Platform Power and Policy in Transforming Television Markets by Tom Evens & Karen Donders

Author:Tom Evens & Karen Donders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Public Broadcasters Take on Cable Operators in Germany

Another story of retransmission deals can be told for Germany . There, public broadcasters ARD and ZDF only paid distribution costs to cable operators UnityMedia and Kabel Deutschland (now Vodafone Deutschland). In 2012 they unilaterally decided on cancelling the payments of about €60 million annually, claiming they no longer corresponded with the actual market situation. Admittedly, both public broadcasters did not pay other television distributions carriage fees . Ever since, the cable operators have contested this decision (Krieger 2016).

In mid-July 2017 the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf decided in favour of the cable operators and told the public broadcasters to pay a total of around €3.5 million for cable distribution of their channels. The court case only covered the carriage fees for the years 2013 and 2016. In the opinion of the court , the carriage contract from 2008 had not been cancelled, meaning that the broadcasters were still obliged to pay carriage fees . According to the court , the cancellation declarations of the broadcasters were violating anti-trust laws as they have not been made for individual economic reasons, but on the grounds of a jointly made agreement , which is not allowed (Krieger 2017a). In response, ZDF called for the prime ministers of the federal states to resolve the dispute regarding whether the public broadcasters have to pay cable carriage fees through a regulation in the national broadcast law (Krieger 2017c).

The tensions between public broadcasters and cable distributors rose significantly in 2016 and 2017. Several litigations were pending and both sides seemed to await the outcome before moving forward or even showing a willingness to do so. Saarländischer Rundfunk, one of ARD’s regional member organisations, and Vodafone Deutschland have been unable to close a retransmission deal on the channel SR Fernsehen in HD quality. The public broadcaster is advising its license fee payers to opt for terrestrial or satellite transmission of its channel in HD quality, which is a remarkable and rather aggressive move. Vodafone Deutschland finds this position incomprehensible. Essentially, both parties await a final legal settlement and want to avoid taking positions that might affect their negotiation position (Krieger 2017b).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.