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Key takeaways
- Enhanced Access for UK Radio Services: The Media Act 2024 mandates that providers of smart speakers and other voice-activated devices ensure UK radio services are as easily accessible as any other content, addressing a previous gap in statutory support compared to television broadcasting.
- Regulatory Safeguards for Broadcasters: New rules prevent smart speaker providers from interrupting radio content with ads, charging carriage fees, or making radio services difficult to discover by verbal request.
- Alignment with UK Broadcasting Policy: The legislation aligns with long-standing UK broadcasting policy by extending regulatory frameworks to this new technology, ensuring that radio services remain readily accessible as media consumption habits evolve.
For decades UK broadcasting policy, as reflected in legislation, has ensured that the UK’s public service television channels have been carried and been given prominence on the principal platforms through which they are made available by third parties to viewers. By contrast, UK radio services, whether provided by the BBC or by commercial broadcasters, have not had comparable statutory support for their efforts to reach their intended national, regional or local audiences. Until now, this has not presented a disadvantage; their services have been readily accessible through analogue and digital broadcasting, by carriage on third parties’ satellite and cable platforms, and through broadcasters’ websites. While those delivery systems will continue, the rapid take-up by the public of the new technology of the ‘smart speaker’ has prompted legislative intervention to ensure that those who own these proprietary systems – the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google and Sonos –must configure them so that the UK’s radio services can be called-up by a user as readily as any other content.
The new rules are set out in in section 48 of the Media Act 2024, which gained Royal Assent in July. Section 48 inserts new sections 362BA to 362BZ4 into the now densely-populated Communications Act 2003.
While the new rules most obviously apply to smart speakers such as Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant and Sonos, they will also apply to smartphones and personal computers where voice activation will enable a user to gain access to an internet-delivered radio service.
The Act forestalls issues which might otherwise have become contentious between broadcasters and the providers of smart speakers, defined in the Act as ‘designated radio selection services’. For example, such providers –
- must make the radio services discoverable by verbal request
- must not interrupt the broadcaster’s content, not least by inserting advertising
- must not charge the broadcaster a carriage fee.
While smart speakers have been on the market for some years, it does feel as if an appropriate regulatory framework, consistent with the thrust of long-established UK broadcasting policy, has been put in place in time to ensure a healthy development of this exciting technology.
Client Alert 2024-191
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