BRUSSELS: The European Commission has accepted concessions by Paramount regarding the studio’s film licensing deals with Sky in the U.K. following an antitrust investigation.<\/p>\n
Last July, the Commission sent Statement of Objections to Sky and six Hollywood studios regarding the restriction of access to content within the European Union. The case asserted that these studios and Sky agreed to contractual restrictions that prevented the platform from allowing EU consumers located elsewhere to access pay-TV services available in the U.K. and Ireland. As a result, these clauses would grant “absolute territorial exclusivity” to Sky UK and\/or other broadcasters, therefore impacting cross-border competition. At the time, Margrethe Vestager, the EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy, said, “European consumers want to watch the pay-TV channels of their choice regardless of where they live or travel in the EU. Our investigation shows that they cannot do this today, also because licensing agreements between the major film studios and Sky UK do not allow consumers in other EU countries to access Sky’s U.K. and Irish pay-TV services, via satellite or online. We believe that this may be in breach of EU competition rules.”<\/p>\n
The Paramount concessions agreed to are now legally binding under EU antitrust rules. The studio “will neither act upon nor enforce these clauses in existing film licensing contracts for pay TV with any broadcaster in the European Economic Area (EEA). It has also committed to refrain from (re)introducing such clauses in film licensing contracts for pay TV with any broadcaster in the EEA.” The commitments are valid for a five-year period and cover standard pay-TV and SVOD services.<\/p>\n
Viacom and Paramount issued a statement noting: “Viacom and Paramount have given binding commitments neither to enforce nor renew the types of clauses in premium pay-TV license agreements that were investigated by the European Commission and that restrict European Economic Area (EEA) pay-TV broadcasters from responding to unsolicited requests by consumers located in a different territory in the EEA. No admission of liability has been made. The European Commission today announced its decision to accept those commitments.\u00a0<\/span>The commitments permit Paramount to continue to license films through premium pay-TV output license agreements in Europe on an exclusive territorial basis. In addition, today\u2019s agreement eliminates the possibility of fines and enables the Commission to close similar pending cases against Viacom and Paramount relating to broadcasters in Italy, France, Germany and Spain.”<\/span><\/p>\n The investigation into deals between Sky and the five other studios\u2014Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros.\u2014continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BRUSSELS: The European Commission has accepted concessions by Paramount regarding the studio’s film licensing deals with Sky in the U.K. following an antitrust investigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[727,586,728,91],"class_list":["post-6923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","","category-top-stories","tag-antitrust","tag-european-commission","tag-paramount","tag-sky"],"yoast_head":"\n