Judge halts development of new services by public broadcasters

The minister of education, culture and science has not put in sufficient effort in researching the disruptive effects on the market of new services that the Dutch public broadcasters develops and should not have given them the go-ahead so easily, the court of Amsterdam ruled. Commercial broadcasters together with newspaper publishers had protested these innovations because they fear these will disturb their market. The judge ruled that this fear is justified and warrants further investigations.

The services that are under scrutiny, are, amongst others, extended possibilities to review tv shows that had already been aired by not only streaming, but also downloading these shows and allow them to be copied and viewed on different devices. Furthermore, NPO is developing sites and portals for interactive and on demand services.

The ministry has been given three months to assess the effects that the new services would have on the Dutch markets for TV, radio and press. On the basis of this market assessment, it should come to a new decision about the acceptability of the new services. In the meantime, the judge allowed the public broadcasters (NPO) to continue developing the services as their disturbing effect will still be marginal and investments have already been made.

The media sector in The Netherlands is a highly complex mixture of public and commercial actors that increasingly operate in each other’s field. The regulations that oversaw that each medium could work more or less unperturbed, is based on clear distinctions of channels: radio, TV, press. Now that media, in battle for the viewers’/readers’ limited time, target they online environment with their innovations, this channel distinction fades.

The careful, but currently slightly outdated regulation, makes it hard for all parties to develop new services or target new markets. This has been concluded before by the much debated report of the Brinkman Committee, that commented on the future of the press in The Netherlands.

It is a shame that competition regulation currently seems to conflict with developing services to better serve the needs of customers. The ways that NPO develops to allow viewers more options for accessing content, sound like music to our ears!

Source: tweakers.net (in Dutch)