EU Reviewing State Financing of Public Service Broadcasters
European Commission plans to overhaul state funding for public broadcasters seem to be on the right track, commercial and public-service broadcasters said Tuesday. Indications from Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes are that the regulations won’t be unpalatable to either group, they said. But whether public-service broadcasters should get taxpayer money to compete among digital media remains an “emotional” question, said Ross Biggam, director general of the Association of Commercial Television in Europe.
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Under the Amsterdam Protocol, EU countries are free to “design the mission and the architecture” of their public- service broadcasting systems, if they exercise “a certain amount of restraint when using public money to support media activities,” Kroes said at a July conference in Strasbourg. Media markets have changed dramatically since the 2001 Broadcasting Communication, as commercial and public broadcasters expand to new distribution platforms, Kroes said. Newspaper publishers and commercial broadcasters increasingly are asking what are the fair limits of using state aid to pay for public broadcasters’ online activities, she said.
Kroes proposed to improve definitions for broadcasters’ public mission when they enter new media markets. She said dating clubs and video games may not serve society’s social, democratic and cultural needs. Kroes urged better measures of how state aid affect new media markets. Public value and market impact should be judged by country, perhaps using the “public value test” applied to the BBC, she said.
Representatives of the commercial TV association met Tuesday with EC officials in Brussels on revamping state aid, Biggam said. Commercial broadcasters view the proposed changes as a “necessary update,” he told us. An overhaul must address the point at which publicly financed operators can be active in the new media space, and issues raised by new head-on competition for online ads and content between public broadcasters and newspaper publishers, Biggam said. Besides more clearly defining the public service mandate, the work must include of proposed public broadcasting activities before the overhaul starts, he said.
No one knows what changes the EC will propose, but Biggam said Kroes might leave it to national governments to write rules on gauging the need for proposed public broadcasting activity, or call for an independent body to decide which services to examine this way.
The European Broadcasting Union, which represents public broadcasters, believes a “few improvements” are needed, but not a change to the general balance, said Director General Jean Reveillon. Requiring government-run detailed public value and market impact tests, with private operators’ participation mandated, could mean a heavy administrative and financial burden and also could keep public broadcasters from adapting quickly to a fast-evolving sector, Reveillon said.
The update should reflect technological neutrality, said incoming EBU President Jean-Paul Philippot, director general of Belgian public broadcaster RTBF. Public service broadcasters’ roles and responsibilities are tied up with content distribution and that should be accessible to a wide public, he said. Proposals should “avoid any tendency” to regulate public-service broadcasting in member countries, he said. If those conditions are met, the overhaul “will not be perceived as a threat to Europe’s cultural diversity,” he said.
The commercial TV group is “broadly” happy with the EC’s direction, an apparent effort to avoid confrontations with national governments, Biggam said. Despite the “often emotional discussions” about the future of digital media and the role of commercial and public broadcasting, “it is not our intention to keep public broadcasters out of the digital and online media,” the association said. The EC is expected to publish proposed changes in the Broadcasting Communication “this autumn,” a spokeswoman said.