Mr. Rory Coveney:

On the issue of EPGs, the Deputy will be aware that television interfaces are dramatically changing and everyone's personal experience is dependent on what platform they access television through, and there is Saorview, Sky, Virgin Media, Vodafone and so on. On one level, there is the EPG, which is what most people are familiar with, and within that prominence is accorded to the channel numbers of the Irish public service media channels and Virgin Media. What the insertion of heads of Bill around this will do, or what we are hoping it will do, is create an underpinning in law to enshrine prominence, so this does not become a commercial negotiation and is a regulatory compliance issue. That is the core issue. It applies not just to channels but also to content, so content is surfaced in all sorts of ways through algorithms, on-demand libraries, recommendation engines and so on. These interfaces are increasingly sophisticated. The simple two-step process that is envisaged was outlined by the Minister yesterday, whereby the core issues would be enshrined in primary legislation and the media commission would develop codes of practice to ensure that compliance was adhered to by the various platforms. That is what is envisaged.

With regard to the jurisdictional issue, that relates to the capacity of the regulator to reach across into countries, and it is a country of origin issue. Therefore, if a platform is based outside of Ireland, the media commission would have jurisdiction to enforce the codes on those platforms that are targeting Ireland, and that previously was not the case.