The Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) is one of the keystones of media law in the European Union. It was thoroughly revised and extended in autumn 2018. The European Commission set the deadline for transposition into national legislation as being the 19 September 2020 but the process is still ongoing in a certain number of countries.

The Observatory has provided a one stop shop AVMSD information resource online which now allow you to research:

• Which EU countries have completed the transposition process so as to have fully incorporated the 2018 AVMSD into their national audiovisual legislation;
• How the various articles have been transposed into national legislation and with what variations on the original text;
• What new rules and regulations are transpiring from the 2018 AVMSD as compared with the former 2010 version of the AVMSD.

Thanks to extensive research by the Observatory team, you can now get the current state of play regarding AVMSD transposition by using:

The AVMSDatabase

This database allows you to make interactive searches across the national transpositions of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive 2018/1808 (AVMSD) in the 27 EU member states.

Each provision of the AVMSD (article, paragraph, subparagraph) is associated with the corresponding provision(s) of national primary legislations, so as to allow searches by article and/or by country. So you can for example: see how a particular country has implemented any articles; compare the new articles in national law with the old articles from the 2010 version of the AVMSD for any given country; compare the way in which different countries have transposed one particular article. The resulting search will give you the correct reference legal texts for each transposed provision of the AVMS Directive. The results of the queries are exportable both as Word and PDF files and as comparative tables in Excel files.

The national rules will be gradually fed into the AVMSDatabase as soon as they are made available to the Observatory in original language and English translation and checked by the Observatory team with its pool of national experts. Mistakes may still occur, so should you detect any, feedback is very welcome and can be sent to iris.obs [ at ] coe.int.

A first set of nine countries is available today (AT, BG, FI, HU, LT, LV, MT, PT and SE).

The AVMSDatabase is co-financed by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

The AVMSD Tracker

This extensive table gives an easy to digest informative overview of the current state of play for AVMSD transposition in each EU member state.

The legal texts listed in the table include final adopted laws and decrees, as well as draft proposals published as part of national consultations, presented or currently debated by the member states' legislative bodies.

For each country listed the table will gradually be completed by a country EXCEL table which gives you the texts of the original AVMSD article, the original language text of the transposed article in national law plus an English translation. An additional country info sheet provides a quick overview on six major topics (protection of minors, accessibility, European works, advertising, VSPs, media literacy) and the corresponding country link to the full search results in the AVMSDatabase.

The work of updating this table is carried out by the European Audiovisual Observatory through desk research and input from its network of national experts. Any contribution for the update of the table is very welcome and can be sent to iris.obs [@] coe.int.