July 31, 2013 – The long-drawn out battle over the rights to broadcast the EPL in Singapore appears to be finally over, for this year at least.
The government’s mandate that Singtel offer EPL content for “cross-carriage” over other pay-TV operators’ networks produced considerable initial uncertainty among content providers, in light of the regulatory requirement that Singtel’s entire bundle containing EPL content would also have to be cross-carried. But in the end, MDA gave Singtel an exemption allowing it to cross-carry only the EPL channels. This removed the need for Singtel to negotiate for approval from all the other “bundled” content providers, and meant that consumers using Starhub’s network would only be able to buy the stand-alone EPL channels after the Minister for Communications and Information’s rejection of SingNet’s appeal over the MDA’s enforced cross-carriage rule.
All in all, the confusion and the outcome (which saw consumers protesting the high price of the content) demonstrated why CASBAA believed and continues to believe that the cross-carriage system is a bad idea.
Read more at Yahoo! Singapore News