Press Release
Strasbourg, 11 January 2010

The European Audiovisual Observatory announces that Greece will hold its Presidency for 2010. The Strasbourg-based Observatory, part of the Council of Europe, collects and distributes information about the cinema, television, video and audiovisual media service markets in Europe, both from a statistical as well as from a legal point of view.
Greece is represented within the Observatory's governing body, the Executive Council, by Mr Rodolfos Moronis, Executive Director of the Hellenic Audiovisual Institute (IOM). Moronis was elected President of the Observatory for 2010 at the Executive Council's meeting in Brussels on the 4th of November last year.

His deputy will be Konstantinos Papavassilopoulos, Head of the New Technologies Department at the IOM. Setting out his intentions for the Greek Presidency for 2010, Moronis expressed the hope that the Observatory would continue to expand in order to cover fields such as new technologies and tax law, both of central importance to media professionals and decision-makers in Europe. We need the Observatory's facts and figures more than ever in order to make sense of the rapid evolutions in the various media markets" he stated, adding that "the Observatory's expertise in data gathering, processing and distribution could, in the long term, be applied to geographical areas outside of Europe as this intelligence is vital for our understanding of other territories."
Greece follows on from the extremely successful 2009 Presidency held by the European Commission in Brussels. The Observatory's Executive Director, Wolfgang Closs, paid tribute to the "dynamism of the Commission" in steering the Observatory through 2009. Closs pointed out that the Observatory had jointly organised two major media conferences with the Commission in 2009 on the subject of television news (MIPCOM 2009) and on the application of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive in Brussels in November.
He thanked Gregory Paulger, Director of the Commission's DG Information Society and Media for his continuing support and enthusiasm for the Observatory's work. Closs concluded that he was looking forward to a fruitful and forward-thinking Greek Presidency of the Observatory in 2010. 

   
          
Rodolfos Moronis     Konstantinos Papavassilopoulos