The Shifting Terrain of Asia’s Television Landscape

This chapter revisits the terrain again, justified on the grounds that Asian television landscapes are now more accessible to transborder media flows than ever before, with satellite television service availability and penetration increasing steadily all over the continent, including in countries such as Myanmar, Mongolia and Vietnam that have come to represent the newest frontiers for growth and expansion. Indeed, as things stand, Asian nations that were historically united in their adoption of a fortress-like approach to foreign media inflows now have governments engaging in variable and in many cases, limited degrees of gate-keeping vis-a-vis transnational broadcasting. While both gate-keeping regimes and media markets in Asia have come to be characterized by visible shifts over the past two decades, on the surface at least audience dynamics in Asia appear to have remained comparatively stable, in that large majorities of audiences continue to privilege local and regional content as they did following the introduction of satellite television.