Television is a Public Good That is too Important to be Left Entirely to the Market

'Television is a public good that is too important to be left entirely to the market'. To what extent do you agree with this statement? What are the key challenges facing public service television today?
Student's Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course Code and Title
Date
'Television is a public good that is too important to be left entirely to the market'. To what extent do you agree with this statement? What are the key challenges facing public service television today?
Television is an audiovisual mass medium that people use to get news, entertainment, education and other political, economic and social information. Several media companies run television stations that reach millions of audiences daily. The nature of television, based on ownership and the consumption of its products, makes it an interesting service. Like other businesses, televisions are business entities that capitalize on information dissemination. Television firms sell products from advertisers to audiences, convincing them to buy certain products or services over others. Television becomes a good for facilitating business and earning revenue for the owners of the television stations. All goods undergo market control to regulate consumption and pricing. Television is one of the goods that undergo such market control; thus is a public good that creates a particular control interest to consumers and other stakeholders. Based on this background discussion, I fully agree with the statement that "television is a public good that is too important to be left entirely to the market." This is because television is a vital information source that should be regulated by the public sector to serve the public's interest. The challenges facing public television today are changing viewing habits, technological changes, audience fragmentation, political interference and funding.
Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, and television fits in this category. Non-excludable means that excluding someone from consuming the good is impossible or costly. On the other hand, non-rivalrous means that one can consume the product alongside others; thus, using the said product does not hinder another person from using it (Andrijašević, 2015). Television is a non-excludable good because once the broadcast signals are roaming, none can stop another one from consuming television content. Similarly, television is non-rivalrous because a person consuming television content does not prevent another from consuming the same content. Therefore, television as a public good agrees with the public goods theory. The theory aims at showing why goods with defined characteristics of publicness cannot be efficiently produced by the private sector (Holcombe, 2000). The model further suggests that public goods are better produced and regulated by the public sector, including governments.
However, technological evolution challenges the nature of television as a public good. When it was discovered, television functioned solely on free-to-air terrestrial television platforms between the 1820s and 1980s, where everybody with a television set enjoyed the broadcast without paying (Andrijašević, 2015). Between the 1980s and 2000, television technology improved, and the g...