Starting from Albert Robida’s early visions of the future of TV in 1883 to the rise of todays expanded satellite services (IPTV), William Uricchio, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies, will demonstrate how television has totally recontextualised any normative ideas of nationalism or the Western. Uricchio will expose the universal vs. local visual codes of television and the consequences of exchanging such codes for the identity of the national visual language.