The media and audiovisual sector plays an important economic, social and cultural role in European countries, and it also has a major contribution to the European Union's economy. The basis of the EU's common audiovisual legislation is the "Television Without Boundaries" (TWF) Directive adopted in 1989 and then updated in 1997. The aim of the Directive was to remove obstacles to free TV broadcasting on a single market, to ensure at least 50 % broadcasting of films and programs of European origin on national televisions, guaranteeing the protection of public interest objectives, such as cultural diversity etc, through the national legislation of the member states. Due to the convergence of media services and the penetration of traditional Internet media, in 2007 a new Audiovisual Media Services Directive / Audiovisual Media Services Directive / (AVMS), which also includes non-liner audiovisual media services, was adopted. In 2016, new amendments were added, which are expected to be adopted by the end of 2018. However, despite the existence of the Directive, the current analysis of national television programs in the EU member states shows that most of them in their quantitative sense fulfill their obligations, while in a qualitative sense it is not the case. Specifically, most of them do not respect the principle of diversity of the origin of the broadcast program, as well as the promotion of European, cultural, documentary, scientific, drama, films or similar contents produced in different European countries. At the same time, the idea of multiculturalism as well as the exchange of European television content on the common European market lost its purpose. Since the Republic of Croatia became a full member of the EU in 2013, the research was aimed at showing whether the implementation of European provisions contributed to the preservation of European and national productions and cultural heritage on national coverage televisions. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used in the research. The quantitative method gave an insight into the percentage of programs of the European origin broadcast on HTV, RTL and Nova TV in 2016, while qualitative method dealt with genre and origin of the content broadcasted in the programs of the mentioned televisions. Within qualitative research deep interviews with the Editors in Chief of HTV, RTL and Nova TV, as well as the representative of the Agency for Electronic Media were led. In those interviews the results obtained were analyzed in order to gain a clearer insight into the program planning and choice of the content being broadcast as well as possibility of sanctions for noncompliance with European provisions. The results of this research give a scientific contribution in the area of normative theory.