The EU Commission has started to update its Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) as part of its larger push to implement its Digital Single Market (DSM) Strategy. It is expected that this will not be just a light fix for some of the ‘bugs’ in the regulation, but a major overhaul motivated by the significant changes in media systems related mostly to media convergence and globalization. In this context this article offers a small country’s view of these processes. It demonstrates in detail how Estonia, a very small country on the EU periphery, is challenged by the need to develop its positions with regard to the complex processes at the EU level. It discusses the ‘impossible conflicts’ that it encounters when trying to articulate its media policies and EU strategies. It also describes the complexities of developing media policy in a country where different government institutions are shaped by different ideological frameworks, and therefore have different policy goals; and how cultural policy goals tend to be sacrificed when they are in conflict with various techno-economic imperatives.

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Estonia is recognized for its optimism with regard to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) -the country has benchmarking online services, and the number of start-ups per inhabitant is the highest in Europe. The ways this enthusiasm is translated into its audio-visual policy is the topic of this article. Estonia's internal market for audio-visual services is very small, and this limits the degrees of freedom for its institutional actors -commercial broadcasters do not drive market innova-tion. Yet the responsibility of public service broadcasters for innovation coordination is not recognized in Estonia's policy frameworks. In contrast, many new initiatives are funded that are aimed at supporting the cooperation of the audiovisual industry's small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with ICT sector. Such initiatives rely on the hope for scalable returns to national gross domestic product (GDP) rather than generating diversity in media. Yet these measures suffer from structural constraints that limit the growth of media SMEs in small peripheral countries. This article raises related issues for both national and European policies.

This article addresses the ‘wicked’ problems met by contemporary public service media (PSM) institutions: to address the fragmentation of audiences across platforms; to have a positive impact on civil society and societal coherence; to facilitate cultural diversity; and to work with private creative industries and facilitate their growth. These objectives can be reduced to a conflict in producing both public and private value. In this article, we build on the combination of innovation systems theory and public value theory to investigate the interrelationships between the production of these different forms of value. Our case study is Estonia’s national pre-selection competition for the Eurovision Song Contest, which is innovative in terms of its cross-media framing and its approach to working with private partners to facilitate the development of the Estonian popular music system.

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