Reply to post:

I agree with you about direct media sales - the idea that a piece of music or movie can be purchased in physical form from anywhere in the EU, but not as a download, is stupid beyond belief. Also, if programme delivery is carried out over the internet, it should be possible to pay for any service, regardless of origin, because the delivery method allows accurate accounting for users.

However, I have to disagree with you about broadcasting. The Austrian/Swiss TV situation with Germany is the same one that Ireland faces with respect to the United Kingdom: the small country's player cannot go free-to-air, because doing so would put it at a major commercial disadvantage.

[Apologies for the long post that follows, but it's not a simple situation]

If you are bidding for the right to show a movie or sporting event, the price you can afford to pay is determined by the number of people who could see it, not the number of people who do see it (you can't calculate the latter with any accuracy, but the former is easily established). If, for example, ÖRF wants to show the World Cup, then it has a market of 8.5 million Austrians to pay the cost of that purchase, and the rates it pays reflect that audience size. However, if ARD bids to show the same event, its broadcasts will address 80 million Germans, and so it must pay more. The cost-per-potential-viewer is roughly the same, though.

In a free-to-air situation, however, both broadcasters are forced to bid for the right to address an audience of around 90 million German-speakers across Europe. That's fine for ARD, as it's only about 10% more that it already pays, but for the Austrian broadcaster, any such deal would be far beyond its means.

Even when weighted for penetration rates, the smaller broadcaster would see its costs at least double, for no real benefit to the audience that pays for the service (in this example, the residents of Austria). The only way to recoup such additional costs would be to aim their programming away from their domestic audience, and towards the larger market.

But take Switzerland. I can't imagine many Swiss would be impressed if their German-language services adopted Standard German for all their programming simply because a pan-european distribution with no opt-out forced it to compete for viewers in the Bundesrepublik, to whom Swiss German is unintelligible.

There is a point where the disparity works in your favour, and the classic example is Luxembourg, whose "national" broadcaster, RTL, is a de-facto commercial competitor to German and French stations, with revenues earned from overspill being used to support local programming, but this is only possible when your own domestic population is so minuscule that a "national" service would never be viable.

Incidentally, the small-footprint Astra services you complain about exist for very sound technical reasons. They are there only to allow greater capacity by taking account of existing language distributions in Europe, not to geo-block content. There is no narrow-beam service that only covers one country, but if you look at the languages spoken in the countries under each narrow-beam footprint, you'll see the real rationale. There is a limited bandwidth available for direct-to-home services, so the use of these localised beams allows that bandwidth to be allocated according to the needs to the market. If all beams were pan-European, then there would be fewer services available overall, because there would be no possibility for frequency re-use, and the costs of broadcast would be higher.