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Programming scarcity that characterized the broadcast era, or what this article refers to as constraint, served very different goals. Often intertwined, these goals ranged from the formation of an ideologically coherent national public, to the protection of economic self-interest, to the explicit promotion of products and messages. They were deployed rather differently in the commercial American and state/public European spaces of television. The article explores a number of assumptions regarding the institution and medium of television that have persisted from the broadcast era into our own and that might well, given the very different structures of contemporary television, be repositioned. It outlines the contours of that repositioning, sketching the implications for some of our theoretical and methodological defaults. Keywords: broadcast era; scarcity; commercial and public service television; United States; Germany; audience metrics

Byline: Zach C. Cohen Gov. Gary Herbert's (R) reelection campaign released a TV ad focused on the economy. Herbert, in ad: 'We must now direct our focus on making education [...]

This paper provides a contribution to the geographies of advertising and the media. The authors examine the ways in which commercial television companies try to attract advertising to their regions; advertising being their main source of revenue. Competition based on the cost of advertising in particular regions is effectively restricted. This market failure results in regionally uneven allocations of advertising money, and hence an uneven regional pattern of TV company revenues. Other forms of competition are used to attempt to change this. TV companies promote their regions to advertisers and advertising agencies in ways varying from the production of 'hard' data to full-blown campaigns designed to promote or alter regional 'images'. They also provide various services and cost incentives. It is argued that the deregulation of commercial television, which introduces intraregional competition, will not correct the market failure and will, if anything, reinforce the uneven allocation of advertising monies and media revenues. It is also suggested that intraregional competition will reduce regional promotion, the main competitive strategy that has been used to try to offset regional differences.

The television shopping phenomenon is analyzed in terms of media system dependency theory. The analysis begins with a discussion of potential changes in structural relationships within the media system introduced by television shopping. We discuss how these structural changes imply changes in microlevel dependency relations. A hierarchy of dependency relations is proposed, with television dependency leading to dependency upon a genre of TV programming and, ultimately, to the development of parasocial relationships with the hosts of specific programs. Using measures of television dependency, parasocial interaction, demographic variables, and buying behavior, a model is proposed and tested upon a random sample of viewer-buyers from a major television shopping service to explain the relationships among the viewer-buyer, the television shopping program, and the television medium. Results indicate that genre dependency plays a central role in the pattern of relationships.