BPN 1033 BBC protects Dutch TV distribution rights

BBC fights with a Dutch dish contractor about the distribution of television packages for BB1 and BBC. Both parties are now involved in a legal case. The case was reported by Peter Olsthoorn in Emerce.

The Dutch dish contractor Hertzinger has grown into the media distribution business besides the installation of satellite receptors and glass fibre connectors in housing complexes and housing projects. Hertzinger picks up the satellite signals centrally and distributes them by glass fibre cables to homes.

Hertzinger competes with cable operators. In Amsterdam the company modestly competes for example with UPC; Hertzinger has some 10.000 subscribers to its services there. The difference between the Hertzinger and the UPC offers is that UPC installs, owns and operate the cable, while the satellite reception and connectors for the cable are owned by the organisation of home owners and home companies. Hertzinger delivers media services, for example, to the glass fibre operator Ons Net in Nuenen and to several other glass fibre networks.


Hertzinger delivers media packages or as it claims on its site, rights to media packages. It sells its service for a few euro under the price of the cable operators and even less in case of housing corporations. The company delivers for example 50 television channels and 30 radio channels for 14 euro.

Hertzinger claims that it is allowed to deliver BBC1 and BBC2 in the media packages and has the right to do so. But BBC does not agree on this point as the BBC has only an agreement with NLkabel, the Dutch association of cable operators, for the distribution of the BBC1 and BBC2 channels against an agreed tariff.

The whole affair started last year with an injunction, but this was suspended and in May 2007 converted into a full fledged legal case between the state company BBC and Hertzinger. The legalities of the case look easy. BBC is owner of the content and distribution rights, so a company should have an agreement with the BBC. On the other hand BBC1 and BBC2 can be received by satellite for free. In the Netherlands BBC1 and BBC2 are included in the media packages and the cable operators pay for this distribution right and charge subscribers for these channels. Problem is that BBC has an exclusive agreement (= monopoly) with the members of the cable operators’ association. When Hertzinger looses the case, it will have to negotiate with BBC or drop the channel from its package. Besides when Hertzinger looses this case, other television and radio channels might hand in a claim for payment. A ruling is expected in the coming months.

Blog Posting Number: 1033

Tags: television, distribution rightstelevision,cable, cable distribution

The municipality of Brunssum in the South of The Netherlands (see coloured area in black oval) is one of the last of the cable Mohicans. It will offer its cable network for sale. Presently the network has 13.500 connections. Reason for the sale it the high costs of upgrading for the network.

Brunssum is one of the last municipalities in The Netherlands which still possesses and operates its own cable network. In the past fifteen years almost all municipal networks have been sold to regional operators like UPC, Casema and Kabelcom/aHome/Essent. These companies have been able to invest in triple play (television, telecom and internet). The present network of Brunssum badly needs an upgrade, if it wants to compete with these regional cable operators. The local network can not offer digital television. So the municipality will put it on the market.

This has been the trend for the last fifteen years and in this way regional operators are growing by threading municipalities in particular regions. This is the way UPC, Casema and Essent grew into cable operators with millions of users. The real high time was at the end of the nineties when regional cable operators paid 2250 guilders (roughly 1125 euro) or more for every subscriber. Brunssum expects revenues from the sale of the network for 10 million euro; this would be 740 euro per subscriber. The regional cable operator could earn that sum back easily – so was the reasoning – by offering digital TV, telecom facilities, internet and security services. But these days cable operators have to compete with new glass fibre consortia. So UPC is fighting the Citynet consortium in Amsterdam and in Nuenen UPC lost the majority of its subscribers to Ons Net, the private glass fibre consortium.

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More than 1 million households in The Netherlands have a television subscription combined with an internet subscription. Source: Vecai

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It is interesting to see that many of the fibre glass projects are also initiated by the municipalities. In the past they ran a cable network to avoid forests of antennas. Now they get involved in high speed networks for their own municipal services, education and hospitals; but their involvement is not that of an operator. They take shares in the private companies in order to have a say about the connections to their services and insure that the inhabitants get the best network possible. I guess that once glass fibre networks are common, up and running, that municipalities will sell their shares again to invest in other citizens’ services.

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Talking about internet by cable. I have a UPC subscription to Internet, Chello Classic, a package of 8 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. That package is no longer sold; they never informed me by letter or e-mail. But what you get back or as compensation is not told on the webpage. On the webpage they guarantee the same optimal service, but lately they have been fiddling with the speed, as you can see from last month’s speed recordings through Speedtest.

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Blog Posting Number: 775

Tags: cable, glass fibre