The paper takes the European media revolution as its starting point and traces the history of the European Community's (EC's) first major legislation on audiovisual internationalization and deregulation-the 'television without frontiers' directive on broadcasting. Specifically, the aims of the EC's audiovisual policy are characterized as tenuously resolving two conflicting models of broadcast regulation-the trusteeship model and the marketplace model. An evaluation of the 'television without frontiers' directive on broadcasting highlights the politics of compromise at play in the EC's regulation of its audiovisual sector.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>