May 16th 2005
By: monica
By: monica
Appointment: EPRA president
Joan Botella, member of the Catalan Audiovisual Council (the only independent audiovisual regulatory authority currently in Spain) was elected president of the European Platform of Regulatory Authorities (EPRA) last Friday. The EPRA webpage is still not updated but you can find Mr. Botella�s bio here.
EPRA is a forum for informal discussion and exchange of information and views between regulatory authorities in the broadcasting field. To date, 49 regulatory authorities of 39 European countries have become members while the European Commission and the Council of Europe act as standing observers.
Mr. Botella, who had been EPRA vice-chairman since 2001, said that a main priority will be the review of the Television Without Frontiers Directive as well as to improve collaboration between regulatory authorities.
The review of the Directive is clearly one of the hottest issues in communications regulation at the moment. It is very likely that the scope of the Directive, currently limited to traditional broadcasting services (i.e., �the initial transmission by wire or over the air, including that by satellite, in unencoded or encoded form, of television programmes intended for reception by the public� Article 1 TVWF Directive) will be widened. This will have important implications for new audiovisual services such as IPTV, mobile television and VOD services. Because the Directive is one of minimums (it sets the principles and minimum requirements but leaves detailed implementation to Member States, which can impose additional obligations) it will be particularly interesting to follow EPRA�s discussions in this respect.
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