With digital media becoming ever more prevalent, it is essential to study policy and marketing strategies tailored to this new development. In this volume, contributors examine government policy for a range of media, including digital television, IPTV, mobile TV, and OTT TV. They also address marketing strategies that can harness the unique nature of digital media’s innovation, production design, and accessibility. They draw on case studies in Asia, North America, and Europe to offer best practices for both policy and marketing strategies.

Social media is said to radically change the way in which public communication takes place: information diffuses faster and can reach a large number of people, but what makes the process so novel is that online networks can empower people to compete with traditional broadcasters or public figures. This book critically interrogates the contemporary relevance of social networks as a set of economic, cultural and political enterprises and as a public sphere in which a variety of political and socio-cultural demands can be met. It examines policy, regulatory and socio-cultural issues arising from the transformation of communication to a multi-layered sphere of online and social networks. The central theme of the book is to address the following questions: Are online and social networks an unstoppable democratizing and mobilizing force? Is there a need for policy and intervention to ensure the development of comprehensive and inclusive social networking frameworks? Social media are viewed both as a tool that allows citizens to influence policymaking, and as an object of new policies and regulations, such as data retention, privacy and copyright laws, around which citizens are mobilizing.

Markets, Pricing, and Deregulation of Utilities examines the effects of deregulation on the energy and telecommunications industries in an economic environment that has changed dramatically since deregulation was first introduced in those industries several years ago. The contributors to this book discuss the aspects of deregulation that appear to be succeeding and those that seem to be failing. Within that framework, they offer insight as to the possible next stages of regulatory restructuring and reform. The contents of this book provide a strong theoretical base leading to a better understanding of markets, pricing, and deregulation by utility managers, regulators, and economists.