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Premiere demands EU competition law hearing: EBU monopoly unfairly prevents pay-TV providers from acquiring
Proceedings also initiated against ARD and ZDF for the receipt of unlawful subsidies / Kofler: “ARD and ZDF are impeding fair competition at the license-payers’ expense”
Munich, October 29, 2004. Premiere is taking action at European level against purchasing cartels and unlawful subsidies to German public service broadcasters. The pay-TV enterprise has filed a complaint against the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) under EC competition rules.
Premiere believes that the co-operative acquisition of TV broadcasting rights to major sporting events, as currently practised by members of the EBU purchasing bloc, contravenes the principles of competition law. “Faced with the purchasing power of the EBU, Premiere is clearly at a competitive disadvantage,” says Premiere CEO Dr. Georg Kofler. “As members of the EBU, ARD, ZDF and ORF regularly acquire pay-TV rights, even though they are unable to use them on their own channels.” The public service broadcasters ARD, ZDF and ORF, which are members of the EBU, operate free-to-air, publicly funded TV programmes in Premiere’s broadcasting area. As Kofler insists, “License-fee money is being used to accumulate an unnecessarily long list of broadcasting rights that has only one purpose: to block, or at best control, access to major sporting events by competitors like Pre-miere. It’s a wild situation – viewers are paying for programme content that is never shown on public TV.”
In addition to its suit for unfair competition, Premiere has therefore also lodged a state aids complaint against ARD and ZDF for unlawful subsidies. As Kofler explains, “We are not challenging radio and TV licence fees as such, but we consider it inadmissible that ARD and ZDF misuse their generous fee revenues to obstruct competitors. What they are doing is eliminating market competition at the expense of their paid-up viewers. This is surely not in the interests of their public mandate to provide a basic TV service, and least of all with the call for economy that this mandate implies. With a sensible pooling of resources, ARD and ZDF could save a lot of money on sports coverage.”
Premiere’s objective in filing these two suits is to ensure access to major sporting events such as the Olympic Games or the European Cup football championships on fair conditions. “We have some really impressive ideas for a full programme of live coverage that perfectly complements the ARD and ZDF programme offering,” Kofler tells us. “Our model would relieve the burden on public service broadcaster and allow sports enthusiasts to view live events that are not shown on any other TV channel.”
Premiere’s legal arguments are supported by a recent final judgement pronounced by the European Court of Justice on September 27, 2004 (case C-470/02 P). The Court’s decision was unequivocal in making it clear that the EBU is improperly eliminating competition in the sports broadcasting market. The Court has thereby confirmed a decision pronounced in a similar case by the EU Court of First Instance on October 8, 2002 (T-185/00; T-216/00; T-300/00).
For more information please contact:
Dirk Heerdegen
Premiere spokesman / Head of Communications
Phone: +49 (0) 89/99 58-63 50
dirk.heerdegen@premiere.de
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