Ownership & Funding

Public Service Broadcasting (PSB)
The public service broadcasting was brought about by Lord Reith in the form of the BBC in 1922 on the 18th of October when he decided that advertisement in radio was damaging society. Radio came about in the 1920s but surprisingly the television was built before hand but development stopped when the war came about. When the television became available and the first channel was released it was funded by licence fees which take a percentage from any household which had a television. There main purpose is to provide television without subscriptions and sign on fees to give viewers freedom from paying for television; this also includes being free from adverts unlike channels like ITV and C4 which pay for there programmes through sponsorships of the programmes and adverts. As a definition public service broadcasting is a service for the public for only benificial uses instead of just commercial concerns. Lord Reith defined that his purpose in public service broadcasting was to, "inform, educate and entertain". Lord Reith recieved a lot of critizsim inside and outside the BBC for his idea on public service broadcasting because of the lack of profit to be made from it but after a long battle with the board of the BBC, his idea was eventually pushed through and still stands today.

Commercial Broadcasting
There are three main types of broadcasting systems in the world; some channels like channel 4 operate on more than one of them but channel 4 has lots of partner channels like more four. The most well known but becoming less used is the terrestrial channels, like ITV and the BBC; these channels are sent through a radio mast and sent to peoples TVs through radio waves. The one that is becoming the mot popular is satellite TV, with all your freeview channels and the main one sky; these channels are sent down from satellites orbiting the earth, this is a good way to reach people who's TVs are out of radio range but the signals from satellites are easily disrupted with from atmospheric interference. The last of the broadcasting methods is cable, which is a lot more common in the USA, but is still used in Britain with channels like virgin and cable is very simply is made by putting a cable in the ground and leading it to your TV.

Corporate Ownership
A corporate ownership is very simply a big company much like the BBC set up by other individual company's with a charter.

Private Ownership
A private ownership company is not owned by the government and is often not for public use; some channels are like this, for instance a channel that you have to subscribe to, to watch like for instance a sports channel on sky that gives you exclusive looks at specific sports that you can't watch anywhere else.

Global Companies
These company's are huge company's that can be found all over the world and own massive amounts of other small company's. The main six of these which are all worth over a billion dollars or pounds are, News Corporation, Viacom, Time Warner, Walt Disney, Sony and General Electric. All of these company's are massive and even though the main company's themselves ain't well known the company's they own are; for example News Corporations owns fox, this includes fox search light, twentieth century fox, and fox news. Time Warner own the Warner brothers studio, Sony owns Columbia pictures and tri star and Walt Disney just recently took over Marvel.

Vertical Integration
This is basically the way film company's make money, a production company makes the film, they then sell the rights to the film to a distribution company who then rent out copies of the film to exhibitors (cinemas) who then display the film to the public. To own all three of these sectors it called complete vertical integration and this is illegal because the government feels that this gives them too much control. For an example of vertical integration outside of the media, the Carnegie Steel company controlled the mills where the steel was made, the mines where it was extracted from, the coal mines that supplied the coal to create the steel, the cargo ships that transported the steel, the rail roads that transported the coal to the factory's and the coke ovens where the coal was cooked.

Horizontal Integration
This is where a company purchases other company's in the same sectors; they do this to they can generate more money, for instance Rupert Murdock, the owner of News Corporation buys news papers. This way not only does he have more money but he is not competing with as many company's for profit.

Monopoly
Having a monopoly basically means instead for example instead of Rupert Murdock owner some papers he owns all the papers, which would be illegal but he tries to get around this by knock out the other papers (the competition) and he does this through many different methods but the most commonly used one would be to advertise his papers a lot cheaper than others, which might make him a loss but if people see one of his papers cheaper than their regular one they might try his paper and this in turn might make them switch papers if they enjoy his more.

Sources of funding for media companies
Licence fee: The BBC gets a percentage from each household with a TV
Subscription: Sky has to be signed up to so you can watch it and it's programmes
Pay per view: The Box Office
one off purchases; DVDs & Blue Ray
sponsorship: Coronation Street is sponsored by compare the market.com
advertising: ITV and Channel 4, lets adverts who pay to play between and during programmes)
product placement: Putting product brands in films and TVs (The beer in SkyFall)
Private Capital: Robert Rodriguez donated his body to science to fund the small film El Mariachi
financial aid; The Lottery
development funds: Grants