This chapter applies the GVC framework in order to progress our understanding of the global TV system. Among the drivers that are changing the TV industry, three stand out: digitisation, consolidation, and vertical disintegration (also known as de-verticalisation). While the first two trends have long been identified as driving forces, the same cannot be said about the third. The phenomenon of segmentation is less known and associated with the formation of GVCs. The chapter expands on its prevalence in television and explain its role in globalising the industry. The final section provides an introductory outline of the TV GVC and its segments.

This first chapter explains why and how the GVC framework can make a contribution to media and communication studies. International communication, the discipline’s subject area dealing with cross-border media scholarship, stands as at a crossroads because its concepts were fashioned when a clear line of demarcation between the local and the global prevailed. This line has blurred, rendering some aspects of the discipline obsolete. The chapter argues that the GVC framework can help lay the epistemological foundations of a forward-looking paradigm that is altogether holistic, multidisciplinary, and cosmopolitan. In the global era, the global cannot be an adjunct to a pre-existing theory but must be inherent to its epistemology. With the GVC framework, the global TV industry can be holistically analysed as a single systemic entity. The first part highlights existing theoretical issues within international communication, and the second explains how the GVC framework can contribute to solve them.