Baltcom

Apr 25, 2023

April 25, 2023 From May 1, 2023, amendments to the Law on Electronic Media come into force, which impose an obligation on television service providers when distributing a program with an audio track in a language that is not an official language of one of the Member States of the European Union (EU) or a country of the European Economic Area (EEA), provide an audio track in the state language. The purpose of the new edition of the law is to strengthen Latvia’s belonging to the Western European cultural space, as well as to protect the interests of national security. The amendments affect both producers of TV content, their owners, as well as suppliers and distributors of TV content. The requirements provide that from May 1, high-quality content on internationally recognized popular science and film channels, for example, such as the National Geographic Channel, History channel, FOX, in the absence of a language track in the state language, program providers will be able to distribute only with an audio track on one of the official languages ​​of the countries of the European Union. Given the disproportionately high costs of translating and dubbing channel content for the small Latvian market compared to the European and US market, some channels do not plan to provide translation, which will force them to disable the Russian language track. As a result, on a significant number of channels, only the audio track in the original language will remain, i.e. mostly in English. In turn, some of the channels will duplicate content, providing translation using artificial intelligence. In order to continue operating in accordance with the new requirements of the law, the telecommunications company Baltcom will also provide audio tracks of some TV programs in Latvian from May 1 this year. For the second part of the TV programs, the language track will be kept in the original languages ​​(including, for example, English, German, French, Polish, Lithuanian, Estonian). Baltcom reminds that language tracks are provided by programmers, however, content localization is a process that requires a lot of time and financial resources, so the number of TV programs whose content will become available in Latvian from May 1 will be limited. Considering that customers may experience inconvenience as a result of the amendments to the law, Baltcom will expand its program list with new channels, including Movify Movie, Movify Series, Movify Story and I Want to Know Everything. *The article has been translated based on the content of GOROD.LV – новости Даугавпилса by gorod.lv . If there is any problem regarding the content, copyright, please leave a report below the article. We will try to process as quickly as possible to protect the rights of the author. Thank you very much! *We just want readers to access information more quickly and easily with other multilingual content, instead of information only available in a certain language. *We always respect the copyright of the content of the author and always include the original link of the source article.If the author disagrees, just leave the report below the article, the article will be edited or deleted at the request of the author. Thanks very much! Best regards! Report Content