Sunday, February 3, 2008

Telestreet (Some Alternative Media in Italy)

So, some of you may have heard about this because someone came last semester and gave a talk about this group. But, I thought it was interesting to bring up either way.

Silvio Berlusconi, the former Prime Minister of Italy, owns arguably 90% of Italian media companies.

In the 1970's, there was a court decision that said that Italians could have local television networks, ending the monopoly of the television station RAI of the airwaves. With more understanding of the equipment, in 2001, hundreds of very small local television channels have been created using rewired televisions and the Internet. The signals have the radius of only about 3km, but with hundreds of them around the country, a lot of different voices are being heard that weren't heard before.
Here's a video about Telestreet.
And here's an article on the Telestreet website-"Italian 'pirates' mount TV protest"- you have to download it (scroll down).
Here's another more interesting article.
More info- this time from wikipedia.

If you want to know more information, I could try to translate some of their other articles from Italian to English.

Sincerely,
Jason

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