Abstract
This chapter explores the relationship between Public Service Media (PSM) and the market through the lens of risk. Instead of approaching PSM’s market impact from a crowding-out perspective, we focus on how these organizations contribute to creating, shaping, and sustaining markets. We identify two key areas of risk that PSM organizations are actively negotiating and/or as part of a change to their remit and responsibilities: first, in creating and sustaining a supply base of indigenous content, and second, in contributing to innovation capacity. Whilst we don’t argue that all PSM organizations are engaging in these equally, or even delivering effectively on these agendas, we want to highlight the important contribution that PSM makes to creative economies and to economic and cultural activity within nation states more generally. The chapter concludes by arguing that by undermining the scale and funding of PSM their capacity to assume that risk is weakening, and that this will have implications for the entire marketplace.
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Notes
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- 2.
The authors recognize the critical role that PSM can play in taking creative risks and innovating within genre, style, and forms as part of their program-making activities. However, for the purposes of this chapter, we focus on risk as a market-based concern.
- 3.
The economic impact of VRT Sandbox was a 90% increase of the start-ups’ staff and almost a 20 million euro boost of their capital (Raats et al. 2018). The success of the VRT Sandbox attracted international attention that eventually led to the establishment of the Sandbox Hub, a new platform launched in 2017 within the EU-funded project MediaRoad.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter is part of the activities of the research project (RTI2018-096065-B-100) of the Spanish State Program of R + D + I oriented to the Challenges of Society of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MCIU), State Research Agency (SRA), and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) on “New values, governance, financing and public audiovisual services for the Internet society: European and Spanish contrasts.”
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Rodríguez-Castro, M., Noonan, C., Ramsey, P. (2021). Public Service Media Interventions: Risk and the Market. In: Túñez-López, M., Campos-Freire, F., Rodríguez-Castro, M. (eds) The Values of Public Service Media in the Internet Society. Palgrave Global Media Policy and Business. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56466-7_10
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