Television is the primary source of information for most people, and is widely considered to be the most influential medium in forming public opinion.

Television viewing time has increased steadily over recent years.

Television has maintained its dominant position in spite of the rise of new communication technologies such as the Internet.

Across Europe, television markets are highly concentrated both in terms of ownership and viewer-ship. In most countries, the three largest television channels grab the bulk of the viewer-ship. At the same time, the ownership of private broadcasters tends to be highly concentrated, despite political declarations against the monopolization of media markets and legislation to limit such concentration.

Besides terrestrial television, the most-used platforms for delivering television are cable and satellite.

The expansion of these platforms has been significantly different in different countries, depending both on State policy in the communications field and on local geography.

In Western Europe, there have been several patterns of development of cable and satellite, which took off mainly in the 1980s. First, there are countries, such as Germany, that have invested massively in both cable and satellite distribution to expand their television offering. Another pattern of the development of cable and satellite penetration is found in the southern countries, such as Italy where there is almost no cable connected or small satellite penetration.

In post-communist countries, cable and satellite penetration is still low and a large part of the population takes its television from terrestrial channels. Countries with low penetration of cable and satellite include Croatia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, the Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia and Turkey.

However, cable television has been steadily growing in a few countries in this region, such as Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. Satellite television penetration is low, in both CEE and SEE, with only Croatia enjoying satellite coverage of over 25 per cent.

Regarding all means of communications, the telecommunications industry has seen a bold growth over the past five years. More than half of these countries' households had a telephone line in 2003, except for Albania and Lithuania (where mobile telephone use is high). More than half of their populations owned a mobile telephone that year,except for Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Romania and Serbia and Montenegro. However the mobile telephone industry is one of the fastest-growing in the region. The most promising growth is expected from the Internet, which has enjoyed great expansion in recent years.

The average Internet usage in Western Europe was 46 per cent in 2003, as compared to 13 per cent in CEE.

However, Internet penetration has increased extremely rapidly in the past two years, and its enhanced capability to carry all kinds of communications, including radio, television and voice services, makes it the medium with one of the highest potentials for growth in the future communication industry.
From an article of Laura Martinez

The first thing revealed by an analysis of the audiovisual policies which have traditionally been pursued by different countries in the Europe Union is the diversity of existing television models.

That diversity finds its historical justification in the fact that when the medium of television began to expand on the Old Continent after the end of the Second World War, Europe was torn by such deep rifts that any idea of a common European identity made absolutely no sense at all.

The European countries today are well aware that the ideas of nation-state and national culture that developed in the 19th century were at the root of the two world wars. And for Europeans at the time, above and beyond any political and economic differences between the states, there prevailed a reciprocal feeling of strangeness: they knew one another very little and not very well.

In that Europe which looked with scant favor on the idea of a community, Television emerged, and it is not surprising that its history reflects that sense of difference and strangeness. There is no reason to think that in such a social and political context it would have been possible for the different television systems to have been directed towards common solutions from the outset. And so, in each country television -and with it audiovisual policies- was constructed in relation to its own society and became a medium that reaffirmed its own specific cultural traditions. The past, present and future of European television are closely linked to the political, social and cultural evolution of European society.

That is why we can conceive the future European television scene as an extremely articulated market, in which mediocrity and cultured, sophisticated programs will exist side by side. A scene made from pluralism and diversity of audiovisual supply in which the cultural and linguistic identity of each European country will live harmoniously with the feeling of belonging to a "European supra-nation". A scene which will be capable of engendering a plural European television system, robust and competitive internationally.

Source: European Audiovisual Observatory