Digitalisation and convergence continue to transform the ways in which audio-visual content is supplied and consumed. This thesis examines the implications for the legacy regulatory frameworks of the analogue era. It explores the relationship between the prevailing approach to concurrent regulation under sector-specific legislation and general competition law, and the competitive conditions for the supply of premium pay-TV in the UK and Australia. Theories of harm for the assessment of market power relating to horizontal concentration of ownership, exclusive rights and refusal to supply, are also reviewed. Whilst acknowledging an enduring role for sector-specific regulation, the thesis advocates an increasing residual role for the enforcement of general competition law. This is supported by the reinforcing effects of digitalisation and convergence upon the network industry aspect of pay-TV and the multi-sided platform characteristics of pay-TV providers. The thesis identifies the need for greater emphasis on the dynamic aspect of competition in the premium pay-TV context. This calls for a broader conceptualisation of competition which critically reflects the growth of online streaming, the global phenomenon around premium drama and the rise of multi-media firms in a global communications sector. These findings are significant and timely because failure to employ a sufficiently broad concept of effective competition may perversely deter competitive conduct and unduly impede the investment incentives that are critical to premium pay-TV. It may also produce outcomes that are ostensibly inconsistent with the normative basis for sector-specific regulation. The thesis suggests reform at the interface between sector-specific legislation and general competition law, and refinement of the principles of competition law in their application to premium pay-TV. In doing so, it proposes a model of regulation which aims to more effectively balance the shared interest of viewers, as consumers and citizens, in the future development of pay-TV and the wider communications sector.

Within the past decade, there has been considerable debate amongst lawyers in most European and North American jurisdictions on standardized contracts. The realisation that these contracts did not fit into the framework of the law of contract elaborated by nineteenth-centry theorists, induced judges and academic alike to fashion concepts and mechanisms in order to tackle the undoubted injustices which were concomitant with the use of standardized contracts. These well meaning attemtps, while affording some protection to weaker contracting parties, were nevertheless productive of uncertainty and inconsistency. Hence, there has been in recent years a spate of legislation designed to deal with standardized contracts directly or indirectly. The adoption of modern economic institutions and also of Western legal systems in Cameroon has brought about significant problems in the realm of contract. The widespread illiteracy in Cameroon, the lack of commercial sophistication of the bulk of the populace, and the use of standardized contracts, have created problems of a much wider dimension than those to be found in the developed countries. This thesis involves a study in comparative law. It charts the ways in which the English and French courts have addressed the problems of standardized contracts. It also delves into how the Cameroonian courts have dealt with them, revealing the incongruities inherent in the application of concepts which have been evolved in a different country with distinct motives, in another country with entirely different social realities. Finally, this thesis looks at the legislative innovation; brought to this area of the law by four European countries and discerns what lessons can be learned from them by Cameroonian legislators in dealing with the problems of standardized contracts in Cameroon. All this is achieved by pulling together legal analysis and comments by Anglo-Americans and European scholars, and by weaving into the text nearly all important English, French, Cameroonian and indeed American cases on this subject.