Czechia

[CZ] New Broadcasting Act and Regulations on Advertising Time on Public-service Television

IRIS 1997-8:1/21

Alexander Scheuer

Institute of European Media Law (EMR), Saarbrücken/Brussels

On 23 May and 9 June 1997 both houses of the Czech Republic's parliament adopted the new Radio and Television Broadcasting Act.

This contains inter alia regulations for increasing by 50% the fee charged to participants for receiving broadcasts. However there were no amendments to the amount of air-time public-service broadcasters are allowed to devote to advertising. Although there was one proposed amendment aimed at reducing total broadcasting time for advertising material from 1% to 0.2% of daily broadcasting time, the parliament did not adopt either this or the amendment aimed at prohibiting prime-time advertising.