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

Abstract

The paper addresses the television programs’ production and analyzes this content in a range of 11 years (2003-2013) for national and regional coverage television stations in Albania. The paper set the focus on the development of Albanian TV market on the point of transition to digital terrestrial television broadcasting. 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. Televisions stations mostly imitate each other in their program structures and strategies. 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 digital terrestrial TV broadcasting. The television stations remains still with a "limited autonomy" and as such continues to be affected by factors and other systems that operate outside of the media. The paper presents examples from some of the main television stations in Albania for indicators such as cost structures, programs cost, relations between different television genres, forms management televisions. The Sustainable Development Index for the media industry and also the effect of business management factor in Albania are presented in the paper.