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Cyprus amended its Law on Radio and Television Stations (L. 7(I)/1998) and the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation Law (Ch. 300A) and harmonised the Republic's legislation with the European Directive 2010/13/EU on Audiovisual Media Services - codified version. The amending laws were published in the Official Gazette on 10 December 2010. Extensive amendments to various sections of the Law on Radio and Television Stations aimed at updating it in order to cover the broadcasting and audiovisual landscape, regulating not only the broadcasting sector but also Video-on-Demand (VOD) services. The terminology...

Until recently, advertising for political parties was banned on audiovisual media services in the French-speaking Community of Belgium. The first sentence of the first paragraph of Article 12 of the Decree by the French-speaking Community of 27 February 2003 on broadcasting (which has since become the Decree of 26 March 2009 on audiovisual media services) provides that “neither political parties nor organisations representative of employers and workers may be the subject of commercial communication”. This provision was cancelled by the Constitutional Court on 22 December 2010 in response to an...

In three recent decisions, the Vlaamse Regulator voor de Media (Flemish Regulator for the Media - monitoring and enforcement of media regulation) addressed the three major Flemish broadcasters for breach of the advertising regulation. The first decision (18 October 2010) concerned the illegitimate transmission of a television advertisement. On the broadcasting programme VT4, a single spot was shown that featured the presenters holding a party, all of them drinking “Martini Brut”. The bottles and the logo were prominently displayed and, at the end of the programme, a voice-over stated “Beleef een...

On 22 November 2010, the Austrian Bundeskommunikationssenat (Federal Communications Office - BKS) issued a decision on the classification of unlawful product promotion in a television programme in response to a ruling of the Austrian Verwaltungsgerichtshof (Administrative Court - VwGH) of 8 October 2010, overturning an earlier BKS decision (case no. 611.941/0002-BKS/2006) on the grounds that its content was unlawful. The case concerned a report in a programme broadcast by Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF) about food for overweight dogs, which contained a 6-second panning shot showing various products....

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...