Broadcasters in Europe are piling pressure on regulators to reassign smart TV and connected TV (CTV) operating systems as gatekeepers within the EU’s Digital Market Act (DMA). The irony is that European broadcasters effectively helped CTV OS platforms like Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, and Tizen become the dominant distribution pipes they are today.
Now the associations that represent broadcasters in Europe are requesting that the European Commission rebalance power at the UI layer. But have they woken up too late?
Over the last 10 to 15 years, broadcasters have rushed to launch smart TV and CTV apps everywhere, through sheer fear of losing relevance on these new and very affordable streaming devices. Without the wealth of broadcaster content, some of these CTV platforms arguably would not be as influential as they are today.
A letter sent to the European Commission by the Association of Commercial Television and Video on Demand Services in Europe (ACT) does not only strike at the TV OS itself, but also the virtual assistants that increasingly inhabit these platforms, spitting out allegedly biased content recommendations.
The letter has been signed by 11 broadcaster associations across the continent, which represent some of Europe’s largest broadcasters including ITV, Canal+, RTL, Mediaset, TF1, and Sky. They argue that TV OS gatekeepers like Amazon and Google are prioritizing content from their own platforms over third-party streaming apps.
This is nothing new. If a Fire Stick user searches for a TV series that is available on both RTL+ and Prime Video, naturally Amazon’s OS will attempt to steer users into its own content ecosystem. There are no rules or regulations to prevent this, and that is what broadcast associations are rallying against.
Certain TV OSs have incentives to contractually or technically restrict linking or redirection, per the letter, and these platforms are therefore intentionally limiting functional interoperability between media services, leading to a content discovery hindrance for end users.
By contrast, the broadcasters want to recreate aggregation layers and foster environments where deep linking and cross-service content discovery are actively encouraged, not blocked by gatekeepers.
In a letter addressed to the EU’s antitrust chief, Teresa Ribera, it claims that between 2019 and 2024, Android TV increased its market share from 16% to 23%. During the same period, Amazon Fire OS grew its market share from 5% to 12%, while Samsung’s Tizen OS has apparently maintained a 24% market share from 2019 to 2024 (which doesn’t sound right).
“A limited number of operators are therefore gaining growing ability to shape outcomes for millions of users and businesses by controlling access to audiences and content distribution,” ACT wrote.
Further, the line “the definition of a Core Platform Service should not depend on the device” is important. This tells us that broadcasters want to bring mobile app store style regulation to smart TVs and connected TV devices, which currently benefit from device-based regulatory loopholes.
If the European Commission agrees to these pressures and opens the door for horizontal regulations, it would signal a massive escalation of the DMA’s regulatory scope.
The EU has stacked up a suite of digital frameworks—the DMA, the Digital Services Act, and the AI Act—designed to make technology companies more accountable. Interestingly, under the EU’s AI Act, content recommendation systems are officially classified as “limited risk” technologies.
However, the exacerbation of AI-powered assistants as recommenders are muddying the waters, and could nudge the European Commission into a rethink. The timing of the letter is very deliberate ahead of an upcoming review of the DMA.
After all, entertainment companies are leaning into LLMs in a big way, such as Liberty Global in Europe, JioStar in India, and Telia in the Nordics.
By contrast, Washington has yet to pass comprehensive federal privacy or platform transparency laws.
“Experience in adjacent platform markets shows that once gatekeepers and harmful practices become entrenched, restoring competition and consumer choice proves extremely difficult. Where users become accustomed to a closed or biased presentation of services, reversing those effects is challenging,” continues the letter.
In summary, what the European broadcast market wants is a redesignation of connected TV OSs and virtual assistant providers as gatekeepers within the forthcoming DMA review, as the capabilities of fast-changing technologies were not fully accounted for when these rules were brought in.
The letter also requests an open market investigation on the basis of qualitative thresholds, should none of the TV OS and virtual assistants meet the usual quantitative thresholds.
This is a contentious demand, considering how the DMA’s gatekeeper designation is primarily based on quantitative thresholds like revenue, number of users, and market cap.
In other words, broadcasters want European regulators to throw out the current rulebook and instead base TV OS gatekeeping on criteria like default placement on devices, dominant influence over what content is recommended, control of homepage, and control of remote control buttons.
A qualitative pivot could actually hit smaller TV OS providers harder than the giants, at least in the near-term, as it would shift the conversation from just being a trillion-dollar company with tens to hundreds of millions of users, to a question of whether you control a critical gateway, regardless of size.
Even so, Amazon and Google are very much still the target of this cautiously aggressive letter that aims to rewrite Europe’s TV OS battleground.