Convergence culture:The EU is throwing its weight behind high- definition television to improve our viewing habits, writes Haydn Shaughnessy
The European Union and television have never really made it as a couple. Little of what happens in Brussels makes it to our TV screens and conversely little is known about how Brussels affects what we see on television.
In fact, Brussels has had a profound influence on the shape of the box in your living room. As the television is becoming a part of the wider communications mix, the mandarins have even more plans for what your TV does.
In an ideal world televisions would already be connected to the internet, programme-makers would pipe high-definition images to your screen, and you would choose to watch European "auteur" films rather than tuning into Sky's blockbuster movies from the US. At least that's the view from Brussels.
In the early 1990s the EU thought high-definition television (HDTV) would be the way European cinema would win back its share of cultural mind share from the Americans. High definition, which appears to be new right now, was technologically available in 1990 and was promoted, unsuccessfully, by the EU with encouragement from French and Belgian television manufacturers.
When it failed to gain traction, the EU turned its attention to widescreen television and subsidised widescreen programme-making in the mid to late 1990s. HDTV is now back on the agenda. Thirteen million European homes are HDTV ready, and there are hundreds of HDTV channels in the pipeline, according to the screen bible Screen Digest.
Widescreen HDTV brings us close to a European nirvana: home cinema. A cinema-type experience in the home would help European movies bypass the high-street cinema chains. The expectation is a latent demand in the public to see diverse cultural product and this will soon be teased into the open.
Although the EU likes to influence developments in the media sector, actual change often happens for different reasons. Broadcasters, under pressure from the internet and finding new markets in packaged media (DVD sales), have been forced to invest in high-definition programming because DVDs make conventional broadcasts look poor.
HDTV and the internet, though, are the two innovations that appear to offer European cinema a shot at a wider public. In Europe, Hollywood films account for 70 to 95 percent of box-office revenues depending on which country you are in.
What is so wrong with Hollywood movies? For many Europeans it's a historical stigma that American culture seems to lie across the cultures of the different European language groups. There's an argument that in the aftermath of the second World War, the US Government gained experience in controlling European cinema, and liked the feeling. American dominance over European cinema is often dated back to that period. Strange to relate that Hollywood has always dominated European cinema, ever since the 1920s.
However, deep in the corridors of the EU there has long been a desire to protect Europeans from American cultural influences, dating back to the opening of TV markets to American programming in the 1980s (the majority of European TV stations were publicly owned 20 years ago). Both at the EU and the European Council there were attempts to impose domestic quotas on new independent commercial broadcasters.
Right now the EU is spending a small slice of its research and development budget to help European cinema steal a lead on competitors by creating movies that incorporate many different camera viewpoints, holographic content, and 3D television.
High Definition, its supporters say, should suit the European "auteur" film more than it does the Hollywood movie or American TV serial. Why? Because the quality of images and the size of screens mean there is less need for framing close-ups or for frequent editorial cuts. Better-quality viewing should be reflected in a new visual grammar where the interest within a scene is allowed to develop.
The real grievance in European cinema is that the market is fragmented into its constituent languages, which means, for example, that a French movie rarely enjoys the influence outside France that an American film enjoys outside the US, but that's a fact of European life and it is impossible to regulate or subsidise it out of existence.
If your first language is not English, though, you may well say, no harm in trying.
WORDS IN YOUR EAR
High Definition Television (HDTV) -an increase in the amount of visual data on a television screen or better pictures
Widescreen -television screens that are wider than they are high
