Brussels on the attack over pay-TV rights

European Commission officials are poised to launch a formal anti-trust inquiry into sales of pay-TV rights to screen premium sport and Hollywood blockbusters.

A formal European Commission investigation could smash open the country-by-country licensing that has dominated the sales of exclusive pay-TV content.

The regulatory attack on restrictions that carve the EU market into national patches follows a European Court of Justice ruling in 2011 regarding Karen Murphy, a publican from Portsmouth, England, who had been fined for showing football to customers using a satellite card from Greece.

While Ms Murphy secured a partial victory, the judges upheld the right of consumers to buy a TV decoder card in any EU country.

Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner, last year sanctioned a “fact-finding” effort to see whether barriers to cross-border access merited anti-trust scrutiny and possible enforcement action.

Some investigators are now poised to step up their inquiries into whether "absolute territorial protection clauses" break competition law. These stop licensees from selling to other countries or accepting unsolicited demands from overseas customers to pay for access to the content.
Copyright 2013 The Financial Times Limited