No business can succeed without trust between a provider of goods and services and its clients.
Which is why when that trust is broken, action by a third party, usually a regulator or competition authority, is needed to put things right.
This week we saw the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) impose an exceptionally large fine of just over €1 million on the cable operator Multimedia Polska for breaking that trust with its clients. In short, the company replaced channels in its pay-TV offer with ones of a different genre and then denied subscribers the right to terminate their contracts without incurring costs.
UOKiK also revealed that this is not a one-off, with the actions of UPC Polska, the country’s leading cable operator, and ITI Neovision, which operates the DTH platform nc+, also under investigation.
Nor are they confined to Poland, which is a reasonably well-regulated market by regional standards. Indeed, such actions by providers of pay-TV services are probably quite commonplace throughout the region but may often go unreported.
However, there have also been other recent instances in which the authorities have attempted to mend that broken trust.
In Hungary, for example, the regulator NMHH imposed a fine of €260,000 on Invitel last August for amending contracts in a one-sided manner and without respecting the rules governing electronic communications.
At the same time, it fined UPC €32,500 for not amending the terms and conditions of contracts for over a year despite a previous binding decision by NMHH.
Perhaps more significantly, NMHH then introduced a number of changes later in the year to strengthen the rights of users of electronic communications.
Meanwhile, in Romania the regulator ANCOM has imposed additional obligations on the providers of electronic communications services. They relate to users’ information in framework agreements and include a requirement for these agreements to be posted on providers’ websites.
Things are certainly changing throughout the region, and that can only be good for both providers of pay-TV and other electronic communication services and their clients.
