“Ringier Axel Springer (RAS), a joint venture between Swiss and German media conglomerates Ringier and Axel Springer, has signed a deal to buy a majority stake in Poland’s umber one Internet portal Onet.pl from Polish broadcaster TVN.”

(The Hollywood Reporter, hollywoodreporter.com, 6/5/2012)

“In a first-of-its-kind deal, SundanceTV and FremantleMedia International are partnering on eight-part event series Deutschland 83.”

(Deadline Hollywood, deadline.com, 2/9/2015)

“BBC Worldwide and ELTA TV kicked off 2015 by announcing a deal that will see the largest volume of UK content available in Taiwan.”

(BBC, www.bbc.co.uk, 1/27/2015)

Media communication doesn’t necessarily stop at frontiers. It may and it indeed does overcome both national and cultural boundaries. Thereby, the headlines and news quotations above show: The way media communication spreads into different countries and regions may vary. Cross-border communication might among others take the form of investments, of corporations, of licensing deals. Moreover, cross-border actions of media companies aren’t necessarily consistent. Local and global management strategies might be applied simultaneously. Strategies of a company as a whole and its business units might diverge. Thus, when it comes to cross-border activities the relationship between market structures and media management is complex and diverse. To fully understand these relations it is necessary to detect what cross-border activities actually are, which quality and quantity they have and how they are constituted by both market structures and the media companies’ strategies and actions.

The research project “The management and economics of cross-border media communication – a study of the transnational relations between market structures and media management” focuses on these different forms of cross-border activities. It systematically analyzes the flow of different media products (in a broad sense) from and to different markets.

Researchers from communication science and media economics from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz collaborate to develop a cartography of cross-border activities and to understand media companies’ objectives and strategies on foreign markets. The research project is funded by the German Research Foundation, the Austrian Science Fund and the Swiss National Science Foundation and runs from July 2015 to December 2017.