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Los Angeles Times/ - Politics, Sex, 30 de Março de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Supreme Court)
Media giants score legal victory against
foes of bundling channels
Don't look for your cable company to let you pick what
channels you want to get anytime soon.
A panel of judges for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of
Appeals in San Francisco sided with a dozen media
giants including News Corp., Time Warner, DirecTV
and Comcast in a class-action suit that was looking to
do away with the practice of bundling multiple
channels together and selling them as a package, a
long-standing industry tradition.
Bundling is when programmers sells their channels in
bulk to distributors. For example, Walt Disney Co.'s
ESPN typically cuts deals with cable and satellite
distributors for multiple channels. The distributor then
sells the bundle as part of a package to consumers.
Many media watchdogs argue that bundling allows big
media companies to get distribution for less popular
channels in return for carrying the popular channels. A
distributor can pay to carry just ESPN and none of its
spinoffs. However, the cost is usually higher than if the
distributor agrees to carry several ESPN channels. The
consumer who might only want ESPN must pay to get
the extra ESPN channels too.
In affirming a U.S. District Court ruling in California, the
9th Circuit panel said that bundling is not a violation of
antitrust laws. The plaintiffs -- a group of cable and
satellite television subscribers -- argued that
programmers abused their market power and harmed
competition by requiring distributors to sell channels in
prepackaged tiers rather than on an individual, or a la
carte, basis.
The attorney for the plaintiffs, Maxwell Blecher of the
Los Angeles law firm Blecher & Collins, said he will
either seek a hearing in front of the full 9th Circuit or
appeal to the Supreme Court.
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