BBC and sky from December

 

Can anyone shed any light on the European laws that will affect the freedom to view Sky and BBC channels from December.

There is an article in this weeks Round Tow News about changes which mean people living in European countries should be able to view their channels.

Will this mean that owning a sky tv card wont be limited only to those with UK postal addresses.

 

The article in Round Town News is a peice of excellent / s*** journalism.....
*delete as applicable.

if true then this means that all EU (not just the UK ones) TV companies have been in breach of EU law for the past 2 years....and nothing has been said or done about it until the RTN acts....hmmmm

from the article
so its not really concrete then....

from the article
as will germany premier (they have a nice spot beam), scandinavian countries, and many others....

from the article
believe it or not there is a big difference between "channels being received" and "channels being able to be watched". I can quite easily recieve Sky Sports on an 80cm dish, but i need a viewing card to actually watch it.

In december all that is happening is the existing directive "television without frontiers" is officially being called the Audio Visual directive (or similar)....which is basically the same document as TVwF but also including the words "internet" and "VOD".





from the very same eu directive (that has been conveniently left out of the "report")
I read this to say that "sky" can legally, bound by the copyright and contractual laws of the UK law, restrict the movement of their content...

so the article with what is written is correct, but he has not written about the section in 89/552/eec subsection 2 b 5 covering broadcasters copyright permission in the eu, which allows the broadcasters to restrict viewing cards and reception of channels.

and it is this basis of copyright breaches that prompted Digial+ to act and try and stop the rebroadcast of copyrighted matirial theat they have the spanish rights for.

i read the the article as suggesting that the EU says it is ok to break copyright, and therefore why are they trying to stop download sites?!?!?!?! all they have to say is "RTN said that the EU says you can breakcopyright...."

bear in mind that if this was correct from the RTN this wil not just affect Sky and the BBC but ALL TV services from all contries on all platforms (cable, terrestrial satellite), and is far far far way from being anything meaningful...


it will be along long time before the TV contracts are sorted out on a europe wide basis....and that is the only solution that will allow the legitimate use of a Sky UK card at a Spanish address.

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You can just imagine Virgin running a fiber optic cable to someone in Malaga, just so they can watch cable TV because Europe say they must make the service available.

So its basically a lot about nothing.

Thanks for that Jon. As per normal, your advice is very much appreciated

 

I see that Round Town News was correct in its story and that its all over the news that all broadcasters in the EU are acting illegally.

Oh sorry...it has not been in the news as it is not happening!!

They even managed to write this recently:

They are obvioiusly good (!) at what they do as they have totally reworded the directive!

The Directive actually states that countries cannot block signals from OTHER EU countries, and not countries cannot block their signals to other countries, as the RTN says.

So it means that Spain cannot block signals from the UK.
It does not mean that the UK cannot block signals to Spain.

It also does on states that the use of viewing cards to restrict viewing is illegal in other countries.

Rather the contrary, there is a whole section, and a whole seperate directive, on the protections of copyrighted material around designated EU territories and the rights of those who hold the copyright to protect them from areas (EU Territories) they do not have permission (which is done via encryption cards available only in those EU territories).


And all these poeple that said the BBC will be available on a small dish from the 19th Dec all are around Europe are very disappointed....what they said would happen at the start of last week has not emerged - and even technically cannot as they is just not enough space on the pan-european satellites without a LOT of shuffling around!