EC Urged Not to Regulate On-Demand Content
LIVERPOOL, England -- Europe’s audiovisual (AV) sector Tues. continued to oppose a European Commission (EC) move to regulate aspects of on-demand AV services. Speakers at a 3-day European Union/U.K. conference here urged the Commission to back off plans to subject “non- linear” services to rules for scheduled programming and instead to let the industry regulate itself. But an EC official said the proposal had backing from many among the more than 200 responses to a Commission consultation on revamping the TV without Frontiers (TVWF) directive for the digital age. These responses “clearly confirm” the EC plan to regulate e-delivery of AV content under an approach distinguishing between linear and on-demand services, whether provided via traditional broadcasting or the Internet.
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Information Society & Media Dir.-Gen. Fabio Colasanti said the TVWF directive embodies key public objectives such as preserving European culture and keeping minors from unsuitable programming. Against, that, however, must be balanced job protection, wealth creation and rollout of new AV services, he said. The EC is trying the determine the “area of trade-off” among the objectives, and “we have to get this trade-off right,” Colasanti said.
Contrary to many press reports and responses to the EC consultation, the Commission isn’t trying to regulate the Internet, Colasanti said. The majority view is that on-demand services should come under minimal broadcasting standards, he said. The swift transition from traditional broadcasting -- a “one-to-many,” public, political service that used to differ greatly from what phone, record and newspaper companies did -- to digital convergence poses a “daunting challenge” to regulators, said BBC Dir.-Gen. Mark Thompson. Adopted in 1989, the TVWF was seen as a response to its era’s broadcast environment, but now should be called the “Content without Frontiers” directive, he said.
That doesn’t mean content should be regulated, Thompson said. Consumers will expect decency and child protection standards to remain in place in linear programming, but the on-demand world is far more complicated. There, he said, many consumers will reject content rules other than those aimed at protecting minors. The BBC doubts if broadcast rules should apply to on- demand services at all, he said.
A Content without Frontiers directive should achieve a pan-European approach to digital rights management, support interoperability and, where applicable, promote open-source technology, Thompson said. But the EC should leave some areas alone. “Enlightened, flexible, evolving regulation” is important, he said, but govts. won’t be able to rely on regulation or the marketplace alone. The digital space needs “active civic intervention and significant public investment” if it’s to deliver its full potential.
Other companies called for light-to-no regulation of new services. Regulators should “wait and see” instead of trying to predict new technologies’ futures, said Damian Reid, Orange exec. European vp-strategy & performance. Even where material unsuitable to minors is involved, Orange feels self-regulation is more viable than govt. regulation, he said.
Consumers already are protected by the e-commerce directive and the Council of Europe recommendation for protection of minors and human dignity, so new regulations aren’t needed in TVWF, said Karen Thomson, CEO of AOL U.K. Moreover, she said, self-regulation in those areas adapts to market conditions more readily than rules from above. Self-regulation is more cost-effective than a regulatory scheme, Thomson said, asking what it will cost to extend TVWF to on-demand services. Video Networks, which provides a U.K. TV over DSL service (Homechoice) that includes both linear and on-demand content, polices its video-on-demand offerings, said CEO Roger Lynch. Self- regulation is an excellent way to enable new services and to act responsibly, he said.
Extending TVWF to require all scheduled programming and on-demand services to meet decency and other qualitative rules is a lot to ask of new services, said Riccardo Perissich, chmn., Telecom Italia Media. However, he said, firms wanting to compete in the market can live with that. What they don’t want is application of the directive’s quantitative rules -- advertising time, quotas for European productions -- to on-demand online services, because the business models aren’t mature.
Many European telcos, ISPs and media companies have complained about the EC proposal in written submissions. On Tues., Intellect, which represents the U.K. information technology and telecom sector, and the Broadband Stakeholder Group -- a govt. advisory panel -- urged the EC to “go back to the drawing board” and fix its “totally unworkable” approach. The proposed directive’s costs “would by far outweigh the benefits,” said Antony Walker, Intellect dir.-knowledge economy. “Many, if not most, new AV services will fall in between the Commission’s artificial definition of ‘linear’ and ‘non-linear services'-- leading to confusion and regulatory uncertainty for many companies and organizations looking to invest in this growth market.”
Govt. must find the right way to regulate broadcasting and AV without hampering innovation and stifling Europe’s most productive sector, said U.K. Culture, Media & Sport Secretary Tessa Jowell. There’s no household in Europe that will be unaffected by those conclusions, Jowell said: “We must get this right.”