Television’s distinctive product is the message, a symbolic vehicle built through codes.

Evidence

The “object” of production practices and structures in television is the production of a message: that is, a sign-vehicle, or rather sign-vehicles of a specific kind, organized, like any other form of communication or language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagmatic chains of a discourse. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 784

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall defines television’s ‘object of production’ as the sign-vehicle — the core premise of encoding/decoding theory.