UTECA takes positions regarding the project of the new National Technical Plan for DTT

The Royal Decree project is limited, according to UTECA, to establishing instruments for actions, without there previously being a stable legal framework on which to carry them out.

In response to the draft Royal Decree presented by the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism to the CATSI (Telecommunication and Information Society Advisory Council), UTECA has published a statement which ensures that the text "is limited to establishing instruments of action, without previously having a stable legal framework on which to carry them out, since the situation of the current 15 national DTT channels is not definitively clarified. The project seems to try to consolidate what we consider an error capital of the recent loss of channels, anticipating new unjustified awards without specifying their conditions.”

The private television employers' association in Spain recalls that there are several appeals before the Supreme Court that question the existence of 8 private DTT channels, in addition to the 9 closed in May 2014.

On the other hand, UTECA denounces that the draft has been carried out unilaterally by the SETSI without any prior consultation or participation of UTECA or its associates, the main affected by the process of releasing the digital dividend, assigning multiple specifics without knowing the underlying rationale and without having made it possible for the television stations to make a consensus proposal among themselves in the search of reducing inconvenience to citizens in the retuning work.

“The allocation of broadcasting capacity proposed in the draft continues, once again, treating private television stations in a discriminatory manner compared to TVE, to which it allocates a much greater bandwidth than to private television stations, when they operate an equal or greater number of channels that, in addition, have been the reference television stations for the Spanish public for years,” UTECA states.

Regarding the development of high definition, UTECA considers it a paradox that, despite the fact that the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism has expressed its commitment to HD, "it skimps on the allocation of spectrum to private television stations, conditioning their commitment to high definition by limiting the number of high definition channels that can already be offered. All this while leaving so much spectrum unassigned."

The private companies understand that the draft Royal Decree presented is “unusually obscure with respect to potential new awards of unassigned spectrum, stating that they will be awarded through contests, but without offering any information on the terms and conditions of said contests or calendars or deadlines for the bidding.”

Finally, UTECA points out that the Technical Plan proposal also does not include any express mention of the capital issue of financing the costs of relocating the channels and, ultimately, the reorganization of the digital spectrum, despite the fact that this aspect is regulated in the current article 51, second paragraph, of the Sustainable Economy Law, which prescribes that “The costs derived from the reorganization of the radio spectrum that must be carried out to free up the frequency band 790 to 862Mhz., will be paid for by the Administration with the income obtained in the public tenders that are called to allocate radio spectrum.” Under this law, in the opinion of UTECA, “the cost of this transition cannot fall on either the operators or the citizens.”