Advocate General Szpunar has come to rather radical conclusions regarding the scope of the AVMS Directive in his non-binding opinion on the New Media Online GmbH case. His opinion goes far beyond the specific questions submitted to the EU Court of Justice: in his view, the “case concerns more general issues relating to the scope of the directive with respect to content which is publicly available via the internet” (par. 13, emphasis added). His conclusions – in particular if followed by the Court of Justice – could raise fundamental questions for the forthcoming review of the Directive. In the present case, there may be good reasons to argue that the website of a daily newspaper containing audiovisual material is not an audiovisual media service within the meaning of the Directive. However the Advocate General’s approach goes much further and restricts the Directive’s scope to such extent that one may wonder what impact such an interpretation could have on the continued relevance of the Directive in a converged multimedia world.
http://www3.ebu.ch/cms/render/live/en/sites/ebu/contents/news/2015/07/legal-case-note-does-audiovisual.html