Africa-Press – Uganda. The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) Competition Commission has started investigations into possible violation of competition rules by three pay television.
The pay TVs, including Multichoice Africa Holdings, Azam Media and StarTimes Group, are accused of blocking some regional broadcast channels from airing the 2022 World Cup matches in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda.
The three, Comesa Competition Commission says, apart from blocking broadcasters, also failed to compensate consumers in the three East African countries who might have suffered damages over outages or failure to access paid for channels.
The Comesa Competition Commission observed that consumers, who may have subscribed for certain bouquets in the interest of having access to a list of TV channels including regional programmes and news were deprived of their right or misled.
“It is also possible that some consumers may have purchased the bouquets, specifically to watch World Cup through the affected channels. In this case, the consumers may have been misled by the pay TV service providers in terms of the composition of the bouquet,” Comesa said, noting this could have been a breach of Article 27 (1)(a) of the regulations. Article 27 of the Comesa Competition Regulations prohibits persons in trade or commerce, in connection with the supply or possible supply of goods or services from giving false or misleading representations to the consumer.
It was also observed that when the pay TV providers blocked certain TV channels, consumers could have been inconvenienced and denied access to content that they had pre-paid for, which disenfranchised consumers, especially where they were not compensated for the loss.
“This may be considered as unfair and unconscionable conduct towards the consumers and a possible breach of the Regulations under Article 28(1),” Comesa noted, saying its concern is that pay TV service providers, to whom consumers had paid their subscriptions, did not offer redress or compensation to affected customers.
Article 28 prohibits persons in trade or commerce, in connection with the supply or possible supply of goods or services to a consumer from engaging in conduct that is, in all circumstances, unconscionable.
The Fifa 2022 World Cup tournament, held from November 20 to December 18, was hosted by Qatar with Argentina piping France in the finals to lift the trophy.
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