You can watch the complete webinar here.
On February 6th, the European Disability Forum (EDF) organised a webinar about the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD). The AVMSD is a directive which sets out the rules for audiovisual media services and adapts them to the new media consumption realities and affects all market players (TV broadcasters, video on-demand platforms and video sharing platforms) in the European Union.
The AVMSD entered into force on 19th December 2018 and its transposition period will end on 19th September 2020. This webinar was conducted by Marie Denninghaus, EDF Policy Coordinator and was supported by Raquel Riaza, Events and Administration Officer and by other colleagues from EDF‘s office.
The webinar was accessible for persons with disabilities providing live captioning and sign language interpretation. It was recorded and it will be available on EDF’s website. Before the intervention of the two speakers, Marie Denninghaus briefed about some practical information about the webinar and set forth the programme. She also gave a short introduction about the European Disability Forum. The first speaker was Lara Orlandi, from the European Commission, is Policy Officer in DG CONNECT. She gave a broad overview about the main AVMSD objectives and provisions as she was part of the team which prepared and negotiated this legislation.
The second speaker was Alejandro Moledo. He is Policy Coordinator at EDF. He spoke about the provisions of the AVMSD with reference to accessibility for persons with disabilities and how to make use of this legislation to advance on media accessibility. He also mentioned some recommendations to bring out the best of the provisions of the directive which are detailed in the EDF toolkit about this legislation. This toolkit was prepared by Mher Hakobyan who is Accessibility Officer at EDF and you can find it published on EDF’s website.