Israel's television industry should be viewed as a single interdependent system.
Lately, we've frequently read in the press about various initiatives to reform the Israeli television market. Measures include closing the Education Channel, a new tender for Channel 10, allowing advertising on cable and satellite channels, and reforming the Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA).
Presenting and dealing with each of these reforms separately, which is how the communications market has essentially tended to approach regulatory issues, would be a mistake. Israel has five broadcasting channels altogether, including one public channel and the cable and satellite networks, and they are managed separately and independently of each other, not to mention in mutual hostility.
The Education Channel answers to the Ministry of Education; IBA is run by an administrative committee comprised of public officials; commercial Channel 2 and Channel 10 are supervised by the Second Radio and Television Broadcasting Authority; and the cable and satellite networks are supervised by the Council for Cable and Satellite Broadcasting. In short, one can't see the forest for the regulatory trees.
This structure of regulatory separation is the direct result of the development of television broadcasting in Israel, which has been in existence for only 40 years. Until the 1990s, when cable entered the market, and was quickly followed by Channel 2, there was just one channel in Israel, Channel 1. Later, satellite broadcasting was launched, as well as Channel 10, and the rest is history.
40 years of Israeli television, and less than 20 years of multi-channel television, are two generations in social and cultural terms. The time has therefore come to restructure the market and adapt it to its environment.
The only way to analyze the television market is to take a top-down view, as demanded by systems theory. In other words, it is necessary to look at the television market as a complete organic system, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. To obtain a holistic and complete perspective of the system, each of its parts cannot be taken in isolation, because all of the parts have reciprocal ties and are mutually dependent.
However one looks at them, these components are functions of the system as a whole; in other words, of the total television market. To take this systems analogy further, a disturbance in one or more of the components that deviates beyond a critical threshold, risks destabilizing the system as a whole, rendering liable to collapse.
It is therefore impossible to discuss closing the Education Channel in isolation from a discussion on the Channel 10 franchise, or allowing advertising on the cable and satellite networks, or reform of the IBA. All the channels depend on each other financially, culturally, socially, and contextually.
Under these circumstances, the initiative of Minister of Communications Ariel Atias to establish a committee to review multi-channel television is welcome. We can hope that, once and for all, a serious and courageous review of the entire system and all its components will take place.
The author is the chief executive of the Israel Audience Research Board
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on August 6, 2008
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