Italy passes TV bill to break RAI/Mediaset duopoly

[BGonaSTICK]

Italy’s cabinet approved a draft law yesterday aimed at breaking the TV duopoly of state broadcaster RAI and Mediaset, the media empire controlled by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. The bill would force the companies, which together operate six of the country’s seven main national TV stations, to move one existing terrestrial channel each onto digital TV, freeing up the airwaves to other operators and potentially denting their own advertising revenues.

Mediaset said the move was Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s revenge on media tycoon Berlusconi, the arch-rival he narrowly beat at an April election whom Italy’s left accused of using his political office to further his business aims. ”For so many years there were criticism of (Berlusconi’s) ‘made-to-measure’ laws. Now the government has presented an ‘anti-one-company’ law, which looks like it was designed as a political vendetta,” Mediaset said in a statement.

Telecommunications Minister P. Gentiloni said the bill was not meant to be punitive but to encourage the digitalisation of television and stop the duopoly, in which the two main broadcasters have a combined 85 percent market share. ”This should not be seen as a threat but as an opportunity,” he said, adding that the broadcasters would each have to move one of their three channels to digital within 15 months after parliament passes the law. Italy aims to move all TV to digital by 2012.