Kabel Deutschland CEO Adrian von Hammerstein has confirmed the operator is talking privately to the public broadcasters and is optimistic of a solution in the retrans fees dispute.
Speaking for the public broadcasters Prof Karola Wille, chairwoman, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk said the discussion should be further widened to include other new technologies. “We should manage to talk about the future and this is HD and Mediathek and timeshift,” she said.
The long running dispute centres around whether the public broadcasters should pay cable operators for the capacity taken up by their multiple digital services.
“We seriously believe our legal position is correct and we are able to defend it. Must carry, must pay, this is the essential argument,” Von Hammerstein told delegates. “The public broadcasters do a very good job, that is without doubt, but they have a huge capacity, higher than the private broadcasters, and this should be paid for.”
Prof Wille said it was unusual that only the large regional providers received the retrans fees, where as the many smaller operators did not, a point picked up by Dietmar Schickel, COO, Tele Columbus Gruppe.
“We’d love to have those fees too, but we are being discriminated against. so we started two law suits. We’ve had a court decision in Hamburg, where it was underlined that there had been discrimination, but there is still a final judgement.”
Representing the commercial channels, Conrad Albert, executive legal, distribution and regulatory affairs, ProSiebenSat.1 Media, said he would also like to receive the retrans fees and the private channels were being discriminated against.
