Foxtel CEO Richard Freudenstein today lashed the system of media regulation in Australia as illogical, unbalanced and focused on sectional interests rather than consumers.
Addressing the American Chamber of Commerce, he called for a “rethink of the regulatory environment from first principles.”
The pay-TV executive urged that cross-media limitations, anti-siphoning regulations and restrictions on access to spectrum should be reviewed or removed, claiming they distort business decisions and stifle innovation.
He argued that emerging IPTV players (such as Foxtel’s own Presto service) and other broadband service providers should be exempt from these rules.
“The history of media regulation in Australia is littered with ad hoc decisions, compromises and special deals,” he said. “Governments of both persuasions have sought to influence media companies by doing favours to win their support or by trying to control them. Too often the default position of many media companies is to go for a regulatory solution, where a commercial one might easily be found.”
He cited the Howard government’s free allocation for the digital spectrum to the terrestrial broadcasters without any competitive process, observing, “I’ll be fascinated to see how much terrestrial high definition TV there is after the obligation to broadcast in HD expires at the end of this year.”
Freudenstein ridiculed the FTA broadcaster’s demands that Foxtel pay to retransmit their signals, claiming that would force Foxtel to pay huge sums in satellite costs each year to carry all the different regional services, which would merely replicate the terrestrial networks, costs that would be passed on to its customers.
He claimed anti-siphoning distorts competition for sports rights, unnecessarily privileges the FTA networks and reduces the money available to sporting bodies and thus the amount they can invest in elite sports and at grass roots.
And he rejected the notion that Foxtel or Fox Sports would lock up access to sports and charge high prices for them as absurd, noting the sports channels cost far less on Foxtel Play than on the main service.
Turning to online piracy, he noted the final episode of Breaking Bad was downloaded illegally in Australia more than any other country in the world, narrowly ahead of the US.
Foxtel is asking the government to take action to make it harder to download material illegally and to encourage consumers to change their behaviour. He advocated enabling content owners to seek injunctions to block pirated sites.