Everyone in Spain knows that you cannot broadcast anything without going to Abertis Telecom. It’s dominant, and across Europe, where most broadcaster operators work under sub-contract to the actual content companies, there are increasingly just one, or two companies that hold the keys to all broadcast operations.
In the UK it’s Arquiva and National Grid Wireless (which are merging),in Finland it’s Digita, itself owned by France’s TDF (T’l’diffusion de France) which is dominant in France, as well as Hungary and which also operates in the Netherlands.
Everywhere you look around Europe, private equity buys into broadcast operators and merges and resells them as if they were satellite or cable companies.
Abertis is in the process of bidding for Wind and 3 Italia’s 18,500 broadcasting aerials in Italy, has just agreed to become the largest shareholder in the Spanish Hispasat satellite company buying a second stake that takes it over 37% ownership, and also augments this controls by owning 32% of Eutelsat, itself a stakeholder in Hispasat. Abertis is also about to agree a contract with the Chinese government to develop mobile TV projects there, so its reach is not just across Europe.
So when the local competition regulator in Spain CNC (Council of the National Competition Commission), decides that it has to investigate the dominance of Abertis Telecom, you can bet that it’s extremely dominant. It is at the heart, for instance, of all the work on DVB-H in Spain, and no network is likely to emerge there without it.
Naturally at the time when contracts are being awarded to run new DVB-T multiplexes across Spain and all of Europe, in the run up to digital switchover, there is an opportunity to at least put the utter dominance of Abertis right, and ensure that competitive pricing continues going forwards for digital TV carriage.
CNC is now saying that is has evidence of anti-trust and has just acceded to a request from Axi’n, Sogecable and Telecinco not to dismiss investigations into the company. The original case was brought in February 2006, and involved concerns over price and terms of carriage for the top Spanish TV channels. It’s tough to accurately understand this because all the documents are in Spanish, but we get the strong impression that its contracts prohibited its customers using any other company for any other broadcasting jobs within Spain and if they did they would lose special ‘volume discounts.’ There were also ‘lifetime’ service clauses, also thought to be illegal under European law.
No remedies have yet been suggested, but it looks like the case may soon find its way to the European Commission, if Abertis cannot offer up some way to appease its local regulator.