통신,방송 융합 추세 하의 방송시장 자유화 전망

초록

Audio-visual services reflect the social and cultural characteristics of nations and their peoples, and are consequently regarded as being of great social and political importance. For these reasons, government regulations and public support programmes play a major role. In the context of the Uruguay Round negotiations, audio-visual industry representatives in a number of Member countries suggested that the cinema and broadcasting sectors should be excluded from the Agrement in order to protect national industries and cultures from being overwhelmed by foreign products. The argument for "cultural exemption" in trade agreements is based on the rhetoric of national cultural sovereignty, one of the key issues in the "cultural imperialism" debate of the 1970s. However, in the last decade or so, innovations in distribution and compression technology has made it possible to permit expansion of channel capacity, and there has been the transformation from a situation of spectrum scarcity to one of program scarcity. Thus, to accommodate rapid technological change and the new multimedia services, governments will need to modify their regulatory structures. In addition, for the sub-category of Radio and television transmission services, it sometimes becomes difficult to determine exactly the boundary between services classified under telecommunications and those classified under audio-visual services. In the age of convergence between telecommunication and broadcasting, it has become accepted that commitments involving programming content are classified under audio-visual services, while those purely involving the transmission of information are classified under telecommunications. This means that new regulatory regime should be introduced to meet the convergence between telecommunication and broadcasting. The convergence between telecommunication and broadcasting may produce various kinds of network-based services, and with the increased number and variety of network-based services, competition policy needs to play a much greater role in the regulation of broadcasting content. The convergence between telecommunications and broadcasting calls for re-categorization of both telecommunication operators and broadcasters in Korea. In this study, we begin by considering theoretical studies of culture and trade, international trade environment in the broad-casting industry, and classification system in telecommunications and broadcasting. Then, the implications for broadcasting policy in the age of convergence are discussed.

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