European Broadcasters Channeling Fear

PARIS — If there is one thing that European commercial television broadcasters like less than a recession, it is that other “R” word — regulation.

The industry has rebounded from the economic downturn, with advertising revenue recovering to prerecession levels, according to the Association of Commercial Television in Europe, an industry group based in Brussels.

As other media reel from technological changes, television keeps going strong. Yes, the traditional broadcasters — commercial and publicly financed networks — now have to share audiences with hundreds of new digital channels, but overall viewership keeps climbing. It has crept up to an average of more than three and a half hours a day across Europe, according to the television association. More and more viewers pay, too: British Sky Broadcasting, the satellite broadcaster, recently reported that it had reached its long-term goal of 10 million subscribers.

“For more than 10 years, people have been saying television will lose, and that is just not the case,” said Philippe Delusinne, president of the broadcasters’ association.

Yet few high-fives were exchanged last week as members of the association gathered in Brussels for an annual conference. That is because of their fear, justified or not, of regulators and lawmakers at the European Commission in Brussels and in national capitals across the 27-country bloc.

Perhaps their biggest worry is a pending overhaul of European copyright rules. Lawmakers want to make it easier to license television shows and other media for use by online video services, which remain meager across Europe. Some commercial broadcasters fear that a greater availability of online services would weaken one of their biggest selling points — exclusive rights to sports, movies and other popular programming.

The doyenne of Brussels regulators, Neelie Kroes, who is now in charge of the E.U.’s digital agenda, visited the broadcasters’ conference last week, where she made it clear that she took a dim view of complacency.

“The truth is that technological revolutions always pose challenges for gatekeepers,” she said in a speech. “The pattern is the same for the digital revolution as it was with the industrial revolution and the printing press. It is only the scale and pace that is different today.”

Despite their fear of regulators, commercial television companies have not fared all that badly in Brussels of late. Among other things, they have secured a requirement that their archrivals, public broadcasters like the BBC, must demonstrate the “public value” of investments in digital services that could compete with private-sector offerings.

At the national level, commercial broadcasters have had a harder time. Lawmakers in Spain and France, for example, have imposed new taxes on commercial broadcasters to help finance public broadcasting. At the same time, France appears to be backtracking on a pledge to remove ads from public TV, which was expected to direct more ad revenue to the commercial channels.

“When the economy gets difficult it is easy politically to make decisions like this,” Mr. Delusinne said.

But public broadcasters can no longer take their political protection for granted. With austerity the order of the day in European capitals, their financing suddenly looks a lot more precarious than it did two years ago when commercial rivals, reeling from the ad slump, envied their steady revenue.

In Britain, for example, the BBC has agreed to absorb hundreds of millions of pounds in costs previously covered by the government, including the budget for the World Service. The license fee that finances the BBC is set to be frozen at the current level for six years. The broadcaster’s management and journalists have been caught up in a nasty dispute over pensions.

In some other countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, public broadcasters are facing bigger cuts.

Against that backdrop, European commercial channels have a fair amount to celebrate — as long as they keep the volume turned down.