Over the last 50 years television has been very successful in developing massive audiences for its content, whether under the structure of national public broadcasting or through commercial imperatives. The success of this model of cultural production is easy to underestimate; but to appreciate television’s consistent impact it may be useful to compare audience sizes with that of film.

The most commercially successful film of all time, Titanic, had a US box office of $600 million. If the average ticket price were $8 that would translate into an audience of 75 million viewers over its extended run of nine months in 1997 and 1998. M*A*S*H, one of the most popular television programs of the 1970s and 1980s, achieved American television history when its final episode in 1983 was watched by more than 125 million households, which could be as many as 200 million people.

The Football World Cup of 1994 achieved a worldwide audience of over 33 billion through its 52 televised games, or approximately 600 million on average for each game (The History of Film and Television, 2003; Internet Movie Database, 2003). It is easy to see how television can dwarf the size of audiences achieved in other media industries and there is little doubt that television has had the greatest cultural impact of any media forms in the second half of the 20th century.