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Football Dataco, the “official, general licensing website, for the 4 professional football leagues in the United Kingdom” compiles and maintains football match data in a database called “Football Live”. It is a “live” database and comprises information from UK football matches, such as goals scored, penalties, yellow and red cards and substitutions. Sportsradar is a German company, owned by a Swiss holding company. It also operates a live sports data service, “Sports Live Data”, with the material held on servers hosted in Germany and Austria. It is both accessible from the UK and made available...

In June 2010 News Corporation offered to purchase the remaining 60.9% of shares which it did not already own in BSkyB, the leading British and Irish pay-TV operator. This bid has been considered on competition grounds by the European Commission and on public interest grounds relating to media plurality by the UK authorities. The European Commission cleared the proposed acquisition on competition grounds. It found that it would result in only a small increment on BSkyB’s existing share of the market for the supply of basic pay-TV channels and that the parties have only a small combined market share...

As part of the fundamental review of public expenditure in the UK, the BBC licence fee has been frozen for the next six years at GBP 145.50. This is the result of agreement between the Corporation and the Government. It had been originally proposed that the BBC would be expected for the first time to meet the cost of free television licences for the over-75s, but this was bitterly opposed by the BBC Trust. Instead, the BBC has agreed to take over the funding of its World Service, currently directly funded by the UK Foreign Office. It will also assume the costs of BBC Monitoring (an open source...

Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, has announced that it will not open an investigation into ‘Project Canvas’ following complaints on competition grounds by Virgin Media and IPVision. ‘Project Canvas’ (see IRIS 2010-2/22 and IRIS 2010-7/23) is a joint venture between the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, BT and Arqiva to offer digital terrestrial channels and internet-delivered TV services via a set-top box connected to TV sets. It involves creating technical standards which can be used to deliver content via a single box using a branded user interface to be known as YouView. Competitors had claimed...

Ofcom, the UK Communications Regulator, has issued guidance on whether the holders of broadcasting licences need separate licences for different feeds (versions) of a service, for example feeds broadcast in different territories. In particular, the document concerns feeds where the programmes are almost identical but in different languages, feeds where the editorial content is almost identical but advertisements are different or differently scheduled or where editorial content of each feed is different. The Communications Act 2003 defines ‘programmes’ in a way which includes advertisements (s....