Event at JMSC: Convergence between Television and the Internet: Challenges for Content Regulation in a Connected Media Environment

Date: Monday, April 2, 2012
Time: 1-2 pm
Venue: Shum Wai Yau Reading Room, Eliot Hall, The University of Hong Kong (see map)
Speaker: Peggy Valcke (Research professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law & ICT, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)

TV is becoming smart, social, hybrid, connected to the internet and moving to the cloud. Internet TV and the delivery of multimedia content to the home user via the Internet are becoming increasingly common. Tthe current trend of integrating the internet and Web 2.0 features – such as social TV guides based on what your friends or people you admire are watching and recommending – into modern television sets and set-top boxes, is also unstoppable. What will be the implications of this convergence between TV and the internet for the current legal frameworks for audiovisual media? In a digital and connected media environment, where should we draw the line between ‘regulatable’ and ‘unregulatable’ content’? Which actors should be held accountable?  Starting from an analysis of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive – with which the European legislator intended to provide an answer to changing business models and viewing habits in the broadcasting sector in 2007 – this presentation will examine whether notions such as “audiovisual media service”, “editorial responsibility”, “establishment”, will still be the right building blocks for TV content regulation in the future.

Peggy Valcke is  research professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, where she currently heads the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law & ICT at the Faculty of Law. She is also a visiting professor at the University of Tilburg, and teaches media law at the University of Brussels and in the Florence School of Regulation. She is a leading European expert on media and communications law and was recently appointed member of the scientific committee of the newly created Centre for Media Freedom and Pluralism at the Robert Schumann Centre of the European University Institute. She is also a member of the General Chamber in the Flemish Media Regulator and of the Belgian Competition Council.

 For more information on the JMSC Media research seminar series, visit: http://jmsc.hku.hk/2011/04/media-research-seminars/