By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the children's television business had become one of the fastest growing sectors of the European media industries. The emerging postsocialist media markets have become a high priority for both transnational and regional media companies looking for new audience groups. In this article, the author provides a historical overview of the transformations that occurred in the arena of children's media culture in Eastern Europe during the last thirty years. Children's television, which attained a symbolic importance in national public debates throughout the region after 1989, can provide a unique lens to examine broader social, political, and cultural issues related to the transformations of postsocialist media systems. The author analyzes the emergence of a new conceptualization of the child media user, who is more influential than ever before, but whose power is given, expressed, and experienced primarily through consumption. Children's television in Hungary is used as a case study to provide an in-depth and detailed analysis of such transformations using diverse sources including TV guides, television programs, and in-depth interviews conducted with media professionals and policymakers between 1998 and 2008.

There are over two billion children worldwide under the age of 18, who are targeted by an increasing number of television channels solely dedicated to them. As such globally circulated programmes and networks expand their reach using digital platforms, is there a need – and room for – locally produced television content for young people? From the perspective of national media policy advocates, locally developed, produced and broadcast programmes can provide children with a sense of their own place in an increasingly complex globalized media landscape and ensure that programmes are developed with the interest, perspective and views of local children in mind. This article explores the dichotomy between ‘local’ and ‘global’ television content targeting children in the context of debates on media globalization. Our three case studies from radically different media policy environments, focus specifically on locally produced content offered on dedicated national children‘s digital television channels launched locally to promote the cultural heritage of a specific nation or region. They provide concrete examples of how local content is conceptualized and what types of content children have to choose from. Our findings are paradoxical. Although each channel has been created to speak back to dominant audio-visual children’s flows from the periphery, our findings are that the better funded nationally based dedicated children’s channels have grown into successful market players beyond original national boundaries. The first case study examines dedicated local children’s provision in New Zealand, focusing on TVNZ6, a digital children‘s channel that operated as part of the public service broadcasting sector. The second case study focuses on children‘s television content in Hungary and uses the case of Minimax Hungary, an Eastern European regional commercial network targeting children growing up in a dynamically transforming post-communist media system. The third case study looks at television content produced in the Middle East by focusing on Al Jazeera Children’s Channel (JCC), a pan-Arabic non-commercial edutainment channel established in Qatar and funded by the Qatar Foundation.

New Zealand’s first primetime animated program, bro’Town, ran successfully for five seasons between 2004 and 2009. Described by its creators as a “modern-day non-PC satire,” bro’Town focuses on five New Zealand teenagers of Samoan and Maori ethnicities growing up in Auckland. While the program was promoted as “ The Simpsons of the South Pacific,” its audience, critics, and politicians have celebrated it as a twenty-first-century New Zealand creative success story. This article explores the historical, cultural, and economic forces that have shaped bro’Town in the context of the debates on media globalization using the framework of hybridity as “the cultural logic of globalization” as well as the framework of global television formats. The authors suggest that bro’Town represents a complex case of television program adaptation and provides a unique case study to examine the multilayered nature of contemporary hybrid cultural forms moving beyond the simplistic local—global dyad.

Unhealthy foods and drinks are among the top products advertised to young children. Considering the growing childhood obesity epidemic and the soaring number of children accessing the Internet, even online junk food advertising has come under increasing scrutiny. Many countries are in the process of expanding and revising existing regulation to account for the realities of the digital age and to respond to health and other social concerns. This paper focuses on two European countries in particular to examine and compare these processes through the lens of junk food advergames aimed at children. Our questions are: 1) Given the differences in the media landscapes of the UK and Hungary, what types of junk food advergames target children?; and 2) In light of the growing childhood obesity problem faced by both nations, how have government bodies, advocacy groups, and advertisers approached junk food advertising targeting children in general and online advertising including advergames in particular? The United Kingdom represents a country with the highest Internet usage by children and the most developed online advertising market in Europe, while Hungary, a post-communist country, represents an emerging media market where young people have less access to the Internet and buying power but constitute a crucial “entry point” for food advertisers.

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