The regulations will replace the Television Without Frontiers
(TVWF) Directive and will extend government regulation to some
internet video. The Parliament has significantly amended the
proposed Directive, and has tightened up some of its
definitions.
Changes to the Directive made at European Parliament committee
stage have been adopted and the Parliament voted in favour of the
amended Directive in December.
The Audio Visual Media Services (AVMS) Directive has been
proposed as a way of updating the law to take account of a changing
broadcasting landscape in which multimedia distribution is playing
an increasingly important part.
The TVWF Directive only applied to television broadcasts, which
meant that even material offered online by broadcasters for viewing
as if it were television escaped regulation. The European
Commission has consulted since 2003 on an update to that
Directive.
The Commission's proposal was heavily amended by the European
Parliament in November when it proposed a series of changes. It has
restricted the Directive to apply only to commercial TV-like
services and not to user-generated content such as videos placed on
YouTube.
The Parliament also defined the scope of the Directive to ensure
that it covered not just editorial content but also advertising. It
made it clear that the rules would apply to services delivered to a
schedule, such as a traditional TV station, but also services
delivered on-demand, such as internet downloads.
Under the terms of the Directive linear services will be more
closely regulated than on-demand services.
The Directive had been controversial because there were fears
that the Commission was attempting to extend its powers to
traditionally less regulated aspects of the internet. Online gaming
companies feared they would be caught in the new rules, as did
publishers of blogs and other non-commercial publishers, such as
video sites.
The amended Directive explicitly states, though, that it will
not apply to online gambling, gaming or games of chance or blogs.
User-generated videos and private websites with no economic or mass
media element are also excluded.
"The Parliament did not wholly endorse the Commission's
suggested definition of audiovisual media services, opting instead
to modify the concepts of 'linear services' and 'on demand
services' in the draft legislation," said a European Parliament
statement. "The former refers to traditional television
broadcasting 'transmitted ... according to a fixed programming
schedule', while the latter comprises services such as web TV or
video-on-demand – where the user requests the transmission of a
given programme 'on an individual basis'."
This was the first reading of the Directive in Parliament. The
Council of Ministers will now decide whether or not to back the
compromise agreed with Parliament in November. If they do, the
Directive will be sent back to Parliament for a second reading
later this year, at which point countries will be given two years
to implement the Directive as national law.
