Paid Broadcasting '33% Rule' Abolished... Broadcasting Act and IPTV Act Amendment Bills Announced for Legislation

[Asia Economy Reporter Seulgina Jo] The government is abolishing market share regulations targeting paid broadcasting services such as IPTV and cable TV. The so-called '33% rule,' which prevented a specific large corporation's subscriber share from exceeding one-third, has already expired, completely eliminating related market share regulations. This move is interpreted as an effort to enable domestic media companies to achieve 'economies of scale' in competition with global OTT giants like Netflix.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced that it will publicly notify the amendment bills to the Broadcasting Act and the Internet Multimedia Broadcasting Business Act from August 31. The amendments mainly include the abolition of paid broadcasting market share regulations, relaxation of fee regulations, establishment of viewer committees, and introduction of quality evaluations. The Ministry plans to collect opinions from stakeholders until October 12.

First, as a follow-up measure to the ‘Digital Media Ecosystem Development Plan’ announced in June, the Ministry of Science and ICT focused on substantially reducing regulatory burdens on operators. It will abolish the market share regulation capped at one-third of paid broadcasting subscribers. Additionally, to incentivize voluntary quality improvements, the quasi-completion inspections (installation inspections, modification inspections) currently applied to comprehensive cable TV operators, relay cable TV operators, and music cable TV operators will also be eliminated.

Regarding fee regulations, the current fee approval system, which hinders free fee and product design, will be relaxed to a notification system to enhance market autonomy and user choice; however, the approval system will be maintained for minimum channel products and broadcasting-telecommunication bundled products to prevent excessive fee increases or discriminatory practices against users. Furthermore, to promote market entry of media convergence services, the entry regulation for technology convergence services will be relaxed from the current approval system to a notification system.

The amendment bill also includes details related to protecting viewer rights as a subtask of the national agenda 'Realizing user-centered media welfare.'

With the growing importance of paid broadcasting, the obligation to establish viewer committees, previously imposed only on terrestrial, comprehensive programming, news, and home shopping broadcasting channel operators, will also be imposed on paid broadcasting. Additionally, quality evaluations will be conducted for comprehensive cable TV operators and satellite broadcasting operators, and the results will be made public. For all paid broadcasting services (SO, IPTV, satellite, 18 companies), seven indicators (five quantitative, two qualitative) such as channel switching time and content diversity will be evaluated by 2,400 evaluators.

The Ministry of Science and ICT stated, “We will continue to support the sustainable growth of the domestic media industry through cooperation among related ministries and actively strive to ensure that users’ interests are not compromised.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.