Melita is appealing fines of €10,000 imposed by the Malta Communications Authority.
The MCA fined Melita €5,000 for not notifying its customers that it would stop airing four football club channels on its “XL” package and another €5,000 for not providing a letter of comfort from an independent auditor stating its billing system was operating satisfactorily over accuracy of consumer bills. Melita said in a statement that it would be appealing the MCA decisions.
Regarding the Inter, Roma, Milan and Juventus channels, Melita said that “as all other local and international operators, it has no control over third party channel broadcasting”.
Melita said that it was also “denied a non-exclusive agreement to broadcast these channels during negotiations with the international rights holders” and said that for several weeks, these four channels were unavailable on the competing platform – Go TV – “since this platform was eager to lay its hands on these assets even though capacity issues restricted the broadcast of these channels.
“To date, some of this content is still not broadcast on the Go platform notwithstanding that Go has exclusive rights for broadcast,” Melita said, adding that football fans were, and in some cases are still deprived, of following the club channels.
“This further highlights the urgent need for regulatory bodies to ensure that content is shared between operators to avoid these restrictive and damaging situations from happening every time exclusive rights expire,” the company said adding that it had already approached Go to discuss content sharing.
“Go’s refusal to cooperate is only depriving customers of following their favourite sports,” Melita said.
At the moment, Go owns the rights to broadcast the Italian Serie A and the English Premier League, while Melita owns the broadcasting rights for the UEFA Champions League.
Melita claimed that the MCA did not take into account the fact that it had doubled the channel line up for the “XL” package to 140 or that 75 per cent of calls to its call centre were answered “in less than one minute”.
Regarding its billing, Melita said it was “unreasonable and unrealistic for the MCA to expect an audit report on undefined criteria and benchmarks within the limited time frame provided”.
“While the company investigates and resolves letters it receives from customers and others published in the media, Melita was unable to investigate and resolve the complaints referred to by the MCA since it was left in the dark on the nature and the quantity of these complaints,” the telecoms operator concluded.