Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-12-13-Speech-2-296"
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"Mr President, after two and a half years of consultations, discussions and conferences, we have reached the point today when the Commission can table a new directive to replace the Television Without Frontiers Directive.
In future, so that the rules are the same for everyone and so that consumers are well informed, which is not the case under the present system, product placement must comply with very strict rules. It will be authorised if there is a guarantee that the viewer will be made aware of the placement. The rules should guarantee legal certainty and equality of treatment for all content. Importantly, however, there will also be major restrictions: no placement of children’s products and no product placement in news and current-affairs programmes or in documentaries. The purpose of these rules is to safeguard our children and protect the editorial freedom of journalists.
This directive contains a vast number of new features, and it would take too long for me to list them all, but I know Parliament, and I know that these matters will be revisited in the course of the next few months. There are, however, three new elements I should like to highlight. The first is the non-discriminatory right to use short extracts for the purposes of general news programming. Secondly, this is the first European directive that explicitly authorises the use of coregulation and self-regulation at the national level. The third new feature which I believe to be of great importance with regard to the implementation of this directive is the establishment of national audiovisual regulators who will be independent of their respective governments.
Why is this directive necessary? Quite simply because of multimedia convergence. There are a multitude of platforms, wavebands, cables, satellites, ADSLs and mobiles delivering the same content, whether it be traditional scheduled television or on-demand services. The problem is that this extremely rapid development has not been followed by development of the law. It is unjust, and it distorts competition, to regulate some operators and not others. It is unacceptable to provide some with legal protection and deny it to others. It is not right to allow some to benefit from the advantages of the single market and deny those advantages to others. The aim of the new directive is therefore to compare like with like and afford them equal treatment.
We are currently observing a veritable explosion of platforms and content. You may remember that, when the Television Without Frontiers Directive was first adopted in 1989, there were 10 satellite channels; today, there are 2 500. After digitisation there will certainly be an explosion in the range of available content. The new services, of which there are 50 at the present time, are growing fast. Even though video on demand still plays a relatively minor role, experts tell us that, if the rules permit the development of that type of service, 22 million households will be connected to a video-on-demand service by 2010, generating an annual turnover in excess of EUR 2 billion. We are at the heart of the Lisbon Strategy here, with the opportunity to strengthen our European content industry, with all its implications for growth and employment.
The directive I wish to present to you today does not focus on the media through which information is transmitted but on content; it deals with audiovisual services, whatever medium is used to deliver them to the public. How, then, shall we regulate this range of content? First of all, there will be a distinction between two types of content. The first is the type we know, the service to which we are accustomed, namely our traditional scheduled television content, a menu which others have put together. We have no option but to accept what they provide or switch off. The second type of content is non-linear (on-demand) content, where consumers search for, select and retrieve what they regard as important and interesting. These two means of bringing content to people, linear and non-linear, will be regulated differently.
But – and this is a big ‘but’ – although there are two types of content, a balance must be maintained between the industrial dimension – I have already referred to the creation of European content – the European values that must not be sacrificed to this new type of content, the protection of consumers, particularly minors, which is important whatever the type of content, and, of course, the cultural diversity to which we are committed.
We must therefore strike a balance between these factors while applying the principle of better regulation. We shall achieve this by what I call the ‘light-touch approach’. What do I mean by ‘light-touch’? First of all, there will be a set of minimum requirements for all types of content. These requirements include the identification of the provider; in other words, people must know who put the message on the medium. They also include identifiable advertising: no surreptitious advertising but strict rules governing the advertising that appears with content. Then there is the protection of human dignity. It would be unacceptable, for example, for particular types of content to be immune to measures designed to combat incitement to racial or religious hatred. Similarly, it would be unacceptable if the protection of minors did not apply to all types of content. Moreover, Parliament and all the other defenders of European culture could not accept a situation in which the European identity and European cultural diversity were promoted in one type of content but not in another. These, then, are the common rules for both linear and non-linear content.
So what about the specific rules that apply to conventional scheduled television, which needs to be more rigorously regulated, given its powerful influence and the absence of consumer choice? The rules that will remain in place cover quotas, the right of reply and access to events of major importance. The rules that will be altered in part and preserved in part relate to the way we deal with advertising. First of all, the rules governing the quality of advertising will be the same as in the current directive. The rules governing the volume of advertising will change, partly because simplified and updated rules are needed in this new multimedia world and partly because it is not up to the Commission to do the work of programme planners. This is why there will no longer be daily limits, why commercial breaks will not be so heavily regulated as they are today and why isolated commercials will be permitted in sports programmes, though not in other programmes. On the other hand, we have no wish to see television programmes awash with advertising, and for this reason we are maintaining some important ground rules.
The first of these rules is the twelve-minute limit. The advertising explosion that is sometimes depicted in the press will not take place: commercial breaks will remain limited to a total of twelve minutes in any hour. There will also be safeguards relating to the interruption of films, TV movies, children’s programmes and news programmes, which will be subject to a limit of one break in each 35-minute segment. This is very important. For example, the fact that children will be better protected in future than is presently the case with traditional television programmes and that they will also be protected in the case of non-linear services is a major advance. It may therefore be said that, while relaxing the rules for adults, we are also tightening them for the protection of young people.
Another important element that was conceived from the perspective of the funding of content is the authorisation, subject to very restrictive and strict conditions, of product placement. In Europe today, we actually have conflicting rules on product placement. In one country there are no rules, in another the rules relate only to national content, and in a third there is a total ban."@en1
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