France

[FR] Licensing of DVB-T Broadcasters

IRIS 2003-5:1/25

Caroline Hilger

Saarbrücken

After the candidates applying for permission to broadcast digital terrestrial channels in France had been chosen in a bidding process in October 2002, and the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel(the High Council for audiovisual, CSA) had started negotiating with these candidates concerning the licensing conditions, on 6 May 2003 the CSA announced that 23 corporations had finally been given licences. In addition, at the end of May 2003 consultations were held about the composition of the multiplexers that are available for digital terrestrial broadcasting. Lastly, the public service broadcasters were asked to comment on how it is planned that the multiplexers should be divided up. According to the CSA's proposal, 4 multiplexers out of a total of 6 should be made available to the private broadcasting corporations and the two remaining multiplexers to the public service broadcasters for the distribution of their channel offering.