The European Commission opened an in-depth investigation on Friday 3 June to determine whether the Czech Republic’s planned public support for digital terrestrial television (DTT) operators complies with EU State aid rules.
The beneficiaries of the measure would be the public broadcasting service Česká televise and two private DTT operators, České Radiokomunikace and Digital Broadcasting.
In 2016 and 2018, the European Commission received two complaints alleging incompatibility with EU State aid rules of Czech plans to compensate DTT operators for simulcasting terrestrial TV programmes on the original networks using DVB-T/MPEG-2 standards and on the new networks using the more efficient DVB-T2/HEVC standards.
In July 2021, the Czech Republic informed the European Commission of its intention to compensate DTT operators for simulcasting costs in the amount of €18 million for two periods: from 1 March 2017 to 18 March 2020 and from 1 July 2020 to 31 October 2020.
The European Commission has doubts that the measure is in line with EU State aid rules. It intends to analyse whether the measure encourages DTT operators to bear the costs of upgrading networks and simulcasting television programmes. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)