European Commission to Investigate Pay-TV Model

BRUSSELS: The European Commission is expected to launch a formal competition inquiry into the sale of pay-TV rights for exclusive content such as films and sporting events.

According to the Financial Times, the antitrust probe could break open the country-by-country licensing that has been the case with the sales of exclusive pay-TV content such as newly released Hollywood blockbusters and live sports. The probe into the restrictions that divide the E.U. into national patches follows on a 2011 European Court of Justice ruling regarding a British publican who had been fined for showing football to customers by using a satellite card from Greece. The ruling upheld the right of consumers to buy a TV decoder card in any E.U. country.

Last year, the European competition commissioner sanctioned a fact-finding mission to see whether barriers to cross-border content warranted anti-trust inquiry and possible enforcement of action.

Investigators are now poised to step up their inquiries into whether “absolute territorial protection clauses” break competition law. These clauses prevent licensees from selling to other countries or from accepting unsolicited demands from international customers to pay for access to content.

“It should be possible for the collective management of copyright to become more European structured, thereby facilitating the issues of licenses covering a number of regions,” the Commission said.