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UK steps closer to retransmission fees

While Australia debates whether Foxtel should pay for Free to Air signals, the UK watchdog says fees could help fund public broadcasters.

2014-12-16_0139While Australian broadcasters debate whether Foxtel should be paying to carry Free to Air signals, British watchdog OfCom says the BBC and ITV could be allowed to charge pay-TV companies for the same service.

Ofcom indicated the revenue generated from retransmission fees would help compensate public service broadcasters in an increasingly fragmented television market.

ITV and Channel Four want the rules changed to charge for retransmission but SKY opposes any change.

Ofcom says other changes such as relaxing TV advertising rules and new tax breaks to encourage investment could also help the coffers.

“The entire TV industry must meet new challenges from an evolving media landscape, which brings risks and uncertainties,” said Ofcom Chief Executive Ed Richards.

In Australia the Lewis Report recently recommended, “The ABC and SBS could achieve a significant saving if they no longer bought satellite capacity to provide their services on Foxtel.”

ABC Managing Director Mark Scott recently told a Senate hearing , “Of course we would welcome not having to pay that money but there are costs involved.”

Source: Yahoo

2 Responses

  1. Networks should be able to allow or not allow retransmission so they can negotiate, because otherwise they could be being forced to subsidise commercial Pay TV.

    The ABC and Foxtel have negotiated and the result is they pay $6m on be broadcast on satellite. Yes the ABC can save $6m but they will lose viewers in remote areas served by Foxtel’s satellite.

    The ABC could stream over NBN satellite to remote areas which be paid for by remote users ( subsidised by internet users in metropolitan areas). Locking in complex cross subsidies to unknown technologies can produce unintended consequences.

  2. I find this a very interesting topic. As i remember not long ago not all Australian FTA channels where on pay tv. Maybe this was a satalite thing more than say cable but its interesting they want to be payed to allow their channels to be on pay tv providers. I am not saying its a bad idea. I could see the money going to help SBS and ABC as they struggle after the budget. But then on the flip side you start looking at America where every so often one pay tv company has to negotiate a new carriage fee as they call it and find the FTA networks playing hard ball and cant agree to terms. Like recently CBS was droped from Direct TV after one such dispute.

    I think this will be a interesting topic to watch and see what the Australian FTA and Pay tv players do.

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