Search Results (67)

Objective: Historically, television has been regarded as the mass medium that is most closely associated with audiences’ needs and expectations. In the context of rapid population ageing, older adults now inhabit a progressively important place in society, and they remain the most frequent consumers of broadcast television. This study investigates the formative role of television among Portuguese older adults—combining informal learning, cognitive engagement, and social connection. It explores how TV contributes to well-being and participation in later life. Methods: An anonymous survey was conducted with 203 participants aged 65 to 94. Results: Television continues to play a fundamental role in older adults’ everyday lives, mitigating loneliness and promoting happiness, information, and life satisfaction. We also saw that higher TV consumption is related with superior income and residence in urban areas. Conclusions: The findings highlight television’s enduring formative and compensatory functions and contribute to ongoing debates on active ageing, media literacy, and digital inclusion among older adults. Full article

Humor is a pragmatic and interdisciplinary phenomenon whose sociocultural relevance has been increasingly recognized by the Academia. Surprisingly, although the anthropo-philosophical theory of homo risu emerged in the 7th century, linguists became interested in the study of the linguistic mechanisms of humor only a few years ago. One of those mechanisms is the use of Anglicisms, because of their pragmatic potential to provide some added value, a halo of prestige and modernity, which creates playful effects of complicity. This paper examines the way Anglicisms crucially contribute to the humorous discourse of the satirical news show El Intermedio, the longest-running program on a Spanish private TV channel. Monitoring of 300 episodes broadcast between April 2022 and December 2024 proves how, in addition to puns and irony, scriptwriters tend to resort to a number of strategies involving the creative use of Anglicisms, which perform different pragmatic functions, while showing sociolinguistic awareness. They also offer an up-to-date sample of the great vitality of Anglicisms in contemporary Spain. Full article

Background: Balancing nutrition security with environmental sustainability is a key priority in global food policy, with Sustainable Healthy Diets (SHDs) serving as a critical framework aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Traditional Japanese cuisine reflects SHD principles through its emphasis on plant-based, seasonal, and minimally processed dishes. However, modern, globalized dietary patterns increasingly feature ultra-processed foods, raising concerns about health risks such as high sodium intake. Methods: This study adopts a novel dish-level content analysis of 120 contemporary recipes from NHK Today’s Cooking between 2023 and 2025, a TV program by Japan’s national public broadcaster that is widely regarded as reflecting the practices of Japanese home cooking, to examine how SHDs pillars—nutritional diversity (e.g., varied protein sources), environmental sustainability (e.g., low-carbon ingredients), and cultural continuity (e.g., traditional techniques)—are embedded in Japanese home cooking. Unlike macro-level consumption or nutrition data, this dish-level approach reveals how individual dishes embody sustainability through ingredient selection, preparation methods, and cultural logic. Results: Quantitatively, pork (33.3%) and seafood (19.2%) together dominated main protein sources, with minimal beef (2.5%) and a notable presence of soy-based foods (12.5%), supporting lower reliance on environmentally intensive red meat; mean salt content per person in main dishes was 2.16 ± 1.09 g (28.9% for men, 33.3% for women of Japan’s daily salt targets), while recipe patterns emphasizing fermentation and seasonal alignment highlight possible pathways through which Japanese dietary practices can be considered ecologically efficient. Simultaneously, the analysis identifies emerging challenges, encompassing environmental issues such as overfishing and public health concerns like excessive sodium consumption. Conclusions: By centering dishes as culturally meaningful units, and using media recipes as reproducible, representative datasets for monitoring dietary change, this approach offers a reproducible framework for assessing dietary sustainability in evolving global food systems. Full article

Television formats are undergoing a redefinition of the audiovisual panorama marked by digitisation and the decrease in audiences. In this context, news coverage at times of special interest is an opportunity to regain relevance, and for this reason the morning magazine programmes are taking on the broadcasting of currently prevalent news, intervening in subjects traditionally reserved for news programmes. This paper analyses the news content of TV magazines in a context of hybridisation of genres that has blurred the acknowledged boundaries between the definitions of television programmes. To achieve this, we study the topics on the agenda and how the news is dealt with that is included in the two leading formats among the private and public channels with the biggest audiences in Spain: Espejo Público on Antena 3 and Mañaneros on Televisión Española. The results show that there is a process we call “news osmosis”, whereby the news is treated in a spectacular way, yet incorporating the language and aesthetics typical of the formality of news programmes. In this adaptation, the magazines impose themselves on the narration of the news scoop while restricting the thematic agenda, leaning towards a kind of reductionism in which the private channels choose to prioritise political conflict while the public channels concentrate on current incidents, understood here as newsworthy events of public interest (crimes or accidents). Full article

This paper analyzes 20th century colloquialization processes in Peninsular Spanish, in line with recent works addressing mass-media colloquialization. Previous studies suggest a change in sports-talk announcing towards a more informal model, which is supported by the incorporation of new linguistic features as well as by the influence of some external changes. In this context, this study delves into the role of discourse markers as a colloquialization parameter, as a growth in their employment has been detected since ca. 1990. To further explore the data, a manually compiled corpus has been transcribed and analyzed: our corpus consists of both radio and TV football-match recordings aired in Spain from 1980 to 2000 and from 2000 to 2024. These two big periods have been subdivided into five-year periods or micro-diachronies to allow for a more detailed analysis. Results reveal a consolidation of the use of discourse markers by sports announcers, contrasting with earlier broadcasts that tended to avoid them or that employed more formal discourse markers, typically related to written, planned discourses. Full article

Brazil and Portugal are undeniably united because they share the same language, ocean, and, to a considerable extent, history. There has also been a profound rapprochement between the two countries at the media level, particularly in telenovelas. Brazil developed the “telenovela” genre in the 1950s and inspired Portuguese serial television fiction the most. First, Portugal saw a commitment to plots of Brazilian origin (1977—“Gabriela, Cravo e Canela”), a reality still observed today, albeit somewhat. Portuguese producers then studied and recruited Brazilian professionals when the first Portuguese narratives were created to absorb their knowledge and expertise. This research aims to measure how many telenovelas have been written by women since their broadcasting in the Portuguese–Brazilian market. This question unfolds into other questions, such as the following: What is the ratio of telenovelas written by men to women from 1951 to March 2025 in Portugal and Brazil? Is there a trend towards equilibrium, an increase or decrease in telenovelas written by men or women in the market being analyzed? To answer these questions, data was collected manually through information repositories such as “Observatório de TV” and “SP Televisão” and by watching generic telenovelas available on YouTube or the broadcasters’ channels. Portuguese and Brazilian television channels with national coverage were considered for this research. The data shows that 926 telenovelas were broadcast in the Portuguese–Brazilian market, of which 27.7 per cent were written by women, 64.1 per cent by men, 7.4 per cent were written in partnership between men and women, and 0.8 per cent have no information available. This study reveals a better balance between the number of male and female authors in Portugal than in Brazil and a downward trend in the number of female telenovela authors in Brazil after the military dictatorship. Full article

Beat the Chasers is a popular UK-originating TV quiz show that premiered in Croatia in 2023. On the show, a contestant challenges a team of up to five chasers with respect to the offers provided by the production. Each offer balances risk and reward, varying in prize money, time advantage, and the number of chasers. In this paper, we first present the dataset obtained by extracting data from the publicly broadcast episodes of Beat the Chasers in Croatia. We then apply various machine-learning models with the goals of predicting (1) which offer a contestant is most likely to select and (2) the game’s outcome. The best-case results suggest that we can successfully do both by reaching an F1-score of $73.6\%$ for the selected offer prediction and $84.6\%$ for the game’s outcome prediction. Regarding the feature importance analysis, we identified the contestant’s hometown size, NUTS 2 region, age group, and gender as the most relevant features in the case of the selected offer prediction. As for the outcome prediction, the game-specific features emerged as the most important, namely, the cash builder result, the selected number of chasers, and the chasers’ time in the selected offer. Full article

This paper presents the results of field tests conducted in the project “Implementation of TV White Spaces (TVWS) for Internet Access in Brazil”. This study evaluates the feasibility and regulatory implications of TVWS in rural and remote areas. TVWS systems are promising for sensor network applications, enabling efficient and long-range connectivity. The experiments assess the coexistence of TVWS signals, applying, for example, the Remote Area Access Network System for the Fifth Generation (5G-RANGE) using the generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) technique, with the Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting–Terrestrial (ISDB-T) system. Laboratory tests determined the protection ratio (PR) between digital television (DTV) signals and interfering signals, with minimum PR values of $-31.38$ dB on channel n$-1$ and $-33.24$ dB on channel $n+1$ for 5G-RANGE using GFDM, highlighting its low out-of-band emission (OOBE). Field tests confirmed the laboratory results, with the worst recorded PR causing interference being $-30.2$ dB on channel $n-1$. The power restriction to 1 Wp limited coverage, allowing 96 Mbps in 24 MHz BW at 14.7 km from the base station. These results highlight that regulatory adjustments can be made to support TVWS deployment in Brazil. Full article

A broadband and compact planar UHF antenna is presented for use in MIMO Digital TV indoor applications. The choice of the element and its physical implementation is oriented towards a low-profile, low-cost, and single-layer deployment. Since it is intended to be used in a 2 × 1 MIMO array, two antennas were constructed and tested to minimize their coupling to provide larger MIMO gains. Regarding the excitation, two different structures were evaluated to observe their impact on the final impedance profile. The option of an infinite balun provided a 62% fractional bandwidth (394 MHz to 747 MHz), covering the desired band and with good isolation levels when analyzed in the array. Results regarding MIMO parameters are provided herein, such as Envelope Correlation Coefficient and Total Active Reflection Coefficient, proving the potential of the proposed antenna array to be used in MIMO Digital TV applications in covering the UHF band. Full article

The global VTuber market is experiencing rapid growth, with VTubers extending beyond mere content creators to be utilized in various fields such as social interaction, public relations, and health. VTubers have the potential to expand the existing content market and contribute to increasing economic and public value. This study aims to investigate the perception of VTubers in South Korea and to provide insights that can contribute to the global activation of the VTuber entertainment industry. For this purpose, unstructured data on VTubers from the past three years, during which interest in VTubers has significantly grown in South Korea, was collected. A total of 57,891 samples were gathered from Naver, Daum, and Google, of which 50 highly relevant data points between VTubers and users were selected for analysis. First, key terms such as ‘Broadcast’, ‘YouTube’, ‘Live’, ‘Game’, ‘Youtuber’, ‘Japan’, ‘Character’, ‘Video’, ‘Sing’, ‘Virtual’, ‘Woowakgood’, ‘Fan’, ‘Idol’, ‘Korea’, ‘Twitch’, ‘IsegyeIdol’, ‘Communication’, ‘Worldview’, ‘VTuberIndustry’, ‘Contents’, ‘AfricaTV’, ‘Nijisanji’, and ‘Streamer’ were extracted. Second, CONCOR analysis revealed four clusters: ‘Famous VTubers’, ‘Features of VTubers’, ‘VTuber Industry’, and ‘VTuber Platforms’. Based on these findings, the study offers various academic and practical implications regarding VTubers in South Korea and explores the potential for global growth in the VTuber industry. Full article

This paper proposes an unusual method for the dissemination of geological sciences and the promotion of geotourism: a scientific documentary, where a representative itinerary of geological and geomorphological evolution of the Umbria and Marche regions was presented. The considerations that led to the identification of the geological route proposed to the editorial staff of FOCUS TV are presented in detail. At each stop, there was an explanation by academic professors and researchers, mainly from the Geology Division of the University of Camerino (MC), who explained the outcrops in detail. During the episode, insights were also given into the anthropogenic frequentation of the epigean caves in Frasassi (AN), ancient places of frequentation and worship thanks to their suggestiveness and the sense of magnificence that they can elicit. In addition to the illustration of the individual stops, the article offers further insights into the geomorphology of the most important geosites depicted, all of which are in natural parks or protected areas and characterized by a high landscape value. The result was the production of an episode of the television program ‘Geological Wonders of Italy: the Marche and Umbria Regions’, which was broadcast in October 2022 by the Italian national Mediaset group. Full article

(1) Background: Studies on women with disabilities (WwD) are rare and tend to reveal certain representation patterns. This study aims to understand how and to what extent WwD and chronic diseases are deemed newsworthy in the Portuguese public news TV station RTP1 primetime news program. Feminist disability, standpoint, agenda-setting, and framing theories are used alongside the concept of intersectionality. (2) Methods: A mixed-method approach is adopted, combining quantitative content analysis of all broadcasted news in January 2020 (n = 704), and qualitative discourse analysis of news items on PwD (n = 5). (3) Results: The results reveal that disability is a reduced issue in Telejornal’s agenda. PwD, in general, are often portrayed in secondary roles and without a voice. The protagonists of news stories about disability or persons with disabilities are predominantly women without disabilities, occupying traditional roles as caregivers (mothers, nurses), while men are more often portrayed as public agents. Discourse analysis deepens understanding by uncovering the prevalence of negative news values and a problem-centred framing, often associated with negativity, rather than presenting solutions. (4) Conclusions: Consequently, WwD were found to be deprived of news representation with a more positive or ‘normal’ focus and an intersectional approach reveals a lack of inclusion, with the few existing news tending to focus on exclusion issues, portraying only white Portuguese women. This study underscores the urgent need for a more equitable approach in media representation, recognising the diversity and positive contributions of WwD to promote an inclusive narrative. Full article

With the increasing frequency and severity of disasters and accidents, there is a growing need for efficient emergency alert systems. The ultra-high definition (UHD) broadcasting service based on Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0, a leading terrestrial digital broadcasting system, offers such capabilities, including a wake-up function for minimizing damage through early alerts. In case of a disaster situation, the emergency alert wake-up signal is transmitted, allowing UHD TVs to be activated, enabling individuals to receive emergency alerts and access emergency broadcasting content. However, conventional methods for detecting the bootstrap signal, essential for this function, typically require an ATSC 3.0 demodulator. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based method capable of detecting an emergency wake-up signal without the need for an ATSC 3.0. The proposed method leverages deep learning techniques, specifically a deep neural network (DNN) structure for bootstrap detection and a convolutional neural network (CNN) structure for wake-up signal demodulation and to detect the bootstrap and 2 bit emergency alert wake-up signal. Specifically, our method eliminates the need for Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), frequency synchronization, and interleaving processes typically required by a demodulator. By applying a deep learning in the time domain, we simplify the detection process, allowing for the detection of an emergency alert signal without the full suite of demodulator components required for ATSC 3.0. Furthermore, we have verified the performance of the deep learning-based method using ATSC 3.0-based RF signals and a commercial Software-Defined Radio (SDR) platform in a real environment. Full article

In this article, we contend that understanding Brazil’s current communicative landscape requires a closer examination of the relevance of legacy media outlets, challenging the widely accepted “traditional media bypass” thesis, which posits that social media platforms have overtaken traditional media as the primary influencers of political discourse, an argument often used to explain the rise of extreme-right ideologies across different national contexts. In order to test the association between voting preferences and the use of different types of media, we employ logistic regression analysis using data from a recent survey that includes numerous questions about the information and media consumption habits of Brazilian voters. Our findings highlight that legacy media, particularly broadcast TV channels like Globo, Record, and SBT, remain dominant in Brazil as sources of political information. Contrary to the bypass thesis, Bolsonaro’s supporters, while favoring social media, also consume significant amounts of legacy media. Analysis reveals stark differences in media preferences between the supporters of different political candidates, challenging the notion of an exclusive reliance on social media by right-wing supporters. The data also indicate nuanced media consumption habits, such as a preference for certain TV channels and fact-checking behaviors, underscoring the complex interplay between legacy and social media. Full article

In highly developed countries, more and more people use culinary services. Cooking at home, for the family, is giving way to culinary services. Consumers either order food home or use the offers of restaurants and bars. Consumers’ choice of culinary form may be influenced by cooking television programs. Many TV stations broadcast cooking programs. This study examined the impact of television culinary programs on consumer behavior in the restaurant services market. The article examines the interplay of emotional responses, personality traits, and culinary preferences to understand how TV cooking programs influence dining decisions. The study was conducted using the CAWI method, which involved 742 respondents. The study, conducted between May 2021 and April 2022, was addressed to people who visited restaurants presented in the Polish culinary TV show titled “Kitchen Revolutions”. The study revealed that almost 3/4 of the respondents chose restaurants based on the program’s recommendations. Although there was a strong emotional connection with this program—nearly half of the respondents expressed delight in the taste of snacks and main courses—this did not always translate into an increased frequency of eating meals away from home. Only every third respondent said that the program influenced their gastronomic behavior. The research hypotheses examined the extent to which culinary TV shows influence the frequency of visits to restaurants, the perceived quality of life, and the influence on consumers with specific personality traits. The results partially supported the hypothesis that cooking programs on television encourage people to eat out more often, but the perceived impact on quality of life and on some personality traits was less clear. The article contributes to the understanding of consumer behavior in the food service market by highlighting the complex dynamics of emotional reactions, personality traits, and the impact of culinary television programs. The findings have practical implications for the restaurant industry, suggesting a focus on emotional impact, food quality and presentation, and targeting marketing strategies towards consumers who are open to new experiences and ready to experiment. Full article