This paper analyses how competition between media firms influences the way they are financed. In a setting where monopoly media firms choose to be completely financed by consumer payments, competition may lead the media firms to be financed by advertising as well. The closer substitutes the...

We consider a model where TV channels transmit advertising, and viewers dislike such commercials. We find that the less differentiated the TV channels’ programs are, the lower is the amount of advertising in equilibrium. Relative to the social optimum, there is underprovision of advertising if...

Under the current market structure in the TV industry advertising prices are typically set by TV channels while viewer prices are set by distributors (e.g., cable operators). The latter implies that the distributors partly internalize the competition between the TV channels, since they take into...