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With the exchange of ratification documents between the current Mayor of the Berlin Land and the Minister-President of the Brandenburg Land, the merger of the two regional broadcasting authorities was officially completed on 29 November 2002. The broadcasting authorities, Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) and Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg (ORB) have therefore amalgamated to form a single public service broadcaster known as Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) (see IRIS 2002-7: 8). The Inter-State Agreement, which needed the approval of the parliaments of both Länder, was given the green light by the...

On 12 November 2002, the Kommission zur Ermittlung der Konzentration im Medienbereich (Commission on Concentration in the Media - KEK), which is responsible for monitoring media concentration in Germany, provisionally approved the acquisition of shares in news broadcaster n-tv by RTL Television GmbH (RTL), which is part of the RTL Group. The decision was given on the proviso that, if the RTL Group attains a dominant position, measures will be taken to guarantee diversity of opinion. RTL will acquire the stakes of GWF Gesellschaft für Wirtschaftsfernsehen mbH & Co. KG (47.33 %), Verlag Norman Rentrop...

On 10 October 2002, in the legal dispute setting broadcasting corporations against the Regulierungsbehörde für Post und Telekommunikation (Regulatory Authority for Telecommunications and Post - RegTP), the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Administrative Court - BVerwG) dismissed a points-of-law appeal from the broadcasters against a decision given by the court of first instance. The subject of the original dispute had been an objection raised by the Regulatory Authority against Deutsche Telekom AG (DTAG) on account of the charging of different fees for the feeding-in into cable networks...

On 17 July 2002, the Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin asked Michel Boyon, a former chairman of Radio France, to report on certain aspects of digital terrestrial television (DTT) in order to enlighten the Government in its decision-making on three points - financing methods and an evaluation of the cost of the operations for reorganising frequencies necessary for setting up terrestrial digital television, the parameters of the public-service television channels on DTT, and the conditions for developing local television stations. This followed on from questions from the Chairman of the Conseil...

On 4 September 2002, public service broadcasters ARD and ZDF announced that they had reached an agreement with the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Neuer Deutscher Spielfilmproduzenten (Association of New German Film Producers), under which the rights to publicly funded co-productions would, in future, revert back to the producers after five rather than seven years. ARD and ZDF have therefore met the request of German film producers, who had originally demanded that the period be limited to three years. German production companies had complained that they would not benefit sufficiently from the growth potential...