Broadcasters have had to grapple with discovery and findability almost since the dawn of TV, but it has become increasingly challenging with successive commercial and technical iterations. As pay TV proliferated during the 1990s, bringing increased competition for eyeballs, it became even more imperative for broadcasters to ensure their content was readily available and accessible to viewers.

This spawned a range of vendors specializing in content search, recommendation and discovery, with streaming adding a new dimension as broadcasters began to compete through their own OTT channels. This brought the challenge of personalization to Free To Air (FTA) broadcasters, since portals for accessing on demand and live content over the internet did not initially involve sign on and authentication of the viewer.

Now AI is emerging as a new disruptor, introducing a new challenge for Public Service Broadcasters where content must compete for prominence with the big streamers and tech companies, while still maintaining brand visibility. At the same time, broadcasters remain under pressure to make sure their content is accessible through captioning and subtitling, in line with their public service remit.

While there is almost universal global commitment to ubiquitous availability of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) content such as news, there are significant regional and national differences over regulation. Some jurisdictions lean more heavily on rules to enforce prominence of services deemed of wider public interest in what they see as a wild west for distribution of linear TV.

Such considerations have led some dominions, notably the EU, to extend the concept of Services of General Interest (SGI) to broadcasting. This brings similar protections to critical PSB content already enjoyed by vital public services such as public transport and mail. It begs the question of which content should enjoy such protection and why it has to be provided by PSBs, as opposed to other service providers.

Regional Differences

So far, individual EU countries have been left to set the pace over positioning of SGI, with France, Germany and Italy all applying different rules. Of these, Germany is the most prescriptive, with strict rules over the positioning of content within User Interfaces (UIs) applicable to some private service providers, as well as PSBs.

This hard line was set in September 2021, when Die Medienanstalten, the German media regulator, introduced rules over discoverability in UIs, combining negative and positive safeguards aimed at avoiding discrimination over placement and ensuring prominence of content deemed of general interest. The stated objective was to highlight media offerings considered relevant for diversity of opinions and incentivize those private providers that invest in public value content. The latter included pay TV operators and some OTT service providers.

In France the rules are slightly softer, obliging PSBs and DTT service providers to ensure prominence for SGIs. In this case a unified SGI access point for favored content is merely recommended rather than mandatory. Equal visibility for SGIs with other services must also be ensured across the UI itself, as well as within search results and recommendations.

Italy’s approach is closer to Germany’s, actually mandating prominence of SGIs across all mainstream viewing devices, including set tops, smart TVs, tablets and digital radios. Homepages displayed on or by such devices must carry a dedicated SGI strip, showing icons for national TV, satellite, local TV and radio, in line with Italy’s logical channel numbering (LCN).

There is also a requirement for designated linear TV channels to be accessible directly via remote-control keys through a specific home-screen icon. This imposes considerable costs and technical challenges on providers of UIs and devices, since firmware updates are required and UIs and remote-control functions have to be redesigned as well as integrated.

Broader SGI Governance

Meanwhile, the EU has been maneuvering to unify treatment of SGIs among member states, not least to minimize the burden of compliance by avoiding having multiple sets of rules. Efforts are rooted in the 2020 Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) designed to coordinate national legislation for both TV and on-demand services across the EU.

However, coherence has proved elusive and is only really coming in the wake of a 2026 review as part of the so-called European Democracy Shield. This has a lofty notion of aligning media with democratic freedom through coordinated legislation over content compliance and public service prominence. OTT video services are obliged to incorporate these rules in their content discoverability.

Outside the EU, the UK has been following a similar line, but with an overarching ambition to address all aspects of discoverability, compliance and accessibility in a single framework. This is embodied in the UK Media Act 2024, which extends PSB prominence requirements to online viewing. Online and connected TV platforms must therefore implement similar content compliance or audience protection measures as traditional broadcasters. They must ensure public service content is easily accessible to viewers while also adhering to quotas for original productions. There is also a strong emphasis on viewability of SGI type content for disabled people, imposing requirements over captions and subtitles.

The USA is rather an outlier when it comes to enforcing content placement, although admittedly it is a very big one. This reflects the stark difference between the USA and most other countries over public service broadcasting in general, with far less government support. Both the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), representing TV and radio respectively, are autonomous entities dependent on non-profit organizations, as well as community support from many local stations.

The situation has been further complicated with federal funding for public service broadcasting cancelled in July 2025. It leaves the USA without the equivalent of generic SGI content, although the country has legislation over accessibility to educational content, as well as provisions for viewing by the deaf or otherwise disabled. This is enshrined in the US Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which imposes fair use rights, including exemption from copyright for access to educational content by students and scholars. There are also accessibility features for blind as well as deaf people, including captions, subtitles, audio description, and transcriptions. Such accessibility features are common to most countries.

Collaboration

Globally there is a growing trend towards collaboration over regulation of media and digital platforms, particularly among smaller nations. Japan is now in the largest of these after signing a cooperation pact with the European Commission in May 2026 to combine forces.

The idea is to underpin implementation of both the EU’s Digital Services Act and Japan’s Information Distribution Platform Act. The idea is to establish the alignment required for digital platforms to operate successfully across borders.

For the EU, the partnership follows similar pacts with the UK and Australia, so it is shaping up as a large international coalition. The coalition is also considering the impact of AI in content discovery and findability, which rather mirrors work ongoing at the EBU (European Broadcasting Union).

There is an EBU group studying the impact on content discovery for AI-assisted search in chatbots, agents and AI-generated summaries. At the time of writing, the EBU aims to publish recommendations for member broadcasters over implications for distribution and what it means for metadata, content rights and accessibility.

Archiving

Some broadcasters have already engaged with AI to assist with liberating their archives, as well as promote new content. When it comes to archives, AI has two roles; one is to help users discover content on the basis of metadata that has already been created, relating to emotion, genre and other elements. The other is to generate relevant metadata in the first place, given that older content may have had only basic information associated with it.

Currently, many broadcasters have long established libraries of archived content that is technically accessible. But in practice, much of it is undiscoverable because there is no key for a viewer to find it, so it often remains buried. Now there is growing use of machine learning to pore through footage and add metadata that provides searchable information about genre, mood, actors featured, and so on. This is work in progress as the AI tools are still being tuned to the tasks, with success or failure contingent on how accurately they can extract relevant descriptive information and associated timecodes.

There is also the potential for archived content to be discoverable through more subtle cues, enabling natural language searches. The degree to which such potential is being realized will be discussed in part two of this series.