I am in media frontierland – in Guyana in South America on a university exchange trip to the country where I was born. It is truly the media Wild West out here. Anything goes, literally.
TV is all present in all homes. There are plenty of local channels – twenty plus at the last count. They’re segmented not by genre but by race and politics – like the society itself. There are black stations (one is even called Hoyte-Blackman TV!), Indian stations with a diet of Bollywood films, a government station which pumps out pretty raw material, anti-government stations and more. The economics of them all are very simple. They steal the product from the US satellites above Guyana. Simple – you buy a decoder card in the US for domestic use and use it here for transmission. The Guyanese call it the ‘ripe mango theory’, if the neighbours ripe mangoes fall into your yard then it is right for you to pick them up and eat them. They even have competitions as to who can steal the mangoes fastest and which station retransmits ‘Oprah’ first!
Writes John Mair…
