Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 1, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Anyone who is not online has no future: with this principle, ZDF Director-General Markus Schächter highlighted the importance of online prospects in the digital world in light of current deliberations on the 12th Interstate Broadcasting Amendment Treaty. At the opening of the 41st Mainz Television Criticism Days on the theme “Commodity or Value? — Television Between Cash Cow and Public Value”, Schächter said on Monday, March 31, 2008: “Anyone who wants to prohibit public-service television broadcasters from publishing text contributions on the Internet in 2008 harms journalistic competition. Anyone who wants to introduce exclusion categories amid media convergence, in which text and moving images enter new combinations every day, jeopardises the future of public-service television and contradicts the Federal Constitutional Court’s guarantee of online development.”
At the start of the media conference, Schächter set out in five points that public-service broadcasters would have growing journalistic importance in the future of the dual system because of private broadcasters’ changed business models. This increasingly important role in the digital world must above all also be exercised on the World Wide Web; otherwise, television offerings that cannot be combined with the Internet will stand no chance.
Financial investors and programme providers, media scholars, media policymakers and media critics are discussing the demands on television between cash cow and public value, and the future of television in the face of the Internet, online communities and mobile media, today and tomorrow at the ZDF broadcasting centre in Mainz.
Excerpts from the Mainz Television Criticism Days will again be broadcast by Phoenix this year, and the event can be followed live online in the ZDFmediathek.
Further Links:
- Media Conference in the ZDF Mediathek
