Television
The Argentine television industry is large and diverse, widely viewed in Latin America, and its productions seen around the world. Many local programs are broadcast by networks in other countries, and others have their rights purchased by foreign producers for adaptations in their own markets. Argentina has five major networks. All provincial capitals and other large cities have at least one local station. Argentines enjoy the highest availability of cable and satellite television in Latin America, similar to percentages in North America. Many cable networks operate from Argentina and serve the Spanish-speaking world, including Utilísima Satelital, TyC Sports, Fox Sports en Español (with the United States and México), MTV Argentina, Cosmopolitan TV, and the news network Todo Noticias.
Argentine television broadcasting began in 1951 with the inaugural of state-owned Channel 13 (since privatized). A technology jealously guarded by U.S. broadcasters at the time, this was largely the achievement of Russian-Argentine engineer and radio pioneer Jaime Yankelevich. Color television broadcasting, however, was not widely available until after 1978, when the government launched Argentina Televisora Color (ATC), now Channel 7 (Argentina's principal public television station). The prevalence of cable television, increasing steadily since the first CATV transmitter opened in the city of Junín in 1965, is now the third-widest in the world, reaching at least 78% of households.
Radio and television broadcasting, whose ownership structure had become increasingly concentrated since the 1980 Media Law, is regulated by a new law advanced by President Cristina Kirchner, and signed on November 11, 2009. This new policy would restrict the number of media licences per proprietor and allocate a greater share of these to the state and NGOs, thereby limiting the influence of the Clarín Group (the largest media conglomerate in Argentina) and other media companies, such as the conservative La Nación.
There are currently 42 television broadcast stations and 12.5 million television sets in Argentina.
Read more about this topic: Communications In Argentina
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)
“History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
In Beverly Hills ... they don’t throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
—Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)