The European Commission and the UK are once again set on a collision course. Forget constitutions, euros or Maastricht. This time it's about something you care about: television, and particularly the future of TV and new media over the internet. The complex row between the UK government, the Confederation of British Industries (CBI), UK technology companies and the EC revolves around the cheerily named TV Without Frontiers directive. It's a proposed piece of European legislation intended to bring television in line with recent changes in technology.The name might imply that it will remove frontiers from TV viewing. But there's another side to the coin: the directive means that anything that appears to be television and travels over the internet is television, and therefore becomes subject to TV regulations.
The reasons for robust resistence are articulated by Jeremy Beales, the CBI's head of e-business.
The problem with this piece of legislation is that the EC has focused on television because that's all that they are interested in. Their motivation is to protect public service broadcasters and the TV industry with a catch-all piece of legislation that could affect huge numbers of websites because of a badly phrased piece of legislation.
Industrial mindsets operating in a postmodern and post industrialised world perhaps?
The Guardian says
According to a TV Licensing spokeswoman, TV watched over the internet on a PC is still TV; anyone caught doing it without a valid TV licence can be fined. Watching TV on a battery-powered device is legal so long as the person has a licence at home. And you can watch TV if it is broadcast from your home via the internet to a PC you are using. That is, if what you're watching is TV. And that is the nub of the problem. No one quite knows what TV is going to become, and so there is confusion over what will constitute TV.The EC legislation is framed to cover anything that looks like TV. According to the BSG, that could even include video blogs on websites.
Yet, information wants to be free, whilst it seems many seem keen to restrict the freedoms made possible by the internet.
Remember it was the church that clung onto wanting to keep the feudal system, as science began to compete with the authority of religion. The church knew that it could have far greater control over its parishoners within the order of the feudal system.
By 2010, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, non-linear or "content on demand" will represent a global market worth £977bn. Where the problem comes is aptly demonstrated by Channel 4, which at the end of last month decided to begin streaming its output via the web. Streaming means its output is linear: it works off a schedule. But towards the end of the year Channel 4 intends to put all of its content on a database, to be available on demand. That's non-linear.
The end of the TV schedule
At the BBC, producers are attending seminars designed to hammer home the message that the corporation does not expect the schedule to exist in six years time
Inapproprite regulation kills creativity Jeff Pulver says
This seems like a case of some people waking up to what happened with VoIP [Voice over Internet Protocol] and the threat that is coming from disruptive technologies and trying to stop it, which won't happen. All it means is that it will encourage the entrepreneurs to go elsewhere
Moment, mobile, money and me
The biggest threat to the European Commission's plans to regulate media on the internet is not from organisations like the CBI and OfCom; it is from technology itself. Already devices such as Slingbox and the software application Orb will allow you to pick up TV and video from a home PC equipped with a TV card on an internet-enabled device from anywhere in the world - a nightmare for the regulatory authorities.
It won't happen I suppose, but these EU regulators really need to sit down and think through what they are doing and why. I think OfCom have done a very good job in thinking holistically, and responsibly concerning the issues surrounding all media, and content and, its regulation in a digital world.
One suspects, that there has been some serious arm twisitng in Brussells by vested interests wishing to stem the wholescale changes being wrought in their industries due to digitalisation.
As we say in our book, business models are dying like days do. Gasping for every last ray of light.
But it doesn't stop the sun going down.
Via the Guardian
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