The chairman of Germany’s association of private broadcasters (VPRT) has threatened to make a formal complaint to the European Commission over state broadcasting licence fees. VPRT chairman Jürgen Doetz said in todayy’s edition of the Bild newspaper, “The state [sic] broadcasters expand wherever they want, go into every market, and exploit the malleable formulations in their contracts.”
This “distortion of competition” is destroying private companies, Doetz complained. “Before we get a new licence fee system in six months, there needs to be clear answers to these questions,” he warned, “Or else we’ll have no other recourse but to make a formal complaint.”
The VPRT’s anger comes after various German public broadcasters have started making serious inroads in the Internet market. Public TV channel ARD has recently announced its plan to offer the nightly news show Tagesschau as an application for mobile phones.
The Free Democratic Party, the government’s junior coalition partner, wants to reform the broadcasting licence fee system.
(Source: The Local)
on Dec 29th, 2009 at 20:58
The bit about “state broadcasters” seems to be a mistranslation by the (non-European?) writer at The Local. The original article is here: http://www.bild.de/BILD/politik/2009/12/29/oeffentlich-rechtliche/irrsinn-mit-unseren-tv-gebuehren.html
It is obvious that BILD (the largest German tabloid) has not produced a neutral report here, but is campaigning against the “insanity of fees” (which have more than doubled in the last 10 years) and the “insanity of programming” (according to BILD, “around 165 public radio channels, including online” and 23 TV channels, including digital special interest channels).
on Dec 29th, 2009 at 23:59
And the background of this campaign are the current efforts of Axel Springer AG to charge for online offerings. Recently they rolled out such a scheme for local content of their Hamburger Abendblatt and Berliner Morgenpost newspapers. Another offering they charge for are applications of their Bild and Welt newspapers for the Apple Iphone.
Now a few days ago it emerged that ARD has such an application in the pipeline for their Tagesschau news, as already hinted by this English-language source. Not that they plan any additional online content, the only purpose would be to facilitate access to the existing tagesschau.de stuff.
This plan immediately raised criticism from publishing houses, obviously out of fear that it curtails the chances to attract customers for Iphone applications like the just launched Bild and Welt ones. It is apparent that this situation prompted Bild to mount a general campaign against public broadcasting, with a big headline about the “insanity”.