English Premier League executive director Bill Bush has criticised European Commission plans to remove geographical barriers to accessing digital content across member countries.
Bush said at a seminar in London that companies have not shown an interest in pan-European rights to the league.
“That’s because local broadcasters… know and are deeply embedded in cultural and market circumstances of their fans,” Bush said, according to the Advanced Television news website.
“They can form the judgement in a way that we, the Premier League cannot do about what those people want. They want different matches, they want different pre-match and different post-match… We are driven by the consumer. We are not imposing our views and our matches on them.”
He added that the UK government’s response to the EC’s outline proposals has been “superficial” and questioned the validity of the European body’s findings.
“What they actually came out with was about 2.7 per cent of the European population actually have tried to access their paid-for services,” he added. “There’s nothing wrong about trying to serve that tiny segment of the population. The problem is there’s nothing wrong in trying to serve that minority so long as the vast majority of very happy consumers are allowed to continue to enjoy what they get.”