Being a sports fan who cannot bear to be parted from the England cricket team and the football, my subscription with Sky is a necessary, if expensive, evil. Likewise, I have a subscription to watch NFL American Football games. While I may be a fully paid up member of the web-generation, it is amazing to be able to watch TV on my lap-top.
But there are two things which are vexing. Firstly, my Sky subscription is useless when I am outside the UK. Secondly, because Sky has also bought rights to NFL games, I find that a few games (usually the ones most worth watching) are ‘blacked out’ when I try to watch in the UK.
Not only is this unfair – after all, I have paid for both subscriptions – but it also highlights one of the reasons why selling broadcast rights on a country- by- country basis often screws over the consumer. You pay through the nose to watch the best and most popular shows only to find that, once you’re outside one Member State, you either have to pay again or do without a service you paid for.
It looks as though the ‘Premier League’ ruling by the ECJ marked a line in the sand. The Commission communication on e-commerce indicated that the era of country-by-country deals may be drawing to a close. Collective rights-sales and pan-European licensing are on he cards. It can’t come a moment too soon for me. After all, if a digital single market is to exist in the EU then it is logical that we have pan-European or multi-territory broadcasting rights. This should apply for all commercial television. The irony is that the likes of the BBC, ZDF and RTE tend to be available to cable-tv viewers across the EU, despite the fact that it is more difficult to justify state-backed channels being available.
So there is every reason to expect that watching our favourite programmes should become easier within the next couple of years. But although some saw the ‘Premier League’ ruling – which decided that it is perfectly legal for individuals to buy decoder cards and TV subscriptions from other countries to undercut the subscription fees for Sky Sports – I don’t expect the value of rights, which is then reflected in the size of the subscription fees, to dramatically decline.
The big money-spinning broadcasting rights deals are for football, of which the English Premier League is the biggest single collective rights sale, with BskyB currently paying £5bn for a three year deal. The deals for the rights to show Barcelona and Real Madrid matches, which are sold by the clubs themselves, are similarly large. Instead, I would expect the Premier League, and all other rights-holders to copyright more elements which they could then require their TV partners to air. For example, UEFA uses a copy-righted anthem in the broadcasts of its Champion’s League matches, and the scope for introducing new copy-rights is extremely wide.
So those of us who baulk at the prospect of paying 40 or 50 euros per month in subscriptions shouldn’t hold their breath in assuming that collective rights will cut costs. Nonetheless, if EU legislation cannot make TV cheaper to watch, it should certainly make it easier. And that in itself would be a big step forward.
#1 by Marcel on January 26, 2012 - 1:47 am
Yes why not, let’s let the undemocratic Eurosoviet Union destroy football as well, after all our democracy and our wealth are nearly gone already (except for the rich of course).
#2 by T on January 26, 2012 - 10:42 pm
Although I’d love to see the total destruction of football, this isn’t just an EU thing, this is a global problem.
This problem is just a skirmish in the war between the (major publishers in the) “content industries” and the “public”. Just read a bit on the SOPA and PIPA-bills in the US, which have been postponed for now, or the ACTA where the EU is a “negotiating partner” (lapdog).
The monetisation of creativity as we know it is only something of the past 150 years, in all the millennia of human creativity. For over a century the public were mere consumers, since the “content industries” decided what you could listen or see.
In the 80′ies tools to create/copy content, such as computers, cassettes and VCR’s became available/affordable for those “consumers”. Suddenly the consumers were able to create content on their own, which the major publishers weren’t used, since this wasn’t how “it used to be”. Internet is just a successor of those tools.
Those acts are only there to keep the economists and jurists (and their croonies) in their positions at those companies. Sadly, creatives in the content-industries are often mere golden egg-producing geese to be plucked.
Believe me as I write that I’m quite antagonistic towards the EU as it is now (not as much as my dislike of the football-scene/industries though), but this is something where the EU is only partially the problem, the major content-publishers and their private bodyguards (the US government).
And “Eurosoviet Union”? The majority of countries have liberal (that’s libertarianism for those across the pond) or conservative governments. (If I recall correctly only Denmark has a social-democratic government at the moment.)
I’m afraid we’re heading towards a totalitarian mockery of democracy, but not one we’ve seen before (such as the various forms of leninism and fascism)
#3 by Mattias on February 3, 2012 - 4:48 pm
Having pan-EU licensing is not so much about getting cheaper prices for the consumers, but rather increasing choices. At present, if I want to buy music in say iTunes, I must have a credit card issued in the same state as the relevant iTunes store, and a billing address in the same state. Also, the iTunes store is not available over the entire EU (missing in Malta and Cyprus IIRC), meaning that a lot of consumers will have no way of acquiring music online except through piracy.
This is more noticeable with movies, where online stores are essentially non existent in the EU, and where they exist they are nationalized (meaning I get German language audio if I buy a movie in Germany, or Dutch subtitles for a French movie if I buy the movie in the Netherlands), with pan-EU licensing of copyrights, I would be able to buy the movie in another store (or the stores would simply be forced to embed multiple subtitles / audio tracks in this case).
For American movies, language is usually not an issue since they are all in English, but for European movies it is an issue. I cannot count the number of times I have decided to not buy French or Spanish movies because they are only subtitled in Dutch where I live, only once have I bothered to get one, but then ordering a physical copy on a DVD from the UK.
How much would the European integration not be promoted if European cultural products that you can acquire are also usable for its citizens?
The same goes with TV broadcasts. I live in the NL and like ice hockey, guess how easy it is to watch any games here, where virtually no one have heard of the sport. Would I have the option of getting a Swedish/Finnish/Slovakian TV channel that actually show the sport, I would be very happy to pay for the subscription, at present this is not easy, but at least the ECJ declared it to be legal last year.
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