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Late last month, news site Gründerszene reported that Germany’s Kommission für Zulassung und Aufsicht (ZAK) der Landesmedienanstalten [roughly, the Commission for Admission and Supervision for the State Media Office] demanded that popular Twitch.tv streaming channel PietSmietTV pay between €1,000 and €10,000 for a broadcasting license. For those not in the know, which includes me before I heard this news, Twitch is essentially a live streaming site focused on video gaming.
Like many online streaming channels on Twitch, YouTube and similar sites, PietSmiet mostly streams video game playthroughs and personal thoughts on current events. The ZAK invoked a law requiring that any German broadcaster reaching more than 500 people hold a license, and classified Twitch as a Rundfunkangebot [broadcasting service]. The law is essentially in place to prevent TV broadcasters from transmitting without a license, so the State Media Office more or less turned it inside out in order to demand PietSmiet’s licensing.
 Peter Smits, who founded and runs PietSmiet, probably has little to worry about personally. His is one of the most popular German-language video game channels, and his YouTube clips hit the 100 or 200K visitor mark within hours of posting, so PietSmiet likely drives serious revenue through ads and subscriber donations. But live streaming communities are up in arms at what they see as invoking outdated legislation to make a little cash on what’s essentially free, unlicensed content. Even the State Media Office admitted that the law doesn’t make much sense and might be changed in the future, so their actions might be a one-off anyway.
Fair or not, retroactively requiring licenses for unregulated broadcasting has some precedents. In the early 1900s, for example, amateur radio broadcasting was all the rage. But as more and more broadcasters took to the airwaves their signals began overlapping, leading to the 1927 Radio Act requiring licenses for frequency bands and eventually to the creation of the FCC. Classifying streaming as broadcasting could be pointing the way to more centralized management and oversight of what’s now essentially a wide-open landscape.
The streaming-as-broadcasting issue sheds light on issues around gatekeeping and cash flow around the more or less unregulated internet. Compare the internet to cable TV, in which content is provided by a network, which is then bid on by a cable company and packaged for a subscriber fee. Internet services are controlled and monetized by ISPs, but with free wi-fi existing almost everywhere the internet could now be thought of as the new broadcast TV, freely available to anyone with an antenna. The role of online streamers in this scheme is still murky. But if any government tries to enforce a license on a streaming channel reaching over 500 people (a tiny population in an online environment), a lot of non-monetized channels will go down quickly without much of a fight.
It remains to be seen whether Germany’s media office will follow through on its demands, and whether it will expand its reach to require other channels to obtain licenses. Given the firehose-like nature of data on the internet, it’s unlikely that they’re trying to limit bandwidth, and perhaps more likely that they’re just trying to make a little cash off a popular channel. Or maybe it’s just another attempt by mainstream media providers to put the slightest damper on the massive stream of free online content.
Image credit: Tom Sundstrom / CC BY-ND 2.0
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