Wednesday July 1, 12:30 PM
French competition body to rule on Orange TV next week
PARIS, July 1 (Reuters) - France's competition council will rule next week on whether the exclusive content policy of Internet service providers breaches competition rules, the council's head Bruno Lasserre said on Wednesday.
The ruling will, in particular, cover France Telecom (Paris: FR0000133308 - news) 's exclusivity on the content of its Orange sport and Orange cinema series channels, Lasserre told reporters.
In May, France Telecom won a court appeal in a dispute with Vivendi (Paris: FR0000127771 - news) 's SFR and Internet service provider Iliad (Paris: FR0004035913 - news) 's Free, allowing its Orange Sport pay-TV channel to be exclusive to its own broadband customers.
France Telecom has been buying up sports rights, including for France's top football league last year for 203 million euros ($286 million). It launched five Orange cinema series channels last year after securing exclusivity deals from Warner (NYSE: TWX - news) , HBO, Gaumont (Paris: FR0000034894 - news) and Fidelity Films.
Orange had 363,000 subscribers to its TV offers at the end of March, including 112,000 for Orange Sport.
(Reporting by Cyril Altmeyer, Dominique Vidalon; Editing by Dan Lalor)
($1 = 0.7107 euro) Keywords: ORANGE COMPETITION/
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