COMMUNIA recently made a submission to a call for evidence on the evaluation of the Geo-blocking Regulation which the European Commission is set to review the rules for this year. This regulation governs geo-blocking, including for audiovisual services and copyright-protected works. The European Commission has not yet introduced measures to improve access to audiovisual content, and audiovisual services and copyright-protected works are currently exempted from the regulation.
Background on the Geo-blocking Regulation and additional information on COMMUNIA’s proposal to provide EU consumers with an opportunity to stream publicly funded content that is otherwise unavailable in their region against the payment of a fee are further detailed in a recent blogpost on COMMUNIA’s site by Justus Dreyling, which is included below:
This week, COMMUNIA made a submission to a call for evidence on the evaluation of the Geo-blocking Regulation (available as a PDF file). The European Commission is set to review the rules for geo-blocking, including for audiovisual services and copyright-protected works, this year. After the stakeholder dialogue on access to and availability of audiovisual works has failed to deliver any meaningful change, we call on the Commission to use this opportunity to finally introduce measures to improve access to audiovisual content across the Union.
The Geo-blocking Regulation was adopted in 2018 with the aim of promoting the internal market by improving access to goods and services for individuals. Audiovisual services and copyright-protected works were notably exempted from the regulation. As a result, most audiovisual content produced in the EU remains inaccessible to European citizens.
COMMUNIA has called on the co-legislators on multiple occasions to consider broadening the scope of the regulation to include audiovisual services and copyrighted content or at least improve the conditions for audiovisual content that has received public funding for its production or distribution. As part of this submission, we renew our proposal for a model project based on a European transactional video of demand (TVOD) platform in order to provide EU consumers with an opportunity to stream publicly funded content that is otherwise unavailable in their region against the payment of a fee (PDF file).
