Jeanette Steemers

• Professor (Full) at King's College London

Video-on-demand (VoD) platforms have become primary spaces for encounters with transnational film and television, particularly among younger audiences. The expansion of global US-owned VoD services like Netflix has generated questions about the availability, discoverability, and prominence of domestic and European content, making the issue of how t...

Screen Encounters with Britain (SEB) is an AHRC-funded research project that explores how transnational video-on-demand services like Netflix and YouTube affect the nature and extent of European audiences' digital encounters with the UK. Using a mixed-methods approach, which combines document analysis to assess market trends with quantitative and...

Screen Encounters with Britain (SEB) is an AHRC-funded research project that explores how transnational video-on-demand services like Netflix and YouTube affect the nature and extent of European audiences' digital encounters with the UK. Using a mixed-methods approach, which combines document analysis to assess market trends with quantitative and...

Screen Encounters with Britain (SEB) is an AHRC-funded research project that explores how transnational video-on-demand services like Netflix and YouTube affect the nature and extent of European audiences' digital encounters with the UK. Using a mixed-methods approach, which combines document analysis to assess market trends with quantitative and...

Drawing on survey and interview data from a pilot study undertaken online in Denmark (March–July 2020), this article provides exploratory insights about how young audiences in Denmark (aged 16–34, with a background in higher education) engage with British television and film as viewing shifts from broadcast television to online on-demand services....

Shifts towards on-demand viewing and the advance of global streaming services are dramatically changing screen content consumption, generating new research questions and reinforcing the need for methodological revisions within audience research. Based on a pilot study in Denmark conducted in 2020, this article offers critical reflections and soluti...

There has never been a greater need for reliable, truthful news to help citizens navigate and assess the veracity of what they are reading and viewing, especially on social media. Widespread concerns around ‘fake’ news demonstrate an enduring requirement for curated and trustworthy children’s news that addresses children as young citizens with cert...

The material challenges of funding, commissioning and distribution that are well known to inhibit production of children’s factual content about other countries and cultures operate in parallel with challenges arising from the moral responsibilities inherent in what Roger Silverstone called “the problem of proper distance”. By that he signified a “...

This paper starts from the premise that research into how producers negotiate issues of diversity and multicultural content in Europe is rare and mostly relies on interviews and documents, and furthermore work on understanding those negotiation processes in relation to children’s screen content is even rarer. The article seeks to reflect critically...

Netflix and other transnational online video streaming services are disrupting long-established arrangements in national television systems around the world. In this paper we analyse how public service media (PSM) organisations (key purveyors of societal goals in broadcasting) are responding to the fast-growing popularity of these new services. Dra...

Just like people around the world have done for generations, Arab people from the Middle East and North African (MENA) region have immigrated to various nations around the world. A number of ‘push’ factors account for why groups have left their homeland and ‘pulled’ to another nation to settle. The history and patterns of Arab migration out of the...

In this study 31 producers of children’s TV from 21 countries were asked to provide insights into their strategies about how they are dealing with the current COVID-19 crisis.

An international study in 42 countries inquired children’s perception of the coronacrisis, their knowledge on COVID-19 and the role the media play in this. URL: http://www.br-online.de/jugend/izi/english/publication/televizion/33_2020_E/Goetz_Mendel_Lemish-Children_COVID-19_and_the_media.pdf

This article explores representations of childhood and forced migration within a selection of European screen content for and about children. Based on the findings of a research project that examined the intersections of children’s media, diversity, and forced migration in Europe (www.euroarabchildrensmedia.org), funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanit...

This chapter explores issues around diversity and forced migration, based on input from a 2017–18 project in which samples of European screen content for children were discussed by European and Arab practitioners. It starts by considering studies of how European media institutions deal with issues around multiculturalism and “diversity within diver...

In this chapter we outline the type and volume of screen content available to be seen by children on various delivery platforms in both Arab and European countries, tracking interconnections where these take place in modes of delivery and the supply chain. We assess the changing landscape of delivery and the impact of the arrival of subscription vi...

This chapter concerns itself with policies designed to promote children’s well-being through media. First, it looks at different ways of regulating screen media for children’s benefit, focusing on the principles of provision, protection and participation that underpin the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)—before considering collab...

This chapter documents and analyses case studies of Arab-European collaboration in delivering video content for children. With the aim of exploring sources of cultural and financial power, it starts by citing examples of some issues that have arisen in cross-regional provision of children’s screen content, around what makes it “local,” its language...

As the present work is prompted in part by the scale of children’s displacement across the Arab region and demographic change in Europe, we start the final chapter by comparing theory and practice in the use of screen media to provide visibility for children experiencing disruption and uncertainty. We consider two documented projects designed to pr...

Highlighting gaps in our understanding of processes underpinning the making and circulation of children’s screen content across the Arab region and Europe, this chapter explains how this book sets aside Euro- or Arab-centrism to engage with an outward-looking version of what might be called child-centrism in respect of policy and production. We con...

This book addresses gaps in our understanding of processes that underpin the making and circulation of children's screen contents across the Arab region and Europe. Taking account of recent disruptive shifts in geopolitics that call for new thinking about how children’s media policy and production should proceed after large-scale forced migration i...

This chapter focuses on the provision of public service content and services for children in the context of debates around the BBC and Charter Review, which took place between July 2015 and May 2016. In doing so, it conceives children’s television as a microcosm of many PSB challenges relating to competition, funding, commercialization and changing...

Domestically produced children’s television is frequently highlighted as both an area of market failure, and also as an area where children’s changing consumption habits necessitate new and different ways of thinking about funding children’s content across a range of platforms. In the light of a recent U.K. proposal to set up a Public Service Conte...

Funding original children’s television has never been easy because this is rarely a commercially attractive proposition unless you target a global audience and tap into ancillary revenues from licenced merchandise. As a case of market failure, policy makers who wish to ensure the production of a diverse range of quality content for children have th...

While the internet has facilitated a proliferation in children’s media offerings and platforms, television remains the dominant medium in children’s lives. Broadcasters and subscription services both compete for their attention, as viewers and as potential consumers of merchandise. Within this transforming landscape, children’s television is now pr...

Focusing on the United Kingdom, this article addresses key issues facing the international distribution industry arising from over-the-top (OTT) digital distribution and the fragmentation of audiences and revenues. Building on the identification of these issues, it investigates the extent to which U.K. distribution has altered over a ten-year perio...

Moving away from the dominant discourse of US experience, this article looks at how the production of local content for children remains a central issue in many parts of the world, in spite of the growth of transnational media and the apparent abundance of content for children worldwide. Drawing on a pre-summit workshop on Children’s Content at the...

There has been a conventional wisdom in contemporary media studies that views the phenomenon of globalisation (economic, political, technological and cultural) as a process that diminishes the role of the nation-state. Extrapolating from the observation that each generation of media technologies has enabled more rapid transmission of messages from...

The institution of public service broadcasting (PSB) and more recently public service media (PSM), offering new multiplatform services that go beyond radio and television, has always been connected with the constructed concept of nation (Williams, 1975; Gellner, 1983). This is particularly the case in its European heartland where PSB was initiated...

In Debate contains papers presented at the Cowboys or Indies Conference held at BFI South Bank on 20 September 2012, which marked the end of a two-year AHRC research project into Multiplatforming Public Service, and coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of Channel 4.

No other area of television programming has probably been so deeply transformed over the past three decades as children’s television. Once a small, prevalently national, public service endeavour, children’s television has been transformed into what is arguably one of the most globalised forms of television and a highly complex industry, primarily d...

This study examines the children's channel output of the US transnationals in Germany, Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands, and seeks to identify the specific factors that determine and shape their programming strategies linked to localisation. The analysis is based on a 2-week analysis of the schedules of some of the most popular transnatio...

This article examines the evaluation and regulation of public service broadcasting’s (PSB’s) contribution to home-grown children’s content, a key marker of difference with commercial rivals. UK experience forms the core of the analysis, but throughout we connect findings to experiences in other European countries. We concentrate on PSB’s interventi...

CBeebies, the BBC's brand for young children, has become a successful public service undertaking, lauded by parents and policy makers alike. Nevertheless, it operates in a complex and highly competitive "ecology," where recent funding crises in commercial television have left CBeebies as the main commissioner of U. K.-originated content. Having out...

This book is written by media scholars from all over Europe who are members of the Euromedia Research Group. What unites the group is the joint interest of its members in the analysis of media structures and media policy in Europe against the background of contemporary communication theories and concepts. The book has two parts: First, it looks int...

This chapter examines the policy framework shaping the provision of children’s content by three Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) organisations — the BBC in Britain, PBS in the US and RAI in Italy. It shows how political decisions regarding the remit and funding of PSBs have traceable consequences for the ability of these organisations to make a re...

As the first producer above indicates, determining what will work in children’s or preschool television is difficult because programme-makers are not part of that audience any more, but producers do need to get ‘down into the child’s world’. As we learnt in Chapter 6, in the United States this anomaly is tackled by marketing and developmental resea...

Chapter 3 stressed the international and economic dimensions of preschool programme production. In doing so it highlighted the significance of the United States both as the major market for preschool programming, and as a source of channel brands and productions. This chapter moves on to consider the broadcast environment within a specific national...

As we have seen access to funding and broadcast transmission are key factors in determining whether a preschool production will actually get made. Looking beyond the institutional and economic facets of the production environment, this chapter considers those specific features of the development process that determine the nature of television for y...

So far this book has concentrated on the production circumstances behind preschool television and the assumptions that those who produce, broadcast and market preschool content make about young audiences and the broader marketplace. However, beyond the focus on production practices and changes in institutional and economic circumstances, there are...

Chapters 6 and 7 covered the parameters and culture of preschool television development and production. They considered how programming is informed by programme-makers’ conceptions of the audience, derived from a combination of professional experience, institutional practices and research which may focus variously on what children like and want or...

This book has attempted to map the historical, institutional and economic contexts that impact the creation of preschool television as well as the interlocking creative, business and regulatory interests which inform its development. This has been achieved through a ‘middle ground’ (Cottle, 2003a: 4–5) analysis, focused on organisational structures...

As Buckingham points out children’s television is ‘not produced by children but for them’. As such children’s programmes are frequently more a manifestation of adult ‘interests or fantasies or desires’ and their construction of childhood rather than a reflection of what children want (1995a: 47). This is apparent in the history of children’s televi...

Around the world small children are regularly captivated by television programmes produced especially for them by adults who inhabit a distinctive production community. Alongside long-running series such as Sesame Street, more recent arrivals such as Bob the Builder, Teletubbies and Dora the Explorer have become enduring favourites with children an...

Children’s television production does not exist in a vacuum. Like other areas of television it is promoted or constrained by policy and regulatory frameworks with profound and far-reaching effect. This is evident in the different historical development of children’s television in the United States and Britain where commercial and public service pri...

The previous two chapters illustrated the importance of primary broadcasters as a showcase for content and a key force in determining what gets made. They also highlighted the significant position of horizontally and vertically integrated US transnational corporations, Disney and Viacom (Nickelodeon), who since the 1990s have become active across a...

As Pecora indicates, at the heart of children’s television including preschool television, there is often a very basic conflict of interest. How-ever much broadcasters and producers emphasise the creative integrity, educational value and age-appropriateness of their preschool offerings, there are always suspicions among parents and cultural critics...

Preschool television is often cited as the most exportable and commercially exploitable form of children’s television content (Cassy, 2000; Ofcom, 2007a). Like all children’s programming, there is a new audience every 2 years as the old one grows up and moves on. Where many preschool series differ, however, is in their longer shelf life with some a...

The review looks at the recent review of children's television broadcasting by the governmental regulator in the UK, Ofcom. It suggests that the research represents a valuable addition to the policy literature by filling the gap in previous research, particularly by providing an in-depth analysis of the economics of the sector. However, it question...

Britain is almost unique in giving its incumbent public service broadcaster, the BBC, a leading role in driving digital, thereby hoping to hasten digital take-up, and thus allowing analogue switch-off by 2012. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part investigates the recent historical past with respect to the making of policy, drawing o...

Within the broader context of globalisation and the transformation of world television markets, this article sets out to address the extent of British drama's international presence, and the factors which either promote or inhibit that presence in Britain's major television export markets in the United States, Western Europe and Australasia. Alongs...

The last few decades have witnessed profound changes in the structure, content, technology, regulation and cultural forms of European television industries. Television in Europe operates in an increasingly globalised communications market characterised by commercialisation, fragmentation and transnational ownership. Digital transmission has resulte...

This paper considers the debate in the U.K. and Germany about the continued justification for publicly funded public service broadcasting in an apparently converging media and communications environment. It examines the public broadcasters' responses, which increasingly encompass a broad range of expansionary and commercial strategies. These strate...

Drawing on examples from the UK (BBC) and Germany (ARD and ZDF) this paper explores the problems of redefining publicly funded public service broadcasting in the light of plans for digital expansion and attempts either to tap into or increase supplementary commercial sources of funding. An analysis of reactions to the prospect of a digital future r...

Drawing on examples from the United Kingdom and Germany, this paper sets out to explore the potential impact of digital television on broadcasting, and to identify what implications its introduction might have for audio-visual plurality and diversity. Through an analysis of current trends in television, it examines the difficulty of applying tradit...