Albanian TV programming on the eve of the switch over to digital terrestrial broadcasting

Abstract

The paper addresses the television programs’ production and analyzes this content for national coverage television stations in Albania. Television programming in Albania has moved quickly toward quantitative and qualitative growth over a period of 10 years, but is still dominated by top-down perspective look at the audience, which remains mostly a passive one. Television stations, mostly imitate each other in their program structures and strategies. The paper gives statistical data of 2013 for three national coverage television stations of the different TV genres.

The paper sets the focus on the development of Albanian TV market at the point of transition to digital terrestrial television broadcasting, as the deadline is set for mid June 2015.

Television management, as a specific form of business management, presents some of its characteristics through program percentage occupied by each of the television genres in the structure of TV programming. The “economy of television”, figures and numbers of advertisement revenues and audience seems to take priority over television programming, and this is also present in Albania nowadays on the verge of a digital terrestrial TV broadcasting. The Sustainable Development Index for the media industry and also the effect of business management factor in Albania are presented in the paper.