AVMS Signalling (Commercial Requirements)

Introduction

The EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive (“AVMSD”) governs EU-wide coordination of national legislation on all audiovisual media, both traditional TV broadcasts and on-demand services. The latest review of AVMSD was completed on 6 November 2018. The final act was published in the EU Official Journal on 28 November 2018 (ref EU 2018/1808 : 14 Nov 2018).

Transposition into national legislation has begun with some EU Member States (“MS”) more advanced than others. Differences can be expected between the MS implementations which take account of national variations in the emphasis each MS places on different aspects. This is as expected.

There are two articles in the AVMSD which are of particular interest to DVB Members: Articles 7a and 7b.

Article 7a states that “Member States may take measures to ensure the appropriate prominence of audiovisual media services of general interest.”

Article 7b states that “Member States shall take appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure that audiovisual media services provided by media service providers are not, without the explicit consent of those providers, overlaid for commercial purposes or modified.”

DVB established the CM-TF-AVMS group in 2021 as a Task Force (“TF”) to explore any potential need to provide DVB solutions to assist in the successful implementation of the AVMSD. The TF has already produced fairly comprehensive Problem Statement [3] and Analysis documents [4] which serve as additional background information to this Commercial Requirements (CRs) document.

The German legislation has been published and an English translation of this legislation has been analysed in some detail by the TF. Legislation from Belgium and France has also been considered. Note: The UK already had its own implementation of prominence requirements and these have been used as a reference point for some of the discussions however the UK is not expected to adopt the solution called for in this document.

The analysis carried out to date indicates that the German legislation is likely to be the basis of a superset of MS requirements for implementing Article 7a.

Scope

This version of CRs refers exclusively to implementing Article 7a of the AVMSD. Whether or not further CRs to address Article7b will be generated is still under discussion and to be decided.
The TF considers that there are no mutual dependencies between likely solutions for 7a and 7b and so requests technical work to proceed on these CRs for 7a without waiting for finalization of the TF’s position on 7b.

The specification shall define the technical signalling capabilities to facilitate the TF’s interpretation for the implementation of the AVMS-Directive Article 7a on receivers. For the purposes of this document this shall be further simply referred to as DVB-AVMS-Signalling or “The Solution”, without constraining any technical meaning associated with the usage of this terminology.

The DVB-AVMS-Signalling Solution is intended to be implemented by horizontal platforms / operators that are distributing services that are deemed as services of general interest (“SOGIs”) and by manufacturers of horizontal reception devices that are expected to implement prominence to these SOGIs as required in markets that are subject to the AVMSD.

Vertical platforms / operators and associated reception device manufacturers may choose to implement the Solution or to select other options to achieve compliance with the provisions of the AVMSD.

In some DVB Networks existing implementations already meet their own internal prioritisation needs, for example, via an LCN based implementation. Each market / network would have to determine their need to use this Solution or not, hence why the solution to these commercial requirements may not be required in such instances. The prime purpose of this Solution is to address markets that currently do not have an existing solution to meet the requirements of the AVMSD Article 7a.