"The new italian media law". Lessons to be learned for the Spanish Television Industry
| Autor | Guiseppe Flores Dárcais |
| Cargo del Autor | Consultor internacional en materias de TV.D. |
| Páginas | 75-86 |
Across Europe, governments, broadcasting entities and other institutions have recently been accelerating their efforts to present plans for a complete switch over from analogue to digital television. While the promised target dates of analogue "switch off" are still several years away, most governments have realized that the time left to have the entire population upgrade their television sets and organize the structural industry changes required for digital transmission is relatively short. The sudden urge to complete the switchover plans is further enhanced by the desire of the European Community to standardize technical standards and harmonize analogue TV switch-off dates. The successful launch of Freeview in the United Kingdom has further given the digital TV debate a new impetus.
The ambitious task of upgrading an entire television industry in most cases requires the EU member states to also review their media legislative environment. While the required legislative redesign differs widely between member states, given the complexity of the switchover task, it is useful to learn from other countries experience in order to extract general guidelines that can facilitate a successful digital TV migration.Page 76
Spain has been one of the countries that embraced the digital terrestrial television (DTT) early on and launched DTT by means of a pay TV alternative, Quiero TV. While the commercial failure of Quiero TV in 2002 had initially raised questions about the general viability of DTT in Spain, the failure is generally attributed to factors (organization, technology platform, financing, etc.) related to this particular initiative, in particular to the pay TV model that was chosen. The previous Spanish government has on numerous occasions said to be determined to introduce DTT, a promise that has so far remained unfulfilled. The incoming government is expected to also strive for a DTT introduction and is likely to do so as part of a larger effort to reshape Spanish (public) broadcast system. One of the first issues that the new government will have to tackle is the Spanish media law that has seen itself gradually being dispersed into fragments falling under different laws.
This article aims to explore a legislative effort in Italy to revise the media law in view of the digital television age. The situation in Italy might not be applicable to Spain but can hopefully provide some useful lessons for the Spanish legislative challenge. Furthermore, the article pretends to demystify opinions about digital television in general and provide insights into the complex dynamics of the migration from analogue to digital television.
The recent events surrounding the proposal for a new media law in Italy, also coined as the Gasparri Law, have been characterized by hefty intra- and extra parliamentary turmoil up to the recent approval of the latest version in Parliament.
Given the extraordinary situation of media control in Italy, the debate surrounding the Gasparri law was from the start destined to be of political- rather than technical nature. Despite its political importance, the law proposal as well as the many discussions following its initial approval in the Senate have been characterized by limited depth of analysis. The law proposal was drafted without much liaison with oposition parties and other stakeholders, resulting in a proposal that fails to solve the media concentration in Italy. Before analyzing the flaws in the Gasparri law, a general overview of digital television policy making is provided.
In the context of the Gasparri Law proposal, politicians, tecnicians and the media talk about ®a new era of television®. What is really referred to in this context is digital terrestrial transmission technology (also referred to as Digital Terrestrial Television or ®DTT®). Besides this form of transmission, three otherPage 77 forms of digital television can be distinguished, namely Digital Cable, Digital Satellite and Video over the Internet Protocol (VOIP). It is important to distinguish the other forms besides DTT because they are real options to consumers today. Any regulatory initiative should acknowledge the co-existence of the different competing technologies and understand the dynamics underlying each of them.
Besides separating different transmission technologies, the distinction should be made between ®pay-TV® and ®free-to-air® television. In pay-TV, a viewer is subscribed to television and can access TV content depending on the monthly subscription amount paid (managed through a so called ®conditional access system®). In free-to-air television consumers apparently receive the content for free. In reality, they pay for the television indirectly, that is, through an advertising premium for the products and services they buy and/or through a one-off television tax.
In Italy, today some 11% of TV houselholds view pay-TV while the remaining 89% view free-to-air television. With the Gasparri law, the government has decided to migrate the entire free-to-air analogue television market to free-to-air DTT. This migration is truly a massive undertaking. Not only should all ¥analogue citizens¥ at some point buy a receiver-decoder that can convert the digital terrestrial signal back to the analogue tv set (or alternatively buy a new so called integrated digital tv set that incorporates the receiver within the TV set) but in addition an entire content production chain (from production to broadcast) should be moved towards a new production- and emission paradigm. The aggregated investment of such undertaking is estimated to be over 2 Bln Euro1.
The first question, therefore, to be answered is whether this undertaking is truly worthwhile. Part of the answer lies in the size of the effort itself; the introduction of DTT will generate billions of Euros in value creation for content industries, hardware- and software manufacturers and...
Para continuar leyendo
Solicita tu prueba