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WARSAW, May 5 (Reuters) - Poland's consumer and anti-trust regulator UOKiK has launched proceedings against Polish television channel Polsat and four companies from the Discovery Group, it said on Wednesday.
UOKiK said it had recently received complaints from operators, industry associations and consumers regarding restrictions on the freedom to shape programming offers or the choice of television programmes.
"The voice from the market was unambiguous and pointed to the deepening imbalance between broadcasters or distributors and operators, for which consumers are paying," the head of UOKiK Tomasz Chrostny said in a statement.
The regulator said that cable TV operators were limited in their ability to freely create a programming offer by the fact that it was more expensive to buy individual programmes or channels than it was to buy them as part of a package.
"Cable TV operators who have limited opportunities to freely create an offer for their viewers may lose out, because they are forced to buy many channels and place them in specific packages which are then sold to viewers," Chrostny said.
Chrostny added that this forced consumers to buy channels that they didn't want in order to be able to watch the ones they did want to have.
The companies could be fined up to 10% of annual revenue, UOKiK said. (Reporting by Alan Charlish and Pawel Florkiewicz, editing by Louise Heavens and Richard Pullin)