Autoridade da Concorrência Levies €13.35 Million on MEO, NOS, Vodafone and Accenture Over the Pay-TV Skippable-Ad Coordination Running From August 2019 to May 2025 — Altice Settles While NOS and Vodafone File Recursos

The Autoridade da Concorrência (Competition Authority, AdC) closed its pay-TV advertising-coordination file on 5 June 2026 with €13.351 million in coimas (administrative fines) distributed across Portugal's three largest fixed-line operators and a global consultancy. MEO (Altice Portugal) carries the largest share at €5.17 million, NOS €4.06 million, Vodafone Portugal €3.876 million and Accenture €245,000. The conduct, which the regulator timestamped as running “at least between 1 August 2019 and 1 May 2025”, broke when the four parties suspended the practice in May 2025 — a date inside the AdC's evidentiary window.

At the heart of the case is a 30-second non-skippable advertising slot inserted before consumers could access programmes from the operators' automatic-recording (gravação automática) catalogues. The AdC's decision finds the three operators coordinated with Accenture — acting as commercial intermediary and sales channel — to standardise the duration, the non-skippable format and the commercial terms under which advertisers bought the slot, producing a horizontal alignment that the regulator treats as a restriction of competition by object under Article 9 of the Lei da Concorrência (Competition Law, Law 19/2012) and Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

Why the conduct mattered for consumers

The AdC's reasoning leans on consumer-lock-in: because the three operators between them control the overwhelming majority of Portugal's pay-TV subscriber base, the coordinated advertising slot left subscribers “without effective possibility of switching operators” in response to the service degradation. Customers could not escape the 30-second advert by moving to a rival because the rival ran the same slot under the same terms. The regulator's communiqué frames that absence of an exit option as the operational definition of consumer harm in the file.

Settlement versus litigation

Altice Portugal opted for the AdC's transação settlement track, paying its €5.17 million coima in exchange for a reduced sanction and a closed file. NOS and Vodafone publicly disagree with the decision and will file a recurso (judicial appeal) at the Tribunal da Concorrência, Regulação e Supervisão (Competition, Regulation and Supervisory Court, TCRS) in Santarém, an instance whose decisions are themselves appealable to the Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa (Lisbon Court of Appeal). Accenture's posture has not been formally communicated. The AdC, chaired by Nuno Cunha Rodrigues, declined to identify the four undertakings by name in the public version of the decision — Portuguese cartel decisions ordinarily anonymise corporate addressees until court orders in parallel proceedings allow attribution.

Where the file sits inside the AdC's docket

The decision lands alongside an active workload that includes the supermarket-margin file opened in 2024, the fuel-distribution proceeding and the long-running banks-interchange recurso. The pay-TV advert case is the first horizontal cartel finding against the three operators since the 2020 mobile-tariff investigation. The €13.35 million headline is below the statutory ceiling — 10% of turnover under Article 69 of Law 19/2012 — and the AdC's reasoning emphasises that the recidive bracket (repeat offender uplift) was not triggered for any addressee. The TCRS recurso window now starts: NOS and Vodafone have 30 days to file, and the suspensive effect of the appeal blocks payment until the court rules.

Sources: Observador (5 June 2026), Jornal de Negócios (5 June 2026), Jornal Económico (5 June 2026), TVI Notícias (5 June 2026), AdC public communiqué (5 June 2026).