Are interaction, co-creation and participation key to the achievement of Public Service Media? A comparative analysis of public broadcasters’ multi-platform services

Explaining the transition from Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) to Public Service Media (PSM) in a digital environment, scholars often refer to the need for a different type of relationship between audiences and public broadcasters. There is a need, so they argue, to rethink the ‘public’ in PSM. Admittedly, public broadcasters face difficulties to capture the opportunities offered by digitization. Moving beyond the boundaries of traditional, top-down and highly formatted broadcasting and reaching out to diverse and fragmenting audiences is a challenge. The proposed research (1) discusses, conceptualizes and operationalizes the concepts of interaction, co-creation and participation, which are, following seminal PSM literature, key to the transition from PSB to PSM; (2) analyzes whether and how public broadcasters have transposed these, so far largely rhetorical, concepts in practice; and (3) critically evaluates whether interaction, co-creation, and participation are indeed key to the achievement of PSM. A comparative case study design is adopted to analyse multi-platform services developed over the past 5 years (aiming for a focus on more ‘mature’ multi-platform services, opposed to services launched in the very explorative first phases of public broadcasters’ Internet expansion) by public broadcasters in the United Kingdom, France, Flanders and the Netherlands.