ACT Director General Talks Euro Content Quotas

PREMIUM: European programming quotas created back in the early days of commercial television are still in place, but the European Commission has come around to the view that application of such regulations for all channels is impractical, the Association of Commercial Television’s Ross Biggam tells World Screen’s Jay Stuart.

“The Commission has recognized that there is a level of audience share below which they are not going to get involved,” Biggam, ACT’s director general, told World Screen Newsflash in Brussels on Tuesday. “Whether that audience share is 0.3 percent or 0.2 percent or whatever has not been quantified but the view is now current that there is a point where channels are too small to worry about.”

One of the reasons for the more laissez-faire policy is the sheer explosion of channels since the Television Without Frontiers directive was born in 1989. At that time, when the EU had fewer members, there were 47 national channels in Europe. Now, if local and regional channels are included, there are probably more than 9,000, according to the ACT, which represents 32 big broadcasting companies (including all the heavyweights) licensed in 30 different European countries.

Once upon a time their big commercial channels would get 35 percent or 40 percent of the audience steadily. “Nowadays we can still get audiences of that size but the audience goes up and down,” Biggam said. The big programming trend is more emphasis on event television, programming shown live or near live. This is not only good for attracting audiences, he pointed out, but it’s a defence against people downloading the content and watching it illegally.

One of the original economic intents of quotas, as a defense against the Americans dumping programming, is now outmoded. “The market has moved on,” Biggam said. “The studios are not selling on price but on quality.”

During the past decade, there has also been a real shift in the creative balance of trade. One of the biggest changes in the program market has been the emergence of the format business—a business that is “largely invisible to outsiders,” Biggam said. “It’s ironic that in the 1990s the politicians were afraid that Europe would be overrun by American programming when the reality today is that we run a trade surplus with the U.S. in terms of formats. The Netherlands and Sweden, two European countries that are not large, rank third and fourth in the world in the formats business, but that’s largely unknown.”

The will to create a single European television market is still strong in some quarters of Brussels. There is an ongoing battle between the commercial sector and Eurocrats who would like to see all channels available in every market. In the first place, Biggam points out, that is technically not feasible. More to the point, there is not a demand for every channel everywhere. He said, “In fact, we have Romanian channels that are available outside Romania, for example, but they make deals with platform operators where there is a market for Romanian content. If programming is available everywhere, it distorts the market.”