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An increasing number of regions in the Czech Republic are receiving digital television. Since the start of September, the Budějovice and Praha transmitters have been broadcasting both digital and analogue TV signals. Households that are still receiving the analogue signals will need to switch to a digital receiver by April 2009, after which channels will only be available via DVB-T. In addition, a number of other regions will be switched to DVB-T in April 2009. Households that need to switch to digital reception will be informed via the DVB-T on-screen ticker. The Budějovice and Praha transmitters...

The Broadcasting Council of the Czech Republic has frequently had to deal with the principles of youth protection on television, particularly in relation to "Big Brother"-type formats and has imposed fines on many occasions. The programmes concerned are accused of infringing the provisions of the Youth Protection Act. The Broadcasting Council’s main criticisms of the new formats concern the systematic flouting of social standards and the deliberate attempts to encourage participants to break taboos. As far as common social values are concerned, these programmes are considered particularly problematic...

The Czech Parliament has passed an amendment to the Czech Republic’s Copyright Act. It concerns the free movement of services and the treatment under copyright law of broadcasts received in hotels, an issue that has been debated in the Czech Republic for many years. The European Court of Justice has already considered the subject of broadcasts in hotel complexes (Case C-306/05 SGAE v. Rafael Hoteles, see IRIS 2007-2: 3) and ruled that this constitutes a “communication to the public”. The Czech government concluded from this decision that it had to adapt the Czech Copyright Act. In March 2007, the...

"Panorama", a morning programme regularly broadcast on Czech public service television, shows images of Czech holiday destinations. However, on 17 June 2007, viewers could hardly believe their eyes when pictures of a nuclear explosion in the Sudeten Mountains were broadcast. Several art college students, members of an informal group of "action artists" known as "Ztohoven", had managed to hack into a remote controlled camera and broadcast an animation live on television, one which looked entirely realistic and had been prepared in advance. The group stated that they had hoped to use this prank to...

Videotext is an information system in which text and simple graphics are transmitted by the broadcaster in parallel with the television programme itself. Alongside basic and supplementary information relating to TV programmes, videotext can be used to provide a wide range of information that can be constantly updated. There is the also the possibility of so-called "videotext chat", in which viewers themselves transmit information. Some user-generated information transmitted in this way has been criticised in the past because it contained vulgar and obscene language. These messages could be accessed...