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Participation is based on membership of the European Broadcasting Union, an alliance of public service media broadcasters.

• tialaramex 1y ago
  A thing that's maybe not obvious to Americans, and maybe even Brits is that "Public Service Broadcaster" is a category based on why it was OK for this to broadcast on the radio frequency, rather than somehow related to how it's funded. So, NBC etc. in the US are Public Service Broadcasters, whereas a local not-for-profit that has laid their own coax in your city is not a PSB. In the UK ITV is a PSB, as well as the BBC (which you probably think of) and Channel 4 (which is owned by the state) but if your local school media team uploads local affairs videos to Youtube that's not a PSB. The idea is there's finite radio bandwidth, the government has decided it gets to decide who uses that bandwidth and how, and so a PSB is an entity which got licensed to use some of that finite space to do something approved. Government policies might require or forbid certain programming, for example maybe you can't advertise cigarettes or you can't swear, but you must have a news show every weekday evening. The EBU exists because of this same bandwidth issue. Radio doesn't care about politics, so even if adjacent country A and country B hate each other and have closed their borders, the radio waves from A propagate to B and vice versa. So radio "regions" exist which try to duck the politics as much as possible to focus on practicalities. That they don't fully duck politics is how we end up with Israel in Europe but not its immediate neighbours...