Television is a cultural commodity. It works within an economically determined capitalist economy, but when we have said that about it we have said both much and remarkably little. There is a financial economy within which wealth circulates, and a cultural economy within which meanings and pleasures circulate, and the relationship between them is not as deterministic as some theorists have proposed.

In the financial economy, television consists of programmes and advertisements, not textuality. A programme is a commodity produced and then sold to distributors. In distribution its role changes and it becomes not a commodity but a producer, and what it produces is a new commodity, the audience, which is then in its turn sold as a commodity to advertisers.

Here the role shift undergone by the programme in the financial economy, from commodity to producer, is now undergone by the audience, who are left as a commodity sold to the advertiser. But in the cultural economy the audience rejects its role as a commodity and becomes a producer, a producer of meanings and pleasures, and at this moment stops being an audience and becomes different materialisations of the process we call viewing television.

Meanings and pleasures do not circulate in the cultural economy in the same way that wealth does in the financial. In the first place there is no exchange of money at the point of sale or consumption. Television appears to be free, however it may actually be paid for; payment has no direct relationship to consumption, and people can consume as much as they wish and what they wish with no thought of what they are able to afford.