Changes In Legislation Concerning Pay Tv In Brazil: A Local Market And Foreign Capital Approach

In a presentation during the public hearing that concerns the regulatory mark of Pay TVs in Brazil’s STF (Federal Supreme Court), the representative of Anatel (National Agency of Telecommunications) Marcelo Bechara stood up for the Law 12.485/2011. The norm is object of three ADIs (Direct Action of Unconstitutionality) and to subsidize the judgment of these lawsuits the rapporteur minister Luiz Fux assembled the public hearing to listen to specialists in the subject.

According to Marcelo Bechara, the regulation of Pay TVs market is necessary so there is a pulverization that will provide the competition, because “the competition brings quality and effectively a better benefit for the user”. Thus it will be possible to lease Brazilian Pay TVs services to the foreign market.

He explained that since the mid-1990s there has been a technological convergence that allowed the access to the information through a digital platform, which is increasingly attempting to the user’s interest. Moreover, without the regulator role of the State, this market would create itself freely in a process that involves not only technological convergence, but “economic convergence” that also implies economic concentration, meaning “acquisition of a market extremely concentrated in which a determined group provides all kinds of services”.

For Bechara the goal of the regulation is market openness and the ending of barriers. “In other words, to let the enterprising free to make the necessary investments, to step into this market, to create a normative flexibility. Regulating is good, and it doesn’t mean creating barriers, yet the opposite: it means having a free and orderly growth of this market”, he asserted.

“Our legislation is recent, we are not inventing the wheel, the Brazilian society wants and needs this service and I understand that we will be fully exercising our constitutional role by taking what is stated in the 5th and the 220th articles of the Federal Constitution, which is the right to the access to communication and manifestation of the freedom of thought”, ended Bechara.