New technology is revolutionizing broadcasting markets. As the cost of bandwidth processing and delivery fall, information-intensive services that once bore little economic relationship to each other are now increasingly related as substitutes or complements. Television, newspapers, telecoms and the internet compete ever more fiercely for audience attention. At the same time, digital encoding makes it possible to charge prices for content that had previously been broadcast for free. This is creating new markets where none existed before. How should public policy respond? Will competition lead to better services, higher quality and more consumer choice - or to a proliferation of low-quality channels? Will it lead to dominance of the market by a few powerful media conglomerates? Using the insights of modern microeconomics, this book provides a state-of-the-art analysis of these and other issues by investigating the power of regulation to shape and control broadcasting markets.

This book analyzes and evaluates the overall significance of public market involvement in general and specifically in the Polish TV signal transmission segment. The work's theoretical fundament consists on the one hand of the major technological parameters accompanying the market, and on the other hand of the two main theoretical approaches influencing this industry: the theories of competition policy and media policy. Based on the technological preconditions of the television sector, its natural markets and products are identified, thereby connecting the technological sphere with a market model terminology. The theoretical approaches examine the TV market's economic and socio-political specifics with the focus on the question of public market regulation, its justification, configuration, and extend. On this base, Poland's television market is presented in its broader context from three interrelated angles: from the legislative, the political, and the economic perspective, allowing for a definition of its factual public market involvement level, for the elaboration of its shortcomings according to the previously derived theoretical postulates, and for refinement suggestions.