ABSTRACT
The mid-1990s were marked by an unprecedented wave of reform of broadcasting and media policy in Europe’s major Member States. France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain all made substantial changes to their broadcasting legislation. 1996 saw Britain’s first new Broadcasting Act for six years, a major revision to Germany’s Interstate Treaty on Broadcasting, and a Law on Information Superhighways in France which created a framework for pilot digital broadcasts. In 1997 Germany approved two new pieces of legislation on the regulation of new media services (one at the Federal level and one at the level of the Länder), while the UK’s Telecoms Regulator, OFTEL, created Europe’s most detailed regulatory framework for conditional access systems, and (together with the broadcasting regulator, the ITC) what was at the time the only set of guidelines anywhere in Europe on the operation of electronic programme guides. In France, after the initial reform proposals of Alain Juppé’s government were abandoned because of electoral defeat, the socialist Government of Lionel Jospin went on to develop its own plans for broadcasting reform during the course of 1998-9.
