Tuning In The Global Village : Powerful Signals: A Look at Four Global Media Moguls : SILVIO BERLUSCONI

The future belongs to global television. But that future will be a long time coming. Not years, but many decades, maybe more than a century, depending on how long it takes for the world population to become uniformly English-speaking.

My company has prospered, among other things, because I have always been able to take the long view. A time frame of 15 or even 20 years is meaningful, and it is regrettable that stock exchange investors are seldom patient enough to let corporate strategies evolve at their own speed, regardless of the short-term fallout on dividends. But when the horizon recedes as far away as what we can expect for global television, we are deluding ourselves if we try to capture it in our plans.

Many do not see it that way. Doesn’t Ted Turner’s CNN broadcast news for the world at large? Don’t Rupert Murdoch’s satellite ventures represent a major step toward the Global Village? The answer is no. Those experiences are significant, but in time they will reach their intrinsic limits.

Those who keep talking about global television view the medium mainly as information, whether it be news or educational programs. This is a mistake. Contemporary television is not about news; neither is it about education. Contemporary television is at least 90% entertainment. And people demand to be entertained in their own way and in their own language.. . .

The Price would never Be Right in another currency, with different shopping habits and with unfamiliar people on the screen. Would Angelenos like “Jeopardy” very much if only Eskimos took part in it, however skillfully dubbed they were?

True, American movie films and TV productions enjoy wide audiences in virtually every country, not to mention TV program formats, the market for which is brisk. These are often high-quality products at reasonable prices--the supposedly “Japanese” formula for success in mass markets! . . .

Yet national audiences, notably in Europe, are turning away from American programs.

Customization is today’s catch phrase in the competition for TV audiences worldwide. It is by taking into account national preferences that Fininvest has been successful in Spain and Germany. To cater to widely differing tastes in more than one country, a television company certainly needs to be global in its outlook and operations. But television itself will not be global for many more years to come.