There is no single digital market in the European Union, and Czech customers are discriminated in their access to some online services. The European Commission has failed to ensure that the new legal reform guarantees the free movement of services, including online streaming. Thus, Czech consumers cannot purchase and use the service offered to customers in another member country. The impact of the Digital Single Market Strategy on the Czech audio-visual industry is being studied by scientists from Palacký University Olomouc and Masaryk University in Brno (MUNI).

In the several-year project supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, researchers deal with the impact of European legislation on Czech consumers, authors, directors, producers, and distributors. “We are also interested in which problems have not been solved by the European Commission’s legal reform despite its original intention, and what the likely consequences will be in the future," said Pavel Zahrádka from the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the UP Faculty of Arts. A multidisciplinary team of sociologists, film industry analysts, and legal experts from UP and MUNI is, among other things, involved in mapping the disputes between copyright holders with online content sharing platforms such as Uloz.to. The team also deals with what attitudes Czech consumers have regarding the use of illegally distributed Internet content as well as the conditions under which domestic customers would be willing to pay, for example, for selected films or TV series.