Uruguay. The Uruguayan Congress is currently discussing a new media law, which includes new policies for advertising on local television. But a group of congressmen has generated a strong controversy by wanting to include restrictions for Pay TV.
Claiming the defense of children and young people, the regulation under study intends to apply new obligations in advertising, decreasing the amount of foreign pattern and increasing the local one. According to the promoters of this proposal, they seek to imitate the model that was applied to Pay TV by the Argentine government.
But pay-TV operators assured that this rule, which is initially aimed at free-to-air TV, would immediately generate an increase in costs for users, due to the intervention required by the network, in addition to generating contractual problems for operators.
A detail that Uruguayan legislators are not taking into account is that the television networks that arrive by cable sell block advertising for the entire region. And to be able to intervene locally, operators require investments close to US$15 million, a difficult figure for medium and small operators.
If this measure is approved, 62% of Uruguayan households that have a contracted subscription TV service would be affected, as indicated by the latest measurement of the National Statistics Center of that country.
