Hollywood vs the Eurocrats - round one to Tinsel Town
- Summary:
- The Eurocrats took on the movie stars - and the movie stars dealt a blow to a major part of Brussels Single Digital Market ambitions.
In what can only be read as a blow to a central plank of Europe’s plans for a Single Digital Market, the European Parliament has voted 344 to 265 against proposals to abolish country-by-country licensing for movies and TV shows across the European Union.
The proposal, known as SatCab, would have allowed European broadcasters to show films and TV shows on streaming services across all 28 EU nations, providing they had licensed the show in the service provider’s country of origin.
Critics of the plans had warned that SatCab would destroy the existing pre-sales industry whereby content producers do territory-by-territory deals with local distributors. They also raised concerns that a borderless regime would mean that consumers would be able to watch streaming services from outside their own countries, which could lead to market domination by price-slashing providers and reduce competition.
The counter-argument from supporters of the proposed legislative changes is that European consumers would in fact have more choice. At present, for example, Netflix offers different programming choices in different countries, depending on what licensing deals have been. Supporters also claim that breaking down the national boundaries would boost cross-border consumption in Europe by up to €18 billion a year.
Not likely to give up
The vote is a big blow to Eurocrats. EC President Jean-Claude Juncker has pitched removing digital barriers as a core element of the Commission’s Europe 2020 strategy, stating last year:
I want to see pan-continental telecoms networks, digital services that cross borders and a wave of innovative European start-ups. I want to see every consumer getting the best deals and every business accessing the widest market – wherever they are in Europe.
Such high-level backing makes it unlikely that yesterday’s vote will be seen as the final decision. Indeed, Andrus Ansip, Vice-President of the European Commission who leads the Digital Single Market project, took to twitter to confirm that he intends to fight on and “strongly defend” SatCab at the EU’s Council of Ministers meeting on Friday this week.
He's not likely to make much progress there. Several nation states have aired public opposition to the proposals, most notably France, Italy and Germany.
But this is a big deal for Ansip and he’s not going to let it lie easily. Last week he wrote to key stakeholders in the European Parliament, declaring that “culture should not be locked in” and arguing:
The current state of access to online content or “play” services across borders is dismal. It does not correspond to our peoples needs and wishes. For some public broadcasters, we are talking about 1% of content, while the rest is blocked for copyright reasons. The best cases of access would be to have 15-20% of content available without blocking on any given day.
My take
Much as I’d like to be able to access - legally - a global library of Netflix content, I’m deeply uneasy about this proposal and welcome its defeat -for now at least. Ansip and Juncker aren’t about to let this one lie though, so we’ll be coming back around on this in 2018.