The European Broadcasters Union refers in particular to live streams and video on demand (VOD) on the Internet.
Up to 27 separate agreements – one for each member state – are currently required for up to three different rightsholders, including musicians, directors and actors.
One European broadcaster claims that clearing the rights of the station's entire archive would take 800 staff three years.
"EU audiences increasingly demand and expect our content on new media platforms, but the current copyright regime does not include sufficient rules to make rights clearance efficient," said Ingrid Deltenre, EBU director-general.
"This situation creates unnecessary administrative costs, and that is not in the interests of users of copyright, consumers or creators," she added.
The broadcasters' report points out that cable television can access multi-territory audiences by mandatory collective licensing.
The EBU wants these licenses extended to digital content such as mobile networks or online television.
The world's leading markets for online TV are in fact in the EU.
Germany's Deutsche Telekom has the highest subscription rate in the bloc, with France's Free and Orange close behind.
Broadcasters join lobby
The broadcasters' push for better clearance appears to be part of a wider lobbying effort by many stakeholders in Brussels to ensure that they benefit from the EU's policy of 'broadband for all'.
The European Commission is currently considering merging all music rights clearance into a 'one-stop shop', a prospect which unsettles collecting societies responsible for granting permission to commercial users of content.
If the Commission gets its way, national collecting societies that manage the rights of online content will have to integrate their systems, which some societies have been dreading since the idea was first flagged in the 1990s.
At the start of its rotating EU presidency, Spain revealed that both digital rights management and rolling out high-speed Internet were high on its agenda and would likely be the focus of discussions by the EU's 27 telecommunications ministers at their meeting in Madrid in May (EurActiv 08/01/10).
