Digital media services: a regulator’s nightmare?

New media service providers offering audiovisual content flew into a panic earlier this year when Viviane Reding, the commissioner for the information society, announced her proposals for an update of EU broadcasting legislation. In extending the scope of current legislation to take account of the switchover to digital technology, overzealous policymakers, it seemed, had ventured too far, catching a number of web-based services and digital entertainment devices in their net.

The issue sparked widespread debate this summer. Excessive regulation, said detractors, would stifle new media businesses, eventually driving them out of the EU. Policing fast-moving digital services, sometimes consisting of thousands of content providers, would also have been a regulator’s nightmare.

In hindsight, Reding maintains that the European Commission took a light-touch approach in its original proposals. "The Commission text covers neither the electronic press nor services which consist only in the distribution or the delivery of content generated by third parties such as Google Video or YouTube…we want first of all to see how technologies, business models and self-regulation will develop."

But close examination of the Commission’s update earlier this year threw up a number of issues. Unsure of how to interpret the Commission’s blurred definition of non-linear services, some feared that it might include videoblogs, online gaming sites and video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube.

"Clearly the definition and scope of services covered has to change and has to be broader than before," says Matteo Maggiore, head of EU and international policy at the BBC, which has been rolling out digital services for over a decade. "But, there have to be differences between services being broadcast to a number of people and services to individuals.

"The position of the BBC has been from the beginning that content without frontiers makes sense. Technical convergence blurs the boundaries between services and technologies."

According to Ruth Hieronymi, who is preparing the European Parliament’s opinion on the directive, ambiguities have now been cleared up. The directive will now only be extended to ‘TV-like’ services delivered on-demand. "We are on the right track as we have already achieved a broad consensus. The scope of this directive only covers a small part of audiovisual services. This was misunderstood at the beginning. Now it is much clearer. User-generated content is not covered," she says.

The UK, which hosts a thriving digital media industry, played a lead role in alerting member states to the pitfalls of extending the scope of the directive too far. "Regulators should look to intervene only where viewers might reasonably expect some statutory protection," says Simon Bates, of national broadcast regulator Ofcom.

Looking back, it seems understandable that the update caused so many misunderstandings. Legislating for the sector at a time when it is undergoing major changes would have been a tricky process. With new services offering broadcast services in some shape or form cropping up on the web all the time, policymakers would have been working on quicksand. But without the appropriate terminology to hand, providing the kind of precision required in a legislative text would have been difficult.

New media service providers offering audiovisual content flew into a panic earlier this year when Viviane Reding, the commissioner for the information society, announced her proposals for an update of EU broadcasting legislation. In extending the scope of current legislation to take account of the switchover to digital technology, overzealous policymakers, it seemed, had ventured too far, catching a number of web-based services and digital entertainment devices in their net.