EU Opens Antitrust Case Against Major US Studios and Sky UK

The European Union’s top antitrust authority charged major American film studios and a television company in Britain with unfairly blocking access to movies and other content.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, sent the charges, which are known as a statement of objections, to Sky UK and to six Hollywood film studios: Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount Pictures, Sony, 21st Century Fox and Warner Bros. The studios license movies to the pay-TV broadcaster under contracts that require Sky UK to block access for consumers outside the United Kingdom and Ireland, the regulator said. The commission, which opened the investigation in January 2014, said the limits were imposed by blocking access to the satellite pay-TV services from abroad and through a technique called geo-blocking, which prevents consumers from, for example, watching Disney movies on Sky on the iPad of a Londoner who is traveling to Rome. The practices prevented consumers who buy films, music or articles from Sky UK online from retrieving that content while traveling elsewhere in Europe, the commission said. The practices, in some cases, also stopped rival broadcasters from making their services available in Britain and Ireland, it said.