Digital single market proposals opposed by creative industries
The European Union plans to create a unified digital market, allowing consumers to buy TV series, movies and music digitally from any other European territory.
The plans were revealed in January and are being fiercely opposed by the creative industries in Britain (and beyond) as being serious threat to the digital market going forward.
The issue put forward by movie and music executives is that distributors are currently able to regulate prices for each individual territory based on a number of factors such as the date of release of a particular piece of content (these still vary widely in Europe), the demand for that piece of conten and any other factor such as a prominent campaign that may drive attention to that piece of content, enabling the distributor to raise its price.
These differences in pricing and strategy are enabled by the geoblocks most content sellers place on their websites, restricting users in the UK to UK content and UK pricing for example.
If geoblocking was outlawed users in the UK would be able to buy digital media from Spain or Greece, where the pricing of a release and the weakness of the Euro may allow for considerable savings.
The other issue of concern is around BBC content, since the iPlayer is currently free in the UK (although in theory users of the service should also be license payers…), and is not accessible from other European territories.
If geoblocking was outlawed then the iPlayer content would be available across Europe for free, which hardly seems fair and would prompt the BBC to have to implement some sort of login system for UK TV license payers.
This would also be an issue for commercial TV, Channel 5 for example has its own ad-supported catchup service that is restricted to UK users, but its content licensing deals would probably make it very clear that that content can only be made available to UK consumers, since distributors of TV programs make a lot of money from negotiating territorially-restricted licenses in each country.
The UK government seems to be on the fence in regards to this issue - it is an election year after all - recognising that people who pay for a subscription service in the UK should also be allowed to access it when travelling around Europe, but also admitting that people outside of the UK should not be able to access other freely available on-demand services.
When it comes to music, the impact is not clear and again currency may be an interesting issue. Spotify is already accessible worldwide for a subscriber from any territory so you won't be left without your music fix when you travel, but when we look at currency the service costs €9.99 in most of Europe and £9.99 in the UK, so subscribing from a European country could constitute a significant saving for UK consumers.
At the same time the UK market is quite competitive when it comes to music download prices and there may well be special offers that prompt users in other EU territories to buy an album from a UK store.
(Andrea Leonelli)