizing agent. And such program, to defend oneself, will propose the market share that it represents.

This is why the audimetry singularly became more sophisticated.

The lengthening of the serviceable time for publicity is one gives general history of the deregulation. It constitutes an hobby horse. One remembers the film Federico Fellini, Ginger and Fred (1985), which parodied with an art consumed an avid commercial television of commercial breaks. The figures speak about themselves: before its privatization, French chain TF1 was authorized to program 18 minutes of publicity per day; after its privatization, it diffuses up to 12 minutes of publicity per hour. This reality makes it possible to better understand which stakes recovered, during the development of the directive of the EEC, the debates on the lifting of the restrictions, even of prohibitions (advertisements bound for the children, advertisements for marks of alcohol or tobacco), as regards publicity. In their commercial logic, new European private televisions thus have recourse to formulas - still new on the Old continent - making it possible to spare many advertizing beaches; for example, the contenitore kind (according to the word of the Italian professionals), together of programs of plays and varieties conceived as of the modules between which of the world the commercials fit most naturally.

The deregulation brutally changes the relationship between supply and demand which the old public utilities of television managed. The considerable increase of times of diffusion and the need for filling them with programs which answer a demand for quick change highlight the handicap that the heritage of a preserved situation of competition constitutes.

The purchase of the American emissions

These televisions had privileged a kind of production up to that point “artisanal”, where the author enjoyed a true autonomy of creation. They suddenly discover the need for reaching the industrial stage - which supposes series production, standardization, division of the labor, rationalization of the costs and profitability of company - and measure the extent of their deficit as regards programs of entertainment. The first solution that they imagine is to go to supply itself with existing stocks, in particular in the United States, from where they import quantity of series made in the USA; some of these series, very old, had not never left deep America, like the famous soap operas, interminable serials born with the radio and had begun again by the television channels. These programs are all the more interesting as they can be acquired, through the system called barter, by exchange against ad space. Generally, the importation of American series seems the solution of lower costs, matched, moreover, of a guarantee of success near the public: in France, three minutes of Crowned Evening, variety programme programmed at one hour for great listening, are more expensive than an episode of Santa Barbara.

The adaptation of the plays

European televisions are not satisfied to buy programs; they also import kinds and formulas, whose American producer yields the rights of use, always against time of antenna for its commercials. Thus settled in Spain, in Italy, in France and in good of other countries of the formulas of plays and shows as the Wheel of fortune, property of the manufacturer of detergents anglo-Dutch Unilever, produced by the American advertizing agency Lintas, or like the Fair price. Another transposition of formula to which many European countries have recourse is that of the reality show, which draws its emotional force from the participation of ordinary people testifying in connection with dramas that they lived.

In addition, the lack of national series of fiction intended for the general public precipitates the programmers towards commercial televisions of other areas of the world, like Brazil or, more recently, Mexico. Thus triumph, in Italy, in Spain, in Russia or Poland, the melodramatic telenovelas, serials which combine the old receipt of a popular kind inaugurated with the XIX ^E century in the newspapers with great pulling and the technological know-how of a televisual product of industrial invoice.

National resistances

With this irresistible advanced of a television built on the spectacular one, the various European public utilities oppose varied answers. Some, like televisions Belgian or Swiss, consolidate an identity centered on information, the report, the documentary one, the great investigations. Others, like German television, which opened less the offer of chains and are thus less subjected to the pressure of competition, count on a fiction more registered in their traditions. Public service in France, if one judges some by the oscillations that know its cultural emissions, in particular literary (Apostrophes type), did not succeed in yet finding his definition vis-a-vis a private sector which collects the largest market shares.

A thing is certain: the television of mass is competed with more and more by a fragmented television answering more targeted requests. The development of specialized channels (cinema, sport, information, programs for the young people, armchair shopping, etc) is significant of this tendency. The televiewer, confronted with the dilemma of passive consumption or the elective use of the small screen, also evolves him: the zapping, course individualized in the programming of the chains, is only a one indication of this behavioral change. Television, as the critic Serge Daney said it, they are also the users who do it.