SCHEDULING: WHERE POWER LIES IN TELEVISON

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CRITICAL REVIEW

SCHEDULING: WHERE POWER LIES IN TELEVISON

The aims of the assignment is to discuss and evaluate how scheduling is constructed and how broadcasters use audiences to schedule their programmes. This assignment will also look at the competition that occurs between different channels when it comes to scheduling.

One of the more important points that the article seems to touch on is ‘genre’. Specific channels and specific national broadcasting systems have different generic mixes. Some genres are heavily featured while others are absent. Genre is recognised in the article as being a crucial factor to determine scheduling and the audience it is trying to target. Therefore genres not only become useful to the audience but also broadcasters who put a lot of thought in scheduling specific programmes to specific audiences. Therefore each television system and each broadcaster maintains a balance between the genres of television. The main networks in USA have a narrow generic mix, mainly concentrated on news, dramas etc. whereas public service television tends to be defined by a wider range of genres. This is done so that head to head competition between programmes in the same genre is less occur ant. Genres are the basic building blocks of television and the schedule is the architecture that combines them.

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The schedule defines the everyday specificity on television. The nature of television is defined by scheduling for example the pacing of particular programme types, the balance between particular forms of programming etc. In simple terms a schedule is a grid, dividing the broadcasting day into slots of thirty minutes duration.  In the age of scarcity when television was broadcast live it was difficult to control the duration of the programme. However in the era of availability, individual programmes matter less than the integrity and the channel itself.

Another important factor in the article is ‘audience’. The performance ...

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