First of all the EU should work on having public television from all EU countries available in all other countries. It is a travesty that you cannot watch Spanish public TV channels in Germany, or Dutch TV in Italy or Austrian TV in Belgium - etc.
This fragmentation has to stop, we cannot have Europe divided by greedy sports right holders. Public TV needs to be accessible for every EU citizen in every country.
To watch Flemish public TV news online, you have to login to your account (verified e mail address). Which is bad enough. If you want to watch it from abroad while not living in Belgium and using foreign IP, they ask you to login + “verify your identity” with your identity card or something like that. Goodbye VRT, I’ll watch other regions’ public news channels, stick yours up yours. Wankers. British, German, Dutch … all offer the basic news shows to everyone without any hurdles.
That’s interesting, we had the same discussion about European public broadcasting in a german speaking sub 2 days ago and someone wrote that their parents wanted to watch French TV in Germany and the only legal option was to get a satellite subscription from Wallonia.
Interesting indeed. I was only talking about public TV and only streaming on their website. Thread you’re talking about seems like it was a private channel situation? I thought this legal nonsense is one of the reasons the Tagesschau never shows soccer but only talks it, it’s to complicated and then they gotta put up the geofencing restrictions too.
You could always block sport only
Geoblocking within the EU has to stop completely, it starts with sports, then its movies, then series… Next thing you know someone has a special right to weather forecasts for Marseille between 6-10am and local news for Bratislava are only available with a 6-hour delay when animals are part of the story, …
ARTE is amazing
ARTE is easily the best thing on German television that ever happened. Great documentaries, culture, music, just shitloads of great content if you’re not a brain dead sitcom-with-canned-laughter consumer.
Instead of making everything about “the EU”, they should progressively increase the range. Include Spanish, Italian and Dutch already. Then Portuguese and Polish, etc.
But they should have done it as the EU enlarged. Now, it seems forced…
They already have several langages available
Yes, that’s true. And they partner with some and Italian content producers.
But they should have entered the full European space progressively, as the EU grew.
This would have been seen as a sign of value and integration. Now, it looks more like 2 economies using it to model the EU thinking as external threats use media to gain more control.
In fairness I think it’s funded by those two countries so if you want to expand it maybe more countries should ask to join? Or maybe create a new EU wide channel from scratch
Having other countries chip in to get content is probably not the end of the world…
ARTE is awesome, so much high quality content. Go check out what they have on YouTube, it’s amazing! They also Live-Stream concerts on YouTube.
Happy to hear. Hope it will remain in the same quality when it spreads out to other languages
